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

Though now known as little else but the eve of the Christian festival, Hallowe’en and its formerly attendant ceremonies long antedate Christianity.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 12, Slice 8 "Haller, Albrecht" to "Harmonium" by Various

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

To add to his happiness, his son, at the age of twenty-one, was appointed his assistant and successor, shortly after he himself had received letters of nobility, which were antedated four years.

From Lives of Eminent Zoologists, from Aristotle to Linnæus with Introductory remarks on the Study of Natural History by William MacGillivray

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

It is certainly remarkable that Schoolmen Webb and Taft were both: Prohibitionists, believers in a strong Classical education, users of homely illustrations; but the former antedating the latter by some 20 years.

From Time Magazine Archive

Operations are going on in Mesopotamia to unearth the city of Ur and the ruins of Chaldean civilization, antedating by several centuries the civilization of the Nile.

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