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Course: Big History Project > Unit 6
Lesson 4: How Did the First Humans Live? | 6.3- ACTIVITY: DQ Notebook 6.3
- WATCH: How Did The First Humans Live?
- READ: Foraging
- WATCH: From Foraging to Food Shopping
- ACTIVITY: Hunter Gatherer Menu
- WATCH: Why Human Ancestry Matters
- ACTIVITY: Human Migration Patterns
- READ: Ales Hrdlicka - Graphic Biography
- READ: George McJunkin - Graphic Biography
- READ: Gallery — How Did the First Humans Live?
- Quiz: How Did the First Humans Live?
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WATCH: How Did The First Humans Live?
The Paleolithic era, marked by the use of stone tools, is the first major age in human history. It spans from the appearance of Homo sapiens to the advent of agriculture. Evidence from archaeology and anthropology helps us understand the foraging lifestyle of our ancestors, their migration patterns, and their cultural practices. This era laid the foundation for human settlement across the globe. Created by Big History Project.
Want to join the conversation?
- In one of the earlier lessons it said that the paleolithic era ended with the developement of metal working but here he says that it ended with the developement of agriculture. Which is it? Did they come about hand in hand?(12 votes)
- So he's saying that the early humans drew on rocks and we see them and we will know it's from them? Am I correct?(11 votes)
- I have a question about how the weapons are preserved(5 votes)
- Why was Antarctica the only place never settled?
I understand the theory of temperatures, but there was a map detailed before the deep freeze.
Is there an universally understood off limits area to humanity?(4 votes)- So I am not positive but I believe since Antarctica is at the bottom of the earth and there most likely weren't many islands on the way over there we have recently discovered it due to significant amounts of new exploration so due to that it was probably because it was isolated but I don't know.(1 vote)
- Why was there even a map of Antarctica and the deep freeze?(2 votes)
Video transcript
DAVID CHRISTIAN:
Now, let's look at the first of the three great
ages of human history. We call it
the Paleolithic era. In Greek, paleo means "old",
lithic means "of stone", so this is the era
of stone tools. For archeologists,
the Paleolithic era goes back at least
two million years because it covers
the whole period during which humans or our
ancestors made stone tools, so it goes back to the time
of Homo habilis. But we're focusing
on Homo sapiens, so for us the Paleolithic era begins when Homo sapiens
first appeared somewhere between
200,000 and 60,000 years ago. And it ends with the
appearance of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. So how can we study our
ancestors who lived in the Paleolithic era? Well, we use two main
types of evidence-- archaeology and anthropology. The archeological evidence
consists of the remains that they left behind. Now, this includes
both the bones, the remains of their bodies, and the remains of
the things they used-- their stone tools, their
ornaments, and their artwork. Anthropology uses
studies of modern societies that were probably
quite similar to the societies
of our ancestors. These are small scale
societies that foraged for their food
and other resources. So, using these evidence, can
we figure out how they lived? If you had lived
in the Paleolithic era what would your life
have been like? How much of your social
and family life revolves around eating? Probably a lot. Who you eat with, what you eat,
and where you eat can tell us a lot about you. And this was also true
of our Paleolithic ancestors. But, of course, they didn't have
restaurants and groceries, instead they relied
on a technique that we called foraging. So what's foraging? Well, in a sense
all animals forage for the food and other
things they need. That is to say they look
around the environment and they pick up those things
when they find them. So birds, for example-- they gather up worms,
they gather insects, and they pick up twigs
for their nests. But human foraging
is very different, and what makes it so
different is the vast range of different techniques
different communities use. So why is there such a variety? Well, this brings us back
to collective learning. Each community develops
intimate knowledge of its own variety
and a whole series of specialist techniques
for dealing with the particular plants,
the particular animals that they have
in their environment, so each community develops
its own technologies over time. And this explains
why human societies have managed to settle
such a vast range of different environments
all around the world. Archaeology can give us
lots of clues about how our ancestors lived. Let's return to Blombos Cave
on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. It was inhabited by humans
between about 95,000 and 55,000 years ago. And it contains lots of evidence
about how our ancestors lived. First, we find the remains
of some deep sea fish. Now, that's pretty impressive. It suggests
that they were good fishermen and it may even mean
that they had pretty good boats. We also find the
remains of shellfish, so they were exploiting
resources on the beaches and also small reptiles
which they were catching. And we find the ash from fires,
which they were probably using for cooking or heating, so they
controlled fire pretty well. We also find very beautiful
little stone tools and very interestingly
some of these were hafted-- that is to say they used glues
or fibers to attach them to sticks to make them
more useful. And finally--
and particularly interesting for an archaeologist--
we find stones... clay-like stones
that are known as ochre on which we find little marks. Now, these maybe
early signs of art or they might even be
early signs of writing. Now, the other major form
of evidence is anthropology. And what anthropologists do
is study modern societies as we've seen that
behaved a bit like them. In the Americas,
in South Africa, in Australia, in parts of Siberia
there are still some societies today that depend
at least partly on foraging. Now, of course
they're modern societies in all sorts of ways. Nevertheless we can
learn a lot about them. About what foraging means
by studying those societies. In particular, we've learned
that if you cannot survive from foraging you
probably need to forage over a pretty large area,
so that even a large area can only support
a very small population. You'll also probably
gonna have to be nomadic. You're gonna have to tour
around that area to get different resources at
different times of the year, so this means you're gonna
get very familiar with it. And you're probably gonna
travel to familiar camp sites each year. Now, if you're nomadic,
you're gonna have to travel light,
so foragers don't seem to accumulate much
in the way of property. This may also help explain
the fact that foragers seem to very often
limit population growth. Now, foragers seem to
travel around in communities-- small communities of perhaps
ten to 50 people at any one time that are
probably related to each other. But those communities
were not isolated. We also know that they tended
to link up with their neighbors. Very often what they do is
they meet with their neighbors at a time and place where
there were lots of resources to support a lot of people
for maybe two or three weeks. In Australia, for example,
in the snowy mountains, there's an area where
the so called Bogong moths flourish for two or three weeks,
so millions of Bogong moths provide a feast
for these sort of parties. Now, what do they
do when they meet? Well, they share stories,
they share ideas, they share dances,
they may play games, but they also share people. So people move
from group to group to marry or to get away
from their enemies, so in this way, people
circulate amongst these groups. So foraging groups
exist in networks within which collective
learning can take place but, of course, those networks are pretty small
by modern standards. Because we're used
to modern lifestyles, if you and I were transported
to a Paleolithic community we'd probably find
life pretty tough. But studies of modern
forages suggest if you were used to that lifeway
it could be pretty good. In some environments
there was a wide diversity of foodstuffs
and different resources, traveling around
meant that life was varied. It probably kept you healthy. How did they see the world? Well, let's be honest:
we don't really know. But studies of modern foragers
give us a pretty good guess. Most modern foragers
seem to think of the universe, the entire world, as full of
spirits of different kinds-- spirits in the trees,
in the rocks, in the rivers, in the stars, in the mountains. Some of them benign,
some of them friendly, some of them really mean. It's as if they thought
of the whole universe as full of life,
as full of conscious life, and that's perhaps not such
a bad way of thinking about the universe. But without records,
it's probable that they didn't have
a sort of modern sense of deep time or big history. Although we know that
some big events, such as volcanic eruptions or
perhaps asteroid impacts could linger in their memories
sometimes for centuries or even thousands of years. As humans collectively
learned more and more about their environments, they began to migrate into new
environments. Now, at the sign... at
the time these migrations would have seemed
completely insignificant. No one would have really
noticed them. But in retrospect, what we can see is that
these tiny migrations were what led our ancestors
to migrate around the entire world,
developing new technologies as they did so. We know that some humans
left Africa about a hundred thousand
years ago, but real significant
migrations began after about 60,000 years ago. We also know that just before
those major migrations, human numbers dropped
very drastically to perhaps
just a few thousand. We know this
because of genetic evidence. And it's probable
that the cause was a series of massive
volcanic eruptions. That's a reminder
that there was no guarantee that our species would
survive to the present day. Then, as if in a rebound,
humans began to migrate faster and faster. By 50,000 years ago,
we know there were humans in Australia. To get there, they must have
had pretty sophisticated navigational skills
because they had to cross quite a large body of water. They also needed the ability
to use the entirely new suite of animals and plants
to survive from. From 25,000 years ago,
we know there are humans living in the icy conditions
of Ice Age Siberia. To live there, they had
to be able to hunt mammoth. Think about it. That was pretty tough. They used mammoth bones
to build houses to keep warm. They also used bone needles
to tailor very, very nicely made skin clothes
to keep themselves warm. From about 15,000
years ago, we have evidence that humans went
to the Americas. So all in all,
by about 10,000 years ago, we know that humans have
settled all parts of the world, apart from Antarctica,
so there's nowhere else, really, or there's not much
room to settle now. Coincidentally,
at about the same time, global climates began to change
as the Ice Age has ended. Now, these two changes-- the settlement of the entire
world and changes in global climates-- would set human history off on
an entirely new trajectory. Why?