Everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, isn't lost, it's simply called prehistory instead of history. We

Everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, isn't lost, it's simply called prehistory instead of history. We do know all kinds of things about ordinary people's lives based on physical evidence in archeology; we can figure out what they ate and where they got that, what jobs they did and how they organized that, what health issues they had and how they died.