Human Beings almost Everywhere
200,000-10,000 Years Ago
This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions
This is the first era in which our own species,
Homo sapiens,
is known to have existed. So it is the first era of human
history. Scholars argue vigorously about when Homo sapiens
first appeared. An increasing number of archaeologists and paleontologists
think that this happened about 200,000 years ago, in eastern
Africa. One reason supporting this approximate date is that
today the genetic differences between humans are very small,
far too small for those differences to have accumulated over
a period much longer than 200,000 years.
Also, fossilized remains of early humans suggest that they
were almost identical to the anatomies of people living today.
There are also hints that those folk were beginning to behave
very differently from earlier hominids.
Big Era Two extends to about 10,000 years ago when, in some
parts of the world, humans began for the first time to take
up farming. Scholars conventionally mark that date as the
approximate transition from the paleolithic
(old stone age) to the neolithic
(new stone age). That is when humans in some places started
using an array of more sophisticated stone tools, many of
which assisted in early agricultural production. So we can
think of Big Era Two as the era of human history that preceded
farming and agriculture.
This era before farming was by far the longest in human
history, embracing about 95 percent of the time that our species
has existed on earth. But it is also the era we know least
about. So in discussing it we will have to explore the different
types of evidence used to try to understand it.
Most historical scholarship is based on written evidence.
Writing did not exist during Big Era Two, however, so we cannot
tell a traditional historical story about this period. For
example, we do not know the names of a single society or individual
in this era.
Nevertheless, scholars have done a great deal of research
in archaeology. Therefore, we can say a surprising amount
about how humans lived and how they related to the natural
environment. We can even make some reasonable guesses about
how they thought about the external world around them.
Archaeologists are extremely skillful at examining material
objects that have survived from this era in order to help
us understand how people lived. For example, scholars can
learn much by examining the bones of both humans and the animals
humans hunted. Archaeologists also analyze the remains of
human tools or foods. They can often date these remains quite
accurately. They can therefore study how technologies changed
over time and how humans slowly spread into new areas.
They also use what they know about climatic change to make
inferences about changes in human life. Finally, study of
modern communities that use technologies similar to those
known in Big Era Two can give us some helpful hints about
the way people lived, the organization of their communities,
and the sort of perceptions they may have had about their
world.
To understand how people might have been thinking 10,000
or more years ago, we have to resort mostly to indirect forms
of evidence. If people buried their dead, it is tempting to
think that they had an idea of an afterlife and were, in some
sense, religious. Art, however, provides probably the most
powerful evidence of how humans perceived their world. Most
archaeologists believe that the existence of art is one of
the first signs that humans had a wider, more complex ability
to communicate. So, when we find early evidence of art, we
are probably in the presence of people who were capable of
using language.
Language may in fact be the defining characteristic of our
species. Apart from the evidence of bones how can we tell
that early homo sapiens really were fully human? In fact,
what is it that distinguishes humans from animals? Historians,
philosophers, and archaeologists have debated this basic question
for a long time, and they have not reached a universally accepted
answer. One trait that appears on most lists of what makes
us human is the ability to communicate with one another through
language.
Many animals can use gestures to communicate with each other,
but only humans can communicate information with precision
and detail. Only humans can talk about things that are not
present (a new pathway through a forest), things that probably
do not exist (dragons, leprechauns, or sky gods), things that
are abstract (one o'clock in the afternoon or the beauty of
a ripe pear). Because of this ability, humans can communicate
to one another the results of what they learn in their lifetime.
This transformed the relationship of humans to their environment
and to each other.
Humans and the Environment
All animals learn how to get food and other resources from
their environment. When an animal dies, however, all the knowledge
it has accumulated in its lifetime dies with it. The ability
of humans to communicate very precisely with each other changed
that rule. The things that individuals learned during their
lifetime could now be passed on to others. This meant that
new knowledge could be stored up and handed on to the next
generation. So humans, unlike all other animals, acquired
more and more new ways of dealing with their environment and
preserving what they knew. They could add to their knowledge
from one century to another. This process, which we will call
collective
learning, explains many of the distinctive features
of the history of our species.
One of the earliest signs of the presence of modern humans
is an acceleration in the pace of technological change. The
stone tools of the earlier hominids show little change in
the course of a million years. But once humans appear, so
do new types of tools. These implements are more varied, more
delicately made, and more precisely designed for specific
tasks. By modern standards, the pace of technological change
was still slow. Nevertheless, Big Era Two witnessed changes
that have transformed human history at an accelerating speed
ever since.
Adaptation
As technologies changed, people learned to live in more
varied environments. By 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had
already learned to live in places, such as deserts and dense
forests, that no earlier hominids had occupied. Later, modern
humans began to explore environments outside their African
homeland. From about 100,000 years ago, we have evidence of
modern humans inhabiting Southwest
Asia (the Middle East), and then South Asia, Southeast
Asia, China, and southern Europe. In those regions they found
environments not too different from those they knew in Africa.
Perhaps 60,000 years ago or earlier, some humans crossed
an expanse of sea to settle in the ice-age continent of Sahul,
which at that time joined modern Australia and Papua New Guinea.
From perhaps 40,000 years ago, humans began to occupy the
cold lands of ice-age Russia and Ukraine. From there, they
migrated into the even icier environments of Siberia. In such
cold climates, they needed highly specialized technologies.
They built pit houses, and learned to sew warm clothing using
bone needles. They also learned to be very efficient hunters.
Because plant foods were scarce, so they had to learn how
to hunt huge animals such as mammoths.
Migration
At least 13,000 years ago, and perhaps thousands of years
earlier, some humans crossed the Bering Strait from eastern
Siberia into the Americas. Once in the Western Hemisphere,
they spread from northern Canada to the southern end of South
America within one or two thousand years. Some scholars have
recently argued that humans accomplished this feat in as short
a time as they did because they inhabited the western coast
lands of the Americas, thrived on a rich marine diet, and
migrated steadily southward in small boats.
Humans Populate All
the Major Land Masses of the World
Environmental Impact
In Australia, Siberia, and the Americas, humans found many
new species of animals and plants. In these regions, animals
had never encountered humans before and many species underestimated
how dangerous this strange new two-legged creature was. Consequently,
the first human colonists found hunting very easy. This may
explain why many large animal species--the mammoths of Siberia,
the giant wombats and emus of Australia, the saber-toothed
tigers of the Americas--soon became extinct.Humans also learned
to use fire to burn vegetation and encourage new plant growth,
thereby attracting the plant-eating animals that they wanted
to hunt. By regularly firing the land and by over-hunting,
humans began to have a significant impact on the natural environment
wherever they settled.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of how dangerous
modern humans could be was the disappearance of all other
hominid species. Neanderthals,
and perhaps some types of Homo
erectus, survived throughout much of Big Era Two.
They may even have met groups of Homo sapiens. Neanderthals
had brains at least as large as ours, and they were effective
hunters. But it seems they could not communicate with each
nearly as well as modern humans could.
As far as we know, the last Neanderthals lived in the south
of France, perhaps 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. There are hints
that they tried, and failed, to imitate the technologies of
modern humans. Other hominids may have lived almost as recently
in parts of Southeast Asia. We cannot know for certain, but
it seems likely that, as modern humans occupied more and more
territory, close genetic relatives living in those regions
were slowly driven to extinction.
By 10,000 years ago, humans could be found in all parts
of the world, in Afroeurasia, Australia, and the Americas.
As the area that humans occupied expanded, their numbers probably
increased as well. Yet the size of each community likely remained
small. In other words, population increased by extensification,
that is, by increasing the number of communities and the range
of settlement across the world without increasing the size
of each community.
Intensification,
which means increasing the size of each community, and the
numbers living within a given area, came later, beginning
in Big Era Three. But even the slow population growth of Big
Era Two may have raised the total number of humans from a
few hundred thousand to a few millions. If so, the population
world-wide at the end of the era was only 1/1000th its size
today.
Humans and Other Humans
How did people live in Big Era Two? Archaeologists can tell
us a lot about their dwellings and the tools they used, but
it is harder to understand their social and cultural lives.
We are sure that virtually all people were gatherers, hunters,
or fishers in that era, even though the techniques people
used varied more and more as groups settled more widely across
the globe.
We may be able to gain insight into the economies of Big
Era Two peoples by investigating the life ways of those few
modern societies that continue to survive by hunting and gathering.
Scholars have to use this kind of evidence cautiously because
we certainly cannot assume that modern hunter-gatherers live
generally the same way that their predecessors did 10,000
to 200,000 years ago! We can, however, use modern evidence
to advance some hypotheses.
Today's hunter-gatherer communities make up a minuscule percentage
of the world's population, but they persist in a few places
on all the continents. Except in extremely cold environments,
they rely mainly on gathered plants for subsistence. Meat
is valued, and most communities have hunters who occasionally
bring it in, but meat is not the main component of most hunter-gatherer
diets because hunting is usually less reliable than gathering.
In cold environments such as the Arctic where plant foods
are scarce, people rely on the meat from seals, whales and,
deer. Their hunting techniques have to be extremely sophisticated.
All hunter-gatherers have to have deep knowledge about the
plants and animals they use. Most modern hunter-gatherer communities
are mobile, traveling through the land as the seasons change,
and staying in a single camp for only a few weeks before moving
on.
The largest communities are really large families, that
is, groups of ten to forty or fifty people who travel together
and sometimes encounter other groups. When they meet, individuals
often move from one group to another because of marriages,
quarrels, or even boredom.
As in modern families, the main divisions within these communities
are of age and gender. Men and women often have different
economic and social roles, as do the old and the young, but
there are few differences in wealth and power because no one
stores up wealth. It doesn't make sense to do that if you
can find the things you need all around you. And besides,
if you are traveling much of the time, why try to carry many
possessions with you? By combining the knowledge we have of
modern hunter-gatherers with the evidence of archaeology (stone
tools and weapons, human and animal bones, and the remains
of camp sites), we can construct a broad picture of how people
lived during Big Era Two.
The Beginnings of Permanent Settlement
Towards the end of the era, we start finding signs that
some communities were spending more time at particular sites
and becoming more settled. This may have happened earliest
in coastal areas where marine food resources were particularly
abundant. As communities stayed longer in a single place,
they devised new ways to increase their food supply. For example,
they might care for stands of favored food plants by clearing
weeds or scaring away birds. Or, they might build weirs (enclosures
set in a waterway) to stock fish or eels. These technological
innovations had features that were at least faintly characteristic
of farming, the technology that appeared in Big Era Three.
Was hunter-gatherer life 10,000 or more years ago "nasty,
brutish, and short," as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
thought, or was it reasonably comfortable? On one hand, it
is probable that many people died young from illnesses, childbirth
crises, or hunting expeditions gone bad. On the other hand,
studies of modern hunter-gatherers suggest that in Big Era
Two humans had a varied and nutritionally adequate diet and
probably much more leisure time in a day than farmers have
traditionally had. So, for a person born into a hunter-gatherer
community, that mode of living was probably both satisfying
and fulfilling.
Humans and Ideas
Modern hunter-gatherers often think of the world as a place
full of many different types of intelligent beings besides
humans. Peoples who lived in Big Era Two may have thought
the same thing.
Some cave and rock paintings, as well as sculptured objects
of stone, bone, or ivory, survive from the era. Much of the
painting depicts hunting, but some artistic expression also
hint at various kinds of magical, supernatural beliefs. These
pictures are hard to interpret, but they seem to describe
a world full of spirits--spirits that animate stones, mountains,
lakes, trees, and animals. If this is the case, then it is
probable that humans in Big Era Two thought of themselves
as just one part of the natural world. They had none of the
sense of separateness from nature that characterizes religions
and cosmologies in later eras of history.
Art
Cave paintings and carved objects were just one of the ways
that men and women expressed themselves symbolically through
art. An early hint of the existence of art among humans is
the physical evidence of powdered pigments. People appear
to have ground up pigments, such as ochre, and used them to
paint themselves or their surroundings. In fact, evidence
of ground pigment use in southern Africa dates to well over
100,000 years ago. Therefore, we may also have an early date
for the use of language.
In the last 40,000 years of the era, the period from about
50,000 to 10,000 years ago that scholars call the upper
paleolithic, artistic expression burst forth in many
parts of the world. Humans began to produce not only paintings
and carvings but also necklaces, bracelets, pendants, beads,
and ornamental headgear. Through this art women and men represented
their world symbolically.
Wherever people lived, they took advantage of the local materials
and opportunities they had. Wall painting, for example, is
concentrated heavily in northern Spain and Southwestern France
where deep limestone caves provided "gallery space" protected
from rain and wind. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, cave shelters
are rare, so people commonly carved small, portable figurines.
Humans even started making music. For example, in western
Eurasia archaeologists have found more than thirty flute-like
instruments made of long hollow bone and equipped with finger
holes. Most of these instruments are broken and unplayable,
but the earliest may date to roughly 37,000 years ago.
Interpreting Ancient Artifacts
Explaining the 'meaning' of painting, sculpture, or music
is always risky because so much depends on the cultural context
of the work and on the ideas we ourselves bring to the interpretation.
We can hardly do more than speculate on the aesthetic, social,
or spiritual intentions of individuals who drew pictures of
bison galloping across rock shelter walls, painted images
of human hands, or carved mysterious spiral patterns on pieces
of bone.
Part of the problem is that we know so little about the wider
human environments in which particular works were produced.
Take for example the hundreds of carved "Venus" figurines
that have been found in sites scattered across Eurasia from
western Europe to Siberia. The best-known samples of these
have exaggerated breasts and buttocks. Were these female statues
symbols of fertility? Were they part of a symbolic system
by which women shared rituals with one another? Did their
meaning vary from one region to another? Debate over the meaning
of art in the upper paleolithic will continue for a long time.
We have no material artifacts at all to help us understand
the most important sign systems of all, spoken languages.
Writing presumably lay far in the future. Or did it? We do
have quite a bit of evidence from the upper paleolithic of
abstract markings, such as dots, paired lines, and zigzags.
These signs seem to suggest systematic storing or transmitting
of information, perhaps a record of hunting successes or the
phases of the moon.
If such symbols were early forms of writing, we still cannot
connect the marks to sounds that came out of peoples' mouths.
We also know almost nothing about the development and spread
of particular spoken languages in Big Era Two. We may assume,
though, that this was taking place as global colonization
proceeded.
2.
Table adapted from David Christian, “’This Fleeting
World’. Data from Stephen K. Sanderson, “Expanding
World Commercialization: The Links between World-Systems and
Civilizations,” in Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Civilizations
and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change (Walnut
Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1995), 267.
3
Andrew Bosworth, “World Cities and World Economic Cycles,”
in Sanderson, Civilizations and World Systems, 216.
4
Data adapted from Rein Taagepera, “Size and Duration
of Empires: Systematics of Size,” Social Science Research
7 (1978): 108-127.
5
Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 29-30.
