prehistory

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.

   ““We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.””

2. (countable, uncountable)The study of those times.
3. (countable, excessive, humorous, uncountable)Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.

   “I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.”

4. (countable, often, uncountable)The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.

   “Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.”

   “One of the challenges of studying any Jewish custom is that we tend to view it in an anachronistic fashion; we think that what we do today is what was always done. Therefore, in this article we shall describe the pre-history of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, the four basic components of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony before the year 1800 as suggested by Michael Hilton, and six major changes that occurred in modern times.”