In the Beginning

1. In the Beginning Thematic Overview of Pre-History

2. Time Line- How Old?

3. Modern History- Do the math

4. Key terms • Geologic time • Biological balance • Pre-human evolution • Language and human evolution • Race and history • Sexual division of labor • Pre-historic spirituality – evidence? • Tools • Hunter-gatherers • Farming and human evolution. – types and consequences • 3 problems

5. Prehistoric Humans

6. Transition….

7. How we changed • Pre-human communities presumably evolved biologically • changes in genes were more important than changes in learned behavior • no one knows when that changed - when evolution by learning became more important • must have been after language/speech developed.

8. Beliefs and Ritual?

9. Beliefs • Ancient hunters believed that world full of spirits. • Most impressive prehistoric evidence – famous cave paintings • Why paint? • Can only guess but everywhere humans felt a sense of mystery ?

10. Hunter-Gathers = 99% of our History • Implications for our “human nature”? • Recent discovery: • After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago, and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals (right) in Europe. But geneticists now say a cousin of the Neanderthals may have lingered in Africa until perhaps 25,000 years ago, coexisting with the modern humans and on occasion interbreeding with them

11. We start farming • 8,000 years ago • Other consequences for humans? • The first farmers were less healthy than the hunter-gatherers had been • Their shorter stature and they had more skeletal wear and tear from the hard work, • their teeth rotted more, • they were short of protein and vitamins • they caught diseases from domesticated animals: • measles from cattle, • flu from ducks, • plague from rats • worms from using their own excrement as fertilizer. • They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time. • http://www.economist.com/node/10278703

12. Spread of Farming

14. The situation in the southern Levant, along the Jordan valley (and perhaps on the Euphrates bend), can be described as cultivation-dependent sedentism in oasis-like locations, where varieties of floodwater farming could be practiced. It is hypothesized that this obligate dependence on cultivated carbohydrates gave rise to a feedback loop linking population growth and an increasing scale of cultivation, generating a moving demographic front which began the process of spatial expansion.

15. 1,500 B.C.E. • ÇatalHüyük, a Neolithic settlement in modern Turkey, contained the oldest map yet discovered (6,200 B.C.E.). Above the settlement towered a volcano, Hassan Dag, and from its slopes the villagers quarried obsidian, which they shaped into tools and ornaments for trade. Also, the nutrient-rich terraces at the base of the volcano would have been highly productive for primitive farmers. This artist's conception of ÇatalHüyük, prepared from the map and archeological finds, depicts the village as it may have been in 6,200 B.C.E. Individual homes were entered via ladders from the roofs. Many of the rooms in the village seem to have been used for ceremonial or religious purposes (perhaps not surprising when one realizes that these people lived at the base of an active volcano!), and the settlement's dead were buried beneath the floors of their homes, perhaps as a form of ancestor worship.

16. Problems • Relations with hunters • Telling time • Shortage of suitable land