Runs from3,000,000 BCE–125,000 BCE2,875,000 years wide
ShelfmarkLiber II
Pre-History
A time period spanning the development of near-human ancestors such as Homo Heidelbergensis up to the emergence of modern Homo Sapiens, roughly 125,000 years ago.
FilmsSerieseach bar is the titles released that decade
Historical Threads
A thread follows one event or historical theme across the archive, wherever and whenever it appears. Pulling a thread opens up a narrowed timeline view filtered to every year that thread touches.
The adoption of primitive tools by humanity's evolutionary predecessors. Hard pounding stones and chipped scraping implements would, gradually, over millions of years, complexify into sharp spear points, bone needles, and stone axes. Some of the earliest tool usage in evolutionary human history is generally attributed to Australopithecus Afarensis, with tool industry beginning to proliferate widely by the time members of the genus Homo such as Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus emerged.
Every place the archive’s titles set in this period name, with each one nested under the larger place it sits inside where that place is here too. The number is how many titles set here name it.
How the titles fall, 1 (faithful) to 5 (a work of imagination). A period average alone would read the same for one the record is bent evenly across and one with a single wild outlier. A series is placed by its own average, rounded.
1A grain of salt0 titles at level 1
2A pinch of salt0 titles at level 2
3A shaker of salt0 titles at level 3
4A bag of salt0 titles at level 4
5Enough to salt Carthage1 title at level 5
2 titles in the archive have no score yet and are left out of the average above — unrated is not a verdict of accurate.
Archive Density
100%3 of the 3 titles the archive sets between 3,000,000 BCE and 125,000 BCE carry the Human Evolution tag.
This measure can help illustrate cinematic hotspots within a time period by comparing which years of the overarching, actual historical time period are backed up by a cinematic release.
3,000,000 BCE1 of 1 title set in 3,000,000 BCE carries this period
1,000,000 BCE2 of 2 titles set in 1,000,000 BCE carry this period
3 years on the timeline fall inside the boundaries, 1 of them with nothing set there yet. The filled part of each bar is the share carrying this period.
Share of the 6 genre taggings across 3 titles set in this period. A title filed under three genres is in three of these slices, so this is a share of taggings rather than of titles.
Films only. Co-directors are counted individually, so a director’s solo work and their collaborations are grouped together. Average saltiness ignores any title still unsalted.
What the Record Corrects
1 claim answered for, across 1 title set during Human Evolution. A citation is attached to a specific assertion inside a review rather than to the review as a whole, so each line below is one thing the archive says a title got wrong or right, and what answers for it. Following a claim lands on it in that review’s own sources.
Homo Erectus first emerged around 2 million years ago and is known for being the first hominin to migrate out of Africa, with some populations surviving to potentially as recently as 120,000 years ago
Peter Bellwood, The Five Million Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture (Princeton University Press, 2022).
Periods overlap freely so concurrent means the two spans share years, and the shared stretch is named. Bounded means it lies wholly inside this one, beginning and ending more than 10 years within its boundaries. Before and after are the nearest periods lying outside this one, with the gap in years shown instead. A shared thread is what the two have in common besides the calendar, and a period lying wholly outside this one can still share one.
Periods before, during, inside and after Human Evolution, with their year ranges, the years they share with it, the threads they share with it, and how many titles the archive holds of each.
