The Beginnings of History

The Beginnings of History

The time before writing was developed is known as Prehistory. Prehistory encompasses over 95% of the time human beings have lived on the planet and we have to learn about it through archaeology, biology, and other non-written sources. About 250,000 years ago, the first anatomically modern humans just like us emerged in East Africa. Even before our own species, homo sapiens emerged, other hominids developed stone tools beginning about 2 million years ago. The development of stone tool-using humans began what is known as the Stone Age. The Stone Age can be divided into two basic periods: the Paleolithic era, or Old Stone Age, and the Neolithic era, or New Stone Age. During the Paleolithic era, humans used a food-collecting way of life often called hunting and gathering, not living in settled areas, but always migrating to find food.

The Neolithic era is defined by the Neolithic Revolutionwhich occurred as humans began transitioning from food gathering to food producing, or agriculture. Domestication of both plants and animals played a key role in the transition from food gathering to food producing. During this time, humans laid the foundations for later societies with developments such assedentary (settled) lifestyleswith permanent settlements (first villages and then, about 3,000 years later, the first cities).Farming allowed populations to rise and led to more complex institutions such as job specialization, government, social classes, writing, and more efficient technology.Societies known as civilizations started to emerge. Thus, the Neolithic Revolution (farming) allowed the later development of civilizations.

The term "civilization" refers to a complex and sedentary society that develops because of its food surplus that exists from the development of agriculture. We’ll be talking about a few very important civilizations that developed between about 3,000 BCE and 600 BCE. All of these first civilizations developed in river valleys around the world: theTigris-Euphrates River Valley,theNile River Valley,theIndus River Valley,and theHuang He (Yellow) River Valley. We’ll also look briefly at the Olmec civilization in MesoAmerica and the Chavin civilization in the AndesMountains of South America, which are unusual because they did not develop in a river valley.

Before learning about farming, settled life, and civilization, let’s look at the remarkable accomplishments of humans during the Paleolithic era and the kinds of societies they formed. Hunting and gathering was a very successful way of life for humans, which is one reason we stuck with it for more than two hundred thousand years! Moving with the seasons and game, humans collected enough to live on and had to keep moving, so they didn’t accumulate very many goods. They had to carry everything they owned. Gathering and hunting requires a lot of land for a small number of people. In other words, the productivity level of hunting and gathering is low. This meant that humans lived in small groups of 25-50 people called bands, enjoying close social networks defined mostly by family relationships. Men and women were relatively equal to one another, as women’s gathering activities produced about 70% of the calories eaten by the members of a band. Social hierarchies, or the division of people into high and low status, were fairly equal, because all people had pretty much the same skills and jobs and no one had much more than anyone else in terms of possessions.

Paleolithic peoples had complex cultures, as well. They created amazing rock art deep inside caves, which may have been used for ceremonies. They buried their dead, often in a fetal position surrounded by a red pigment from a rock called ochre. We also have found large numbers of female “Venus” figurines across Europe and Asia Minor (modern Turkey) which indicates a preoccupation with feminine fertility. We believe that most Paleolithic peoples were animists, meaning they felt that natural objects like mountains or rivers contained spirits within them.

The most amazing accomplishment of Paleolithic peoples, however, is their epic spread across the entirety of the globe. Humans, utilizing our inventiveness, adaptability, and technology, were able to spread from our place of origin in East Africa to cover the entire planet. About 90,000 years ago, the first modern humans crossed over from Africa into the modern Middle East. About 45,000 years ago, we find evidence of humans spreading into Europe and acrossAsia where we developed important technologies like bone sewing needles that allowed us to make snugly-fitting clothing so that we could survive the intense cold of modern northern Russia. From this area, called Siberia, humans were able to make their way across a then-exposed land bridge into the Americas, where we see evidence of humans all the way at the tip of South America by about 13,000 years ago. We followed the coast lines of India into Southeast Asia and then invented boats by which we were able to migrate all the way to Australia by around 60,000 years ago. All of this, early humans did in the depths of the last Ice Age, when weather patterns and cold were much more extreme than today, and huge glaciers covered most of the northern hemisphere of the earth. Finally, the islands of the Pacific Ocean were settled in an amazing feat of human boating and navigational skills. Using oceangoing canoes, humans took their already domesticated plants and animals with them as they settled everything from Madagascar off the coast of Africa to the Hawaiian Islands and the farthest reaches of Polynesia by about one thousand years ago.

Most people think of hunter-gatherers as primitive and unaccomplished people who lived horrible lives, barely eking out a living from the earth. Noting the amazing accomplishments of our ancestors, however, tells a different story. Recent studies show that Paleolithic humans had a pretty good quality of life. For example, studying the skeletal remains of people shows that the health and life expectancy of hunter-gatherers 20,000 years ago was much better than that of farmers 3,000 years ago. They were taller, had better bone density, more teeth, and, based on studies of modern hunter-gatherer tribes, worked very few hours to fulfill their daily needs. Compared with the back-breaking labor of a farmer or the life of a Roman slave, owned by another person, their life looked pretty good. Paleolithic people’s constant movement also helped keep them healthy, as they didn’t have the sanitation and trash problems, and therefore disease, associated with settling in one place.

In the end, the people of the Paleolithic era set the stage for the great human story of history; migrating over and populating the entire planet. As the environment began to change and the earth began to warm toward the end of the last Ice Age, the Paleolithic way of life began to transition into the Neolithic era and farming. This warming of the planet set in motion the events that would lead to modern life.

Reading Questions:

1. Define Paleolithic and Neolithic, including the characteristics of each era.
2. Describe the society and culture of Paleolithic peoples.
3. Detail the amazing achievement of human migration done in the Paleolithic Era.
4. What evidence from the text indicates that the life of hunter-gatherers during the Paleolithic era was superior to that of farmers in the Neolithic era?
5. What environmental cause resulted in a shift away from hunting and gathering?