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[SUMMARY] Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, A Concise History of the World (Cambridge 2015)
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SUMMARY OF MERRY E. WIESNER-HANKS, A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE
WORLD (CAMBRIDGE 2015)
2016 – 2017, Semester II
BACHELOR YEAR II
Lisa Jurrjens
,Summary Wiesner-Hanks, A Concise History of the World (2015)
Content
Chapter 1 Foraging and farming families (to 3000 BCE).........................................................................3
Society and culture among other hominids........................................................................................3
Thinking humans................................................................................................................................4
Foraging lifeways................................................................................................................................5
Family, kinship, and ethnicity.............................................................................................................5
Rituals.................................................................................................................................................6
Sedentsm and domestcaton.............................................................................................................6
Plow agriculture and food processing.................................................................................................7
Social and gender hierarchies.............................................................................................................8
Monuments and mentalites...............................................................................................................9
Prehistoric paterns............................................................................................................................9
Chapter 2 Cites and classical societes (3000 BCE – 500 CE)................................................................10
Paths of urbanizaton........................................................................................................................10
Writng and other informaton technologies....................................................................................11
States and lineages...........................................................................................................................12
Marriages and families in cites and states.......................................................................................12
Family paterns in kin-based societes..............................................................................................13
Social hierarchies and caste..............................................................................................................13
Slavery and slave societes................................................................................................................14
Text-based religions and cultural interactons..................................................................................14
The end of a classical world?............................................................................................................15
Chapter 3 Expanding networks of interactonn 500 CE – 1500 CE.........................................................17
The development of Islam.................................................................................................................17
Conflict, diversity, and blending in the Muslim world.......................................................................17
Soldiers, slaves, and social mobility..................................................................................................18
Courts and courtly culture................................................................................................................18
Codes of behaviour and tales of romance.........................................................................................19
Agricultural expansion and village society........................................................................................19
Nomadic pastoralists........................................................................................................................21
City life..............................................................................................................................................21
Zones of cultural and religious exchange..........................................................................................22
Shifing and lengthening trade routes..............................................................................................23
A middle millennium.........................................................................................................................23
Chapter 4 A new world of connectonsn 1500 CE – 1800 CE.................................................................24
Lisa Jurrjens 1
,Summary Wiesner-Hanks, A Concise History of the World (2015)
The spread of disease.......................................................................................................................24
Colonizaton, empires, and trade......................................................................................................24
Warfare............................................................................................................................................26
Transferring food crops....................................................................................................................26
The trade in animals, alive and dead................................................................................................27
Drug foods and the commercializaton of leisure..............................................................................28
Sugar and the slave trade.................................................................................................................29
Religious transformatons and their consequences...........................................................................29
The expansion and creolizaton of Christanity.................................................................................31
Families and race in the colonial world.............................................................................................31
Social protests, revolts, and revolutons...........................................................................................32
The early modern and the truly modern...........................................................................................33
Chapter 5 Industrializatonn imperialismn and inequalityn 1800 CE – 2015 CE.......................................34
Coton, slaves, and coal....................................................................................................................34
The expansion and transformaton of industry.................................................................................35
Class, gender, race, and labour in industrial societes.......................................................................36
Movements for social change...........................................................................................................37
Populaton growth and migraton....................................................................................................38
The new imperialism.........................................................................................................................39
Total war and modern culture..........................................................................................................40
Decolonizaton and the Cold War.....................................................................................................40
Liberaton and liberalizaton.............................................................................................................42
Religious fundamentalism and diversity...........................................................................................43
Post-industry and poverty.................................................................................................................44
Into the third millennium..................................................................................................................44
Lisa Jurrjens 2
,Summary Wiesner-Hanks, A Concise History of the World (2015)
Chapter 1 Foraging and farming families (to 3000 BCE)
Society and culture among other hominids
When should the story of society and culture start? The eighteenth-century European
scientists who invented the system we now use to classify living things placed humans in the
animal kingdom, the order of Primates, the family Hominidae, and the genus Homo. The other
surviving members of the hominid family are the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas,
and orangutans – and some primatologists who study them are quite comfortable talking
about, say, chimpanzee society or even chimpanzee culture.
Combining symbols in new ways, and understanding that both oneself and others have
internal lives and consciousness, are currently the core of what most scientists see as the
divide between humans and other species. Symbolic thought involves creating a symbolic or
syntactic language, that is, a way of communicating that follows certain rules and that can
refer to things or state of being that are not necessarily present. A consciousness of
consciousness – what philosophers call a “theory of mind” – involves not only responding to
what others are doing, but also reasoning about what others think or feel, recognizing that
they have aims, and making abstractions about why they might be doing something.
Scholars are divided about when society started, but agree about where it started:
humans evolved in Africa, where between 7 and 6 million years ago some hominids began to
walk upright at least some of the time. At some point, certain groups in East Africa began to
make tools as well as use them; the earliest now identified are 2.6 million years old, but
archaeologists suspect that older ones will be found.
Around 2 million years ago, one of these groups developed into a different type of
hominin that later palaeontologists judged to be the first in the genus Homo. Among the
contenders are Homo habilis (“handy human”) and Homo ergaster (“working human”). Early
members of the genus Homo had a larger brain, narrow hips, longer legs, and feet that indicate
they were fully bipedal, but here there is an irony: the slender upright pelvis made giving birth
to a larger-brained infant difficult.
The pelvis puts a limit on how much the brain can expand before birth, which means
that mong modern humans much brain expansion occurs after birth. Humans thus have a far
longer period than do other animals when they are completely dependent on their parents or
others around them.
Homo ergaster also had other physiological features with social implications. Their
internal organs were small, including those for digestion. Thus, in order to obtain enough
energy to survive, they had to eat a diet high in fat and protein, most easily obtainable by
eating animals and animal products. Catching some of those animals may have necessitated
walking or running significant distances in the hot sun, but the Homo ergaster had the ability
to cool down by sweating, a process made easier by the fact that they were relatively hairless.
Another solution to the problem of a short digestive tract is to transfer some digestion
outside the body, through cooking. Cooking allows an outside source of energy – fire – to
break down complex carbohydrates and proteins to increase the energy yield of food; it also
detoxifies many things that would otherwise by dangerous to eat.
Lisa Jurrjens 3
,Summary Wiesner-Hanks, A Concise History of the World (2015)
Cooking had enormous social and cultural consequences. Cooking led to eating
together in a group at a specific time and place, which increased sociability. Because it
expands the range of possible foodstuffs, cooking encouraged experimentation in other
aspects of food preparation. Cooking may also have encouraged symbolic thought, as cooked
foods often make us think about something that is not there, and both cooking and eating can
be highly ritualized activities. Plus, cooking involved fire, which itself has deep meaning in
later human cultures.
From 1 million to 2 million years ago the earth’s climate was in a warming phase, and
Homo ergaster ranged farther, moving into western Asia by as early as 1.8 million years ago.
Here some developed into a species that many palaeontologists call Homo erectus (“upright
human”). They continued to migrate: Homo erectus had reached China and Indonesia about
1.5 million years ago, and also reached what is now Spain by at least 800,000 years ago, and
then further north in Europe.
Neanderthals lived throughout Europe and western Asia beginning about 170,000
years ago. Neanderthals exhibited technological inventiveness and long-range planning,
characteristics that some scholars have described as part of “behavioural modernity”, even if
anatomically they were not Homo sapiens.
Thinking humans
Archaeologists distinguish Homo sapiens from other hominins by a number of anatomical
features, most notably a relatively slender build, a head with a large cranium (and forebrain)
with a face tucked underneath this, small teeth and jaws, and a larynx situated lower in the
throat.
One group of scholars, including Richard Klein and Chris Stringer, asserts that
although early Homo sapiens were anatomically modern, there were not behaviourally
modern. Behavioural modernity, which they see as including long-range planning, rapid
development of new technologies such as the bow and arrow, behaviours to deal with
changing environments, wide use of symbols in burials and personal adornment, and broad
networks of social and economic exchange, developed only about 50,000 years ago. At this
point, there was a “cognitive revolution”, a sudden flowering of creative activity within one
small group that led to symbolic thought and then to everything else that is part of behavioural
modernity.
In opposition to those arguing for a sudden and quite recent cognitive or language
“revolution” are those who take more gradualist views. Among these are scholars such as
Gamble who find symbolic thought evident in material objects, bodily gestures, and social
relationships that long preceded speech. In this view, “behavioural modernity” emerges
gradually in different parts of Africa over the period from about 250,000 years ago to about
50,000 years ago.
However and whenever behaviourally modern humans emerged, Homo sapiens were
doing what Homo ergaster did before them and what they have done ever since: moving. First
across Africa, and then into Eurasia. They reached what is now Australia by at least 50,000
years ago and perhaps earlier. By 20,000 years ago humans were living in northern Siberia,
and by at least 15,000 years ago they had crossed into the Americas.
Lisa Jurrjens 4
, Summary Wiesner-Hanks, A Concise History of the World (2015)
Homo sapiens moved into areas where there were already other types of hominins. So
far no evidence of interactions between Homo sapiens and any other hominin group has been
discovered (other than DNA), but we know the outcome: Homo sapiens survived, others did
not.
Foraging lifeways
With the melting of glaciers sea levels rose between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. This cut off
migratory paths between North America and Asia, but also spurred innovation. Humans
designed and built ever more sophisticated boats and learned how to navigate by studying
wind and current patterns, bird flights, and the position of the stars.
In the Palaeolithic period people throughout the world lived in ways that were similar
to one another, in small groups of related individuals who moved through the landscape in
search of food. It would be most accurate to call them “gatherer-hunters”, and most scholars
now call them foragers, a term that highlights the flexibility and adaptability in their search
for food.
Both hunted and gathered foods were cooked, generally by roasting them directly over
or near a fire or placing them in a pit-oven along with heated stones or smouldering wood.
Cooking in bags with heated stones or in pots expanded the repertoire of possible foodstuffs
to those that were too hard to process or eat otherwise. It also provided those who did not
have good (or any) teeth, such as infants and the elderly, with softer foods.
The diet of foragers is varied and nutritious: low in fat and salt, high in fibre, and rich
in vitamins and minerals. People avoided contemporary killers such as heart disease and
diabetes, but they often died at young age from injuries, infections, animal attacks, and
interpersonal violence. Mothers and infants died in childbirth, and many children died before
they reached adulthood.
Total human population thus grew slowly during the Palaeolithic to perhaps half a
million about 30,000 years ago. The low population density meant that human impact on the
environment was relatively small, although still significant.
Family, kinship, and ethnicity
Small bands of humans – twenty or thirty people was a standard size – were scattered across
broad areas, but this did not mean that each group lived in isolation. Their travels in search of
food brought them into contact with one another, not simply for talking, celebrating, and
feasting, but also for providing opportunities for the exchange of sexual partners, which was
essential to group survival. Bands became linked by bonds of kinship.
Heterosexual relations produced children, who were fed as infants by their mothers or
by another woman who had recently given birth. Breast milk was the only food available that
infants could easily digest, so mothers nursed their children for several years. Extended
nursing brings a side benefit: it suppresses ovulation and thus acts as a contraceptive.
Foraging groups needed children to survive, but too many could tax scarce food resources.
Within each band, and within the larger kin group, individuals had a variety of
identities. Each of these identities was relational (parent to child, sibling to sibling, spouse to
spouse), and some of them, especially parent to child, gave on power over others. Along with
Lisa Jurrjens 5
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