antedate

This selection, which includes several cartoons that antedate the age of Trump, showcases several modes.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 19, 2017

These stones antedate even the long-ago, medieval world in which this “Macbeth” is set.

From New York Times ● Jun. 5, 2014

Robert Hooke, not long after, suggested that the fossil record would form the basis for a chronology that would “far antedate ... even the very pyramids.”

From Scientific American ● Oct. 20, 2013

His juggled compositions antedate John Cage by a generation.

From Time Magazine Archive

“Yes, and Basil now believes he can antedate Adam, and trace some facts about his ancestry that started with a missing link.”

From Polly and Her Friends Abroad by Roy, Lillian Elizabeth

The thought that a 17-game regular season was too long will someday seem as quaint and antedated as the Christmas Eve playoff matchups of the mid-1970s.

From New York Times ● Jan. 5, 2022

“The Negro church may be said to have antedated the Negro family on American soil,” wrote the early 20th-century scholar W.E.B.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 27, 2021

Indeed, they appear to represent an evolutionary branching that far antedated the common ancestor of all true bacteria.

From Scientific American ● Jan. 1, 2013

Swift, of course, antedated Edmund Burke, whose conception of "great objects and terrible" gave birth to the Romantic notions of the psychologised sublime.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 27, 2010

In geological history, so far as the facts are at present known, the second group, that of the Marsupials, antedated the others by a vast lapse of time.

From The Chain of Life in Geological Time A Sketch of the Origin and Succession of Animals and Plants by Dawson, Sir J. William

Hardly a day goes by on ADS-L, the email discussion list of the American Dialect Society, without someone reporting an antedating of some word or another.

From Time ● Jul. 6, 2015

I always think of them as mysteriously antedating London itself, and having been plonked down there for two long millenniums while the concrete and clay built up around them.

From New York Times ● Nov. 28, 2012

This powerful king warred with Scotland and France; At Crecy and Poietiers, his son, the Black Prince, Gained victory and glory, but early expires, His death by one year antedating his sire's.

From Time Magazine Archive

It is one of the oldest books in the world, antedating the New Testament a couple of centuries, quite as old as Aesop's Fables, which it much resembles.

From Time Magazine Archive

The system is evidently an ancient one, long antedating the immunologic sensing of familiar or foreign forms of life by the antibodies on which we now depend so heavily for our separateness.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas