World History: Unit 1

World History: Unit 1 Coach Wattie Fall 2013

Five Themes of Geography • Objective: Explain the five themes of geography and its importance to the study of world history and culture.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme One: Location • Where something is positioned • Every point on Earth has a specific location that is determined by an imaginary grid of lines which are latitude and longitude.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme One: Location • Parallels of LATITUDE measure distances north and south of the line called the EQUATOR. • Divides the earth into northern and southern hemispheres. • Meridians of LONGITUDE measure distances east and west of the line called the PRIME MERIDIAN • Divides the earth into eastern and western hemispheres.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme One: Location • There are two ways that we can describe the positions of people and places on the Earth’s surface. • Absolute locations: the latitude and longitude (global location) or a street address (local location). • Willard, MO is 37 18’15” North Latitude and 93 25’24” West Longitude.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme One: Location • There are two ways that we can describe the positions of people and places on the Earth’s surface. • Relative Location: described by landmarks, time, direction or distance from one place to another and may associate a particular place with another. • Missouri is in the center of the United States. • Willard is a small town north of Springfield.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Two: Place • An area that includes those features and characteristics that gives an area its own identity or personality. • All places have characteristics that give them meaning and character and distinguish them from other places on earth.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Two: Place • Geographers describe places by their physical and human characteristics • Physical characteristics include: mountains, rivers, soil, beaches, and wildlife. • Human characteristics: architecture, patterns of livelihood, land use and ownership, town planning, and communication and transportation networks. • Countries, cities, and states are the best examples of a place.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Three: Human-Environment Interaction • Focuses on how people respond to and alter their environment. • In studying human/environment interaction, geographers look at all the effects (positive and negative) that occur when people interact with their surroundings. • Example: The construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River changed the natural landscape, but it also created a reservoir that helps provide water and electric power for the arid Southwest.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Three: Human-Environment Interaction • There are three key concepts to human/environment interaction: • Adapt: the adjustment to new or changing conditions of the environment. • People in Arizona adapt to the environment by wearing clothing that is suitable for summer and winter.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Three: Human-Environment Interaction • There are three key concepts to human/environment interaction: • Modify: changing or altering the environment to fit human needs. • People in the Ozarks modify the environment by clearing the forests for agriculture.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Three: Human-Environment Interaction • There are three key concepts to human/environment interaction: • Depend: relying on the environment for survival or support. • People depend on the Tennessee River for water and transportation.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Three: Human-Environment Interaction • All places on the earth have advantages and disadvantages for human settlement. • High population densities have developed on flood plains where people could take advantage of fertile soils, water resources, and opportunities for river transportation. • By comparison, population densities are usually low in deserts. • Yet flood plains are periodically subjected to severe damage, and some desert areas, such as Israel, have been modified to support large population concentrations.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Four: Regions • An area unified by some feature or mixture of features • A basic unit of geographic study is the region, an area on the earth’s surface that is defined by certain unifying characteristics. • Using regions, geographers divide the world into manageable units for study.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Four: Regions • A region is an area that displays a coherent unity in terms of the government, language, landform, or situation. • The unifying characteristics may be physical, economic, or cultural. • Geographers study how a region changes over time.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Four: Regions • Some regions are defined by one characteristics such as a language group, or a landform type, and others by the interplay of many complex features. • Examples: • Latin America as an area where Spanish and Portuguese are major languages can be a linguistic region. • Rocky Mountains as a mountain range is a landform region. • Neighborhoods are considered regions because of income and educational levels of residents or by prominent boundaries such as a freeway, park, or business district.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Four: Regions • There are three basic types of regions: • Formal regions are those defined by concise and fixed boundaries that are not open to dispute. • Physical regions like the Rockies or Great Lakes fall into this category. • Functional regions are those defined by a human function. • Business Districts, Financial Districts (Wall Street) • Vernacular regions are those loosely defined by people’s perception. • The South, The Middle East

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Five: Movement • Delivery of people, things, and ideas from one are to another. • The movement of people, the import and export of goods, and mass communication have all played major roles in shaping our world.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Five: Movement • People interact with other people, places, and things almost every day of their lives. • They travel from one place to another. • Communicate with each other. • Rely upon products, information, and ideas that come from beyond their immediate environment.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Five: Movement • Humans occupy places unevenly on Earth not just because of the environment but also because we are social beings. • Some live on farms or in the country while others live in towns, villages, or cities.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Five: Movement • Products, goods, and many other things represents another part of movement. • Material possessions are no longer from household economy: resources are pulled together to create an item, then it is shipped to the stores for presentation before being moved again by the buyer, who takes it home. • Example: Someone from Georgia eating apples grown in Washington.

Five Themes of Geography • Theme Five: Movement • Ideas and information move through various mediums. • Ideas, such as fashion, fads, methodology, and information, move through various types of mediums (internet, magazines, and television).

Environments and Their Effects • Objective: Describe the initial processes of the environment that affects life and culture.

Environments and Their Effects • There are three types of environments to be discussed: Physical, Climatic, Cultural. • Physical Environment: There are three phenomenon that are present in the physical environment that affects humans in almost any instance. • Water (hydrologic) cycle: continuous flow of water from ocean to atmosphere to land through various routes back to the ocean.

Environments and Their Effects • Physical Environment: • Nitrogen Cycle: encompasses the processes and chemical reaction involving the producing organic nitrogen back to inorganic form, in which all living organism participate

Environments and Their Effects • Physical Environment: • Plate tectonics are a theory that divides the Earth’s crust into a number of rigid plates floating on the mantle, and the collisions of these plates explains the formation of most landforms.

Environments and Their Effects • Physical Environment: • In the physical environment, humans and other life forms coexist in a community. • An ecosystem is the interaction of various aspects of humans and the environment which includes three major functions. • One: how organisms retain and recycle minerals within an ecosystem. • Two: energy flow that limits the amount of available energy and determines the size of the organism. • Three: population control is regulated by a predator/prey relationship.

Environments and Their Effects • Physical Environment: • Environmental conditions helped influence human life and presented practical problems that humans had to solve in order to survive. • Humans have responded to the physical environment signals through multiple ways • Collapse • Migration • Creative invention through discovery.

Environments and Their Effects • Physical Environment: • It was human discovery that allowed innovation to evolve, and eventually permitting more control over their environments. • Agriculture (emerging 12,000 and 8,000 years ago) allowed humans to adapt to an environment that lacked a suitable amount of wildlife. • Discovery allowed technology to transform the environment and humans to meet the requirements for continued existence.

Environments and Their Effects • Climatic Environment • Climate is composed of averages and extremes (temperature and precipitation) over a period of time. • Weather is the expression of day-to-day conditions. • Climate affects the worlds patters of soils, vegetation, and water resources as well as directly or indirectly influences every human endeavor. • Climate determines an area’s suitability for settlement, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and other economic activities.

Environments and Their Effects • Climatic Environment • Climates differ because of several factors that affect the amount of incoming solar radiation (insolation). • This is the basic source of energy for all atmospheric processes. • The AXIS (the rotation of the Earth) accounts for daily changes in amounts of insolation.

Environments and Their Effects • Climatic Environment • LATITUDE determines the duration of daylight as well as the angle of light. • ALTITUDE is a factor because air temperatures normally decrease with an elevation • General ATMOSPHERIC AND OCEANIC CIRCULATORY SYSTEMS redistributes heat and moisture. • PREVAILING WINDS (trade and westerlies) transfer temperature and moisture properties. • Because WATER is slower to heat and cool than land, and affords a ready supply of moisture. • Regions around water usually have moderate temperature and heavy moisture than the interior of continents.

Environments and Their Effects • Climatic Environment • Human activity has the potential of affecting large-scale climate patterns through the introduction of materials into the atmosphere and the depletion of forest cover. • Greenhouse effect is being enhanced by human activities including burring of fossil fuels and increase of carbon dioxides. • Climate changes also affect migration patters and cultural development.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Culture is defined as a way of life, a learned behavior acquired by individuals as members of a social group. • Each human society has a body of norms governing behavior and other knowledge to which an individual is socialized. Or acculturated, beginning at birth.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Culture has several distinguishing characteristics: • It is based on symbols: abstract ways of referring to and understanding ideas, objects, feelings, or behaviors and the ability to communicate with symbols using language. • Culture is shared: people in the same society share common behaviors and ways of thinking through culture.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Culture has several distinguishing characteristics: • Culture is learned: while people biologically inherit many physical traits and behavioral instincts, culture is socially inherited • Culture is adaptive: People use culture flexibly to quickly adjust to changes in the world around them.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Human culture can spread from one society to another within the limits of the physical environment and according to a society’s ability to absorb new ideas, institutions, and technologies. • The four ways culture can spread are the following: • Acculturation, Cultural Diffusion, Cultural Relativism, and Cultural Materialism.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Acculturation: direct interaction between groups that distribute cultural traits and institutions. • Cultural Diffusion: happens when elements of culture are spread from society to society through direct or indirect contact.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Cultural Relativism: customs and behaviors that are considered sinful in one culture might be totally acceptable, even praised, in another culture. • Cultural Materialism: many aspects of culture relate directly to a people’s economic conditions. Therefore, a culture’s technology shapes its economy, which in turn shaped its beliefs and values.

Environments and Their Effects • Cultural Environment • Cultures may have little to profound effects on their environment depending on the dominant activity. • Hunting and gathering generally make small demands on the natural environment. • Agricultural societies can place burden on the environment with unrestrained soil erosion. • Industrial societies put the largest demands on the environment by exhausting important supplies of natural resources and releasing heaving pollutants into the environment.

Human Origins • Explain the development of human beginnings leading to civilization.

Human Origins • All major developments in the evolution of the human species took place in tropical Africa. • The divergence between the great apes of Africa and the human line occurred between 5 and 8 million years ago.

Human Origins • Australopithecus “southern ape” • Earliest hominids • Dated from about 4 million B.C.E. • Lived on exclusively on fruits and nuts • Walked on two feet • Had complex social lives • Larger brains • Operated in nuclear family groups

Human Origins • Homo Habilis “handy man” • Dated from around 2.5 million years ago • First to make and use tools • First to scavenge for meat as a regular part of their diet.

Human Origins • Homo Erectus “upright man” • Developed around 1.7 years ago • Made more sophisticated tools • Used shelters • Made clothes • Learned to make and control fire.

Human Origins • Homo Neanderthalanis “Neanderthal Man” • cold-adapted body • Brain as a proportain of body weight • Buial sights • Well made stone tools • Hunted in groups • Employed some form of speech • Homo Sapiens “Thinking Man” • Exploited a wider variety of habitats and local tool traditions some half a million years ago.

Human Origins • A human population with more “modern” characteristics seems to have appeared in tropical Africa and adjoining parts of Southwest Asia. • These earliest modern humans date from around 100,000 BCE and also originated in southern Africa. • The modern human replaced the Neanderthals by warfare, competition for resources, or were simply bred out of existence. • By 30,000 BCE all of the species of hominid which walked the Earth during the past 5 million years were replaced by the modern human.

The Ice Age • The first Ice Age began some 1.5 million years ago, and the pattern of alternation glacial advance and retreat has been the dominant feature of the global environment ever since. • At intervals of 90,000 years temperatures fell and ice covered the northern parts of Asian, American, and European continents. • Further south the tropical regions remained warm and became arid deserts.

The Ice Age • The last Ice Age began 80,000 years ago • As the water turned to ice, sea levels dropped causing the appearance of land bridges which linked most of the land areas. • Humans began to spread from Africa replacing interbreeding with hominid populations in Europe and Asia. • They took advantage of the shorter sea crossing and colonized Australasia in about 50,000 B.C.E. • By 40,000 B.C.E. the reached Japan crossing the land bridge from Korea. • They also began populating the America across the Bering Strait, reaching New England and Chile by 9000 B.C.E.

The Ice Age • The human species is the product of the long process of adaptation to the harsh conditions of the Ice Age. • Major achievements from the last Ice Age include the mastery of fire, and the invention of clothing, development of shelter, and social and communication skills. • As the ice began to melt these groups became isolated pursuing their own independent lines of development.

World History: Unit 1