So-Called Prehistory

The Permian mass extinction, the subsequent introduction of the dinosaurs, their own extinction, and many other events would have happened before human life came about if modern scientific paradigms are true, but if they happened, they are still historical.  The life and death of many floras and faunas (together called biota), natural cataclysms like earthquakes, and a multitude of geophysical transformations are supposed to have occurred well before the first humans appeared, and words like "prehistoric" are at a minimum all but misleading on a literal level.  Dinosaurs would have lived in what is called prehistoric times, but there would still have been natural history.

This portion of it just would not involve humans in any way since it elapsed prior.  The terms prehistoric and prehistory are ultimately misnomers when speaking of events before human presence or recovered historical documentation/artifacts because they really would still be referencing points in the historical timeline of Earth or the broader cosmos.  Before human life, writing, or society is not at all necessarily the same thing as before history.  The only way the two would be identical is if the universe appeared in one moment fully formed with human inhabitants present.  After all, if anything at all happened before humans wrote about it, it is still part of history, for as evidentially unsupported as it might be on an epistemological level, it would still have occurred.

Whether someone uses prehistory to refer to anything that happened in human existence which was not recorded or to the great host of events that could have happened before humans were around, on a basic morpheme level, the word would literally mean before history.  This, however, could not actually be true of the events if there was anything to the chronology of the natural world before human writings or creation/evolution.  Only something like the moment the uncaused cause created the universe (or created something else to make it, and so on) would truly be prehistory as far as the universe is concerned.

This would of course by necessity apply to phenomena like the birth and death of stars, the distribution of nebulas, and the expansion of the universe as well, given that they happened before human life, investigation, or documentation.  It is not that someone could not use words like prehistoric without meaning anything irrational by them.  It is that the word itself, in a literal sense, is misleading because history does not only encompass what happens after humans employ written records.  Everything that has ever happened could only be historical.

Some people, having never realized the conceptual differences, use the word gods when thinking of the likes of Athena or Zeus, who are not uncaused causes at all (Athena came forth from Zeus's head in Greek tales, and Zeus, as an Olympian, was not what created the universe or pseudo-"deities").  Some people think alcohol is not really a drug because the words "drugs and alcohol" are often uttered separately when speaking of alcohol and other drugs.  In the same way, someone might use the word prehistoric or prehistory and actually think that to be before humans or before human records in particular means something was before history itself.  It would by necessity still be a part of cosmic history.