HISTORY NOTES SUMMARY
CHAPTER ONE
Species that act like humans and share similarities such as the ability of learning.
Homo habilis: about 2.5 million years ago, chipped hand axes from stones. This first humans are
defined by scholars as “toolmakers”.
Homo erectus: about 1.5 million years ago
Homo ergaster and antecessor appeared 800.000 years ago, who later stacked the bones of the death.
Earlier in time we have the australopithecines, that are identifiably nonhuman or prehumen.
1974 archaeologist Dan Johanson discovery no more clear dividing line. Spotted the bones of an
australopithecine sticking out of the mud in Ethiopia. called Lucy.
Lucy had died 3 million years ago. About three feet tall. She and her kind walked on two legs and lived
in family groups (characteristics species of Homo).
Also discovered tools of 2.5 million years old and in 1977, he found footprints, from 3.7 million years
ago of creatures who stood and walked in two legs. Finds with similar characteristics may date as far as
back as 6 million years ago.
We consider humans as members of the specie we know as Homo sapiens.
Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens coexisted for like 100.000 years. The first one had different
vocals tracts so they might have not been able to communicate with the second group.
Similar appearance but the brain of the Neanderthals was slightly bigger. They both were hunters, lived
in the same types of society, ate the same food and had many of the same customs and rites.
Latest discovery led to a new type of Hominid known as Floresiensis that had a little brain (same size as
a chimpanzee) showing that not always the ones with biggest brain where upon the others.
15.000 years ago, common ancestor. We all have a chemical component that a mother in East Africa
passed on to her daughters at that time. She is Eve.
2003 archeological evidence of Eve turned up in Ethiopia. Also discovered three skulls (a child’s and
two adults’) dated to about 154.000 and 160.000 years ago. Skulls were polished after death, which
suggests that the culture they belonged to practiced some death-linked ritual.
When groups of homo sapiens left Africa, 100.000 years ago, they often relocated in challenging
different environments, this brought unfamiliar diseases. Yet people kept on moving through them and
into them. We are still struggling to understand how it happened. This had happened before (1.75/ 1.25
million years ago) before homo sapiens, homo erectus had spread all over Africa and Eurasia.
Homo sapiens were in the Middle East by 100.000 years ago. This colony failed, but new migrants
reestablished it about 60.000 years ago. Settlement then proceeded along the coasts of Africa and Asia,
probably by sea.
Earliest evidence of humans in China is about 67.000 years old. Humans developed nautical technology
surprisingly early. They crossed seas in boat to colonize what nowadays is Australia 50000 years ago.
Homo sapiens reached Europe only a little later. However, Northern Asia and America were probably
colonized much later dueto they were isolated by impenetrable cold climate.
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, EVIDENCE INDICATES THE NEW WORLD WAS SETTLED NO EARLIER THAN ABOUT
15.000 YEARS AGO. This means that the homo sapiens must have experienced a huge population
growth. A handful of Eve’s children had multiplied to the point where they could colonize most of the
habitable Old World in less than 100.000 years.
Migrating groups were doubly dynamic: not just mobile but also subject to huge social changes-
divisive and violent, but with constructive ways of organizing their lives.
Migration changed people’s relationships with each other, the size and organization of their groups, the
way they saw the world, etc.
Cooking with fire probably helped populations growth, making food really easy to digest. Evidence of
cooking with fire dates back about 150.000 years. This date coincides with the beginning of the
population boom. (there is also another possible date for the beginning of cooking and is about two
million years ago (R. Wrangham) based on shape of the hominid guts and teeth.
Whether or not new technologies empowered humans to migrate, new stresses or opportunities drove
them on.
Food shortages of ecological disasters might explain the necessity to move. Another possible source of
stress is warfare. Plague, famine, and natural disaster tend to inhibit human action, whereas war spurs us
to new responses.
But how and when first wars started?
War appeared with social and biological evolution as aggressive instinct of animals. Others say human
nature is peaceful until competition corrupts. Others: an invention, not biological necessity.
First battle 11.000 ago. Start of agriculture, maybe communities started to fight one another to control
land and resources.
When chimpanzee groups leave a societies, their former fellows try to kill them. Similar conflicts may
have made early human groups migrate to safety.
What stresses could have caused people to divide and fight each other 10.000 years ago?
In societies of increasing violence, men have enhanced roles. Among men there was a greater
competition, making them bigger and stronger that females.
Domination come to be normal in human societies
In chimpanzee societies, hunting was an activity ruled by man, took more food-supplying roles. While
men were focusing on hunting, woman did in gathering. But we don’t know when this specialization
started or how widespread it was.
THE LAST GREAT ICE AGE
A great cooling began about 150.000 years ago. The world only began to emerge from the last Ice Age
about 15.000 to 20.000 years ago. Now global warming.
Most of Europe was tundra, a treeless region with permanently frozen subsoil or coniferous forest, with
trees such as spruce, fir and. Steppe – dry plain covered with scrub grass- licked the shores of the
Mediterranean.
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, However, for hunters in the tundra that covered much of Eurasia, the edge of ice was the best place to
be. A lot of mammals had adapted by efficiently storing their own body fat- and that was what hunters
target. Hunters favored species they could kill in large numbers by driving them over cliffs or into bogs
or lakes.
About 20.000 years ago the invention of the bow and arrow revolutionized hunting.
ICE AGE ART
Most art of this Age was found in Europe, specially Spain and France, in inaccessible caves.
This art told stories and had magical, ritual uses.
A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today from a rock face in Kenniff, Australia,
where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20.000 years ago.
ICE AGE CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Although languages and social structures were different, everyone hunted and gathered the same food,
had similar or the same religious rituals, etc. Not much change.
The material culture that archeological digs have found provided clues to what goes on in the mind:
Eg: Russia there are several constructions built with the bones of the mammoths before they were extint.
Moreover, they often included what seemed to be numbers made by dots and notches. One widely
occurring mark that looks like a P may be the symbol for female because it represented her body curves.
Eg: What looks like a calendar was made 30.000 years ago in France, it was formed by crescents and
circles that may record phases of the moon.
Ice Ge people also used symbols and pigments in magic. In paintings and carvings, we can glimpse the
Ice Age elite, people considered especial and set apart from the group.
There were also paintings that included people with animal masks: intermediaries between people and
the god/s. “shaman”
We know innequalities existed because of Ice Age graves. In a cemetery in Moscow, dated about 24.000
ago, the first status persons seems to have been an early man. There were discovered two 8 or 10 year
old boys, that were buried with ivory bracelets, necklaces, animal carvings and weapons, including
spears of mammoth ivory.
Attempt understand where power layed in Ice Age societies: crumbs for reach tables. There were big
feasts with tables full of food, to build and strengthen societies and enhance the power of those who
organized the feasts and controlled the food.
PEOPLE OF THE NEW WORLD:
The New World was one of the last parts of the planet the Homo sapiens began to habit.
A race hunters crossed the land link between North America and Asia, where the actual Bering Strait
flows, to enter a new paradise. These people were considered heroes, American pioneers.
However, a new theory defends that these people never existed. The first arrivals came while glaciers
covered much of North America. They followed corridors between walls of ice or along narrow shores
away from glaciers.
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, Around 10.000 ago, a cluster of extinctions wiped out mammoth, mastodon, horse, etc. New hunters and
their new techniques seemed to be responsible. The question of the date of the peopling in the New
World remains open.
SURVIVAL OF THE FORARGERS
As the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it, many human communities opted to follow
them.
The most persistently faithful followers of the ice were the Inuit of North America. About 4.000 years
ago, they invented the blubber filled soapstone lamp.
This way of life persisted until the twentieth century, although its first practitioners have disappeared.
Migrants from the Artic Ocean replaced them 1000 years ago.
Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in environments where they had to develop new ways of
life. Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance. Here were broad-leaved forests and
lakes, etc.
Between the unstable periods of climate change around 12.000 years ago, foragers even colonized
dense, tropical forests at Pedra Pintada in Brazil, where the Amazon river now flows.
Some societies lived in hot, arid deserts, most different from the best hunting grounds of the Ice Age.
This required two forms of adaptation: Firstly creating networks and second, develop orally transmitted
science. Only with accurate info of the environment people could live is these areas.
In the post-Ice Age world, little by little, over thousands of years, most societies abandoned foraging and
adopted farming or herding as the way to get their food. Close to the ice cap, the Inuit remain faithful to
their hunting tradition In North America.
The disappearance of foreign lifeways seems a remarkable turnaround for a predator species such as
Homo sapiens. There was a time before hunting, when our ancestors were scavengers
For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years, foraging (searching for food, hunting, not
farming) was reliable and rewarding. It fed people through every change of climate. Its humans’
practitioners spread over the world and adapted to every kind of habitat.
They dominated every ecosystem. They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic
systems to record information. They had their own social elites, political customs, ambitious magic, and
practical methods to exploit their environment.
OUT OF THE MUD
To most people, food is and always has been the most important thing in the world. During the global
warming that followed the Ice Age, husbandry (breeding animals and cultivating crops) began to replace
hunting and gathering and introduced enormous change. But, why did this change occurr?
The Problem of Agriculture. Husbandry happened in two ways, according to the environment and
human’s intervention in it.
In some environments, people would manage the herds rather than hunting them. Breeding by
consequence, non-evolutive qualities like docility, and yield of milk or eggs.
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