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

Historically the city and the civilization at Quito antedate Columbus and hark back to glorious Inca times.

From Time Magazine Archive

To date before the true time; to assign to an earlier date; thus, to antedate a deed or a bond is to give it a date anterior to the true time of its execution.

From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary by Noah Webster

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

Nevertheless, respecting Wagram, had 291 the Archduke John, with his 40,000 men, turned up, as the Archduke had more right to expect than Wellington had to expect Blucher, Waterloo might have been antedated six years.

From Napoleon's Letters to Josephine by Henry Foljambe Hall

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

WMC points out that the chief trouble is still an old one, antedating the war: doctors are not proportionally distributed.

From Time Magazine Archive

The strata are of the Pleistocene age, antedating the last great ice age, which ended at least 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

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