World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500

Eugene Berger, George Israel, Charlotte Miller, Brian Parkinson, Andrew Reeves, Nadejda Williams

• Publisher: Studium Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9788027226603
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Contents: PrehistoryEarly Middle Eastern and Northeast African CivilizationsAncient and Early Medieval IndiaChina and East Asia to the Ming DynastyThe Greek World from the Bronze Age to the Roman ConquestThe Roman World from 753 BCE to 500 CEWestern Europe and Byzantium circa 500 - 1000 CEIslam to the MamluksAfrican History to 1500The AmericasCentral AsiaWestern Europe and Byzantium circa 1000 - 1500 CE

Chapter One: Prehistory

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Chronology

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8 – 6 million years ago	Bi-pedal hominids in Africa
2.6 million years ago	Homo habilis begin to use tools
43,000 BCE	Homo sapiens expand out of Africa
50,000 – 10,000 BCE	Homo sapiens complete their migration to all continents
22,000 – 14,000 BCE	Last Glacial Maximum
c. 9,000 BCE	Younger Dryas event
c. 9,000 BCE	Jericho reaches its height
c. 7,000 BCE	Çatalhüyük reaches several thousand inhabitants
2,000 BCE	Paleo-Eskimos appear in the Arctic
2,000 BCE	Humans begin to make pottery

Introduction

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In 1952, at the age of 77 and suffering with an abdominal hernia long overdue for surgery, Sellards returned to Vero to collect charcoal or bone suitable for the newly invented technique of radiocarbon dating. … His longtime field assistant Glen Evans accompanied him, having left Texas with careful instructions from Sellard’s physician about what to do if the hernia suddenly bulged. It did, and Sellards collapsed unconscious at the excavation. … But the moment Sellards regained consciousness he insisted on continuing to excavate.1

The above case of Florida State Geologist Elias Sellards demonstrates that the study of “human antiquity” or man’s earliest origins is one surrounded by passion, controversy, and a deep well of curiosity. Our curiosity about our earliest origins has not only given birth to fictional characters like Indiana Jones and Captain Kirk, but also is largely responsible for the growth of archaeology in the early twentieth century. Western scholars and explorers were not content with simply reaching remote places; they were curious about their earliest human inhabitants. While the motives of early excavators may have been quite simple (Well-known paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey got his start collecting stones as a child), archaeologists and paleoanthropologists eventually created an entirely new field of historical investigation: prehistory. Multiple pioneers have hacked through underbrush or spent months excavating Paleolithic sites. Not until recently, however, have scientific advances, local knowledge, and anthropological theory merged with the curiosity of western explorers to craft a more accurate version of human origins and evolution.

Written texts are the primary sources most historians are trained to work with and are those they are most comfortable using. However, if we are to understand humanity’s origins, we have to recognize that written language is a relatively recent invention (around 5,000 years old); therefore, much of what we know about human beginnings must be borrowed from the findings of colleagues in other disciplines like geology, botany, and archaeology. In all of the regions mentioned below, archaeologists have excavated and analyzed physical evidence relating to our pre-historic ancestors. Up until recent times, though, it was difficult to understand migration patterns and chronology without a method to determine the age of anything from a human skull to a cutting tool. Archaeologists in the 1930s and 40s used imprecise terms like “stone bowl cultures,” a nomenclature that referred more to the details of the articles unearthed than their historical context.2 This began to change with the advent of radiocarbon dating or C14 dating in the 1940s. Through this method, we were able to place thousands of organic archaeological materials in their proper historical context even without textual evidence. For artifacts over 40,000 years old, the amount of radioactive carbon we can recover doesn’t permit accurate measurement. However, we do have a number of techniques to trace human origins even further back, including aerial photography, side-scanning radar, and potassium-argon dating. All these techniques get around the lack of radioactive carbon in that they don’t date the organic material, but instead the terrain in which they were found, allowing us to trace human origins back millions of years to the beginnings of bipedalism.

The goal of this chapter, though, is not to trace human evolution from its beginnings, but to set the scene for the beginnings of civilization. In this chapter we will explore why hominids moved, how they survived, and how they came to develop agriculture. We also hope to lay out why humans in far flung parts of the world responded similarly to changing conditions around them and hence developed civilizations at roughly the same time.

This chapter begins at the origins of bipedalism some eight million years ago and brings us up to eight thousand years ago with the the NeolithicEra or “new stone age.” Bipedal hominids would develop during the Pliocene era and our closest ancestors during the more recent Pleistocene. Finally, modern Homo sapiens would appear during the Holocene. During the Holocene humans would perfect tool usage during the PaleolithicEra,and would usher in agriculture during the Neolithic. Our chapter ends as humans prepare to enter the Bronze and Iron Ages.

1 David J. Meltzer, The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Age Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1.

2 J.E.G Sutton, “Archeology and Reconstructing History in the Kenya Highlands: The Intellectual Legacies of G.W.B. Huntingford and Louis S.B. Leakey,” History in Africa 34, (2007): 313.

Questions to Guide your Reading

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1. What were some factors that led to hominid bipedalism?
2. How did climate affect hominid development?
3. How and why did Homo sapiens expand out of Africa?
4. How and when did Homo sapiens populate the Americas?
5. What was a hunter-gatherer existence like?
6. Why did Homo sapiens start to prefer agriculture?
7. How did agriculture start to change human relationships?

Key Terms

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• Abu Hureya	• Ice Age
• Beringia	• Jericho
• Çatalhüyük	• Natufians
• Dolni Vetoniçe	• Neanderthals
• Holocene	• Neolithic
• Homo erectus	• Oldowan Industry
• Homo habilis	• Paleolithic
• Homo sapiens	• Pleistocene

Human Beginnings in Africa

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The fossil record in Africa clearly establishes that a human lineage diverged there from African apes sometime between eight to six million years ago. Beginning as far back as eight million years ago, various species of hominids (the ancestors of modern humans or Homo sapiens) began to walk upright. This bipedalism would allow these hominids to use their hands to develop, craft, and use tools. Bipedalism would also eventually contribute to a move out of forests into the savanna and turn hominids into big game hunters and gatherers. Paleoanthropologists once theorized that hominids became bipedal to adapt to life in the grasslands. However, the fact that fossils of bipedal hominids were found alongside fossil remains of wood, seeds, and other forest dwellers has cast some doubt on that theory. In fact, bipedal hominids may have lived in the forest for some time. While some bipedal hominids may have stayed in the forest, climate changes did drive others to move into new areas within Africa and beyond it.

Climate, Hominin in Evolution, and Migrations

As far as thirty million years ago hominids were reacting to changes in their environment. (“Hominids” refers to all Great Apes including humans and their ancestors. “Hominins” is often used when speaking more specifically about modern humans and their more recently extinct ancestors. We will use “hominids” here because it covers all of the groups we will reference including modern humans). The earth cooled, producing more fragmented environments. As already mentioned, some hominids may have stayed in the trees, but those that left the forest began to thrive in grasslands. These savannas and prairies expanded during the Miocene, the geologic era lasting from 24 – 2 million years ago. This grassland expansion prompted baboons and hominids to move out of the forest.

During the Pliocene epoch (5 – 1.6 million years ago), another series of environmental changes made these grasslands even more prevalent, leading to a transformation that geologists call the “turnover-pulse hypothesis.” Animals with adaptations such as angled knee joints and arched feet survived on the grasslands, while those with longer arms or curved fingers who were better suited to the woodlands did not. For hominids, this favorable grassland environment meant the “development of several closely related species. Large-toothed hominids known as robust australopithecines appeared in Southern and Eastern Africa.”1 Towards the end of the Pliocene, around 2.4 million years ago, the first members of our genus — homo (Homo habilis) — appeared, the first hominid to make stone tools.

The Pleistocene epoch (1.6 million – 10,000 years ago) saw at least twenty-five periods of glaciation and warming. Glaciation resulted from dips in global temperature which had two major effects on hominid development. First, with sea levels dropping due to glaciation, hominids migrated to Australia and the Americas for the first time. Second, while many migrated out of colder climates, those that remained developed physical adaptations. Homo neanderthalensis (Neaderthals), a hominid that disappeared 28,000 years ago, became stockier and more powerful to deal with the difficulties of this icy climate.

While not as dramatic as previous developments, the current Holocene period has seen its share of significant climatic events. The Younger Dryas event (c. 12,000 BCE) was a drop in global temperatures accompanied by a corresponding change in vegetation distribution. Reduced rainfall from 2200 – 1900 BCE made conditions very difficult for civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Finally, the Medieval Warm Period represents “one of the most recent periods of climate change.”2

Like neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and other hominids all reacted to changing climate conditions. Homo erectus and Homo habilis migrated, hunted, and used fire, while neanderthalensis had some use of language and tools and buried their dead. For millions of years, in fact, hominids had been using slivers of volcanic stone and cutters probably to hack through animal skin. The cutters were often found close together, suggesting that early hominids even had a division of labor between hunters who would have to pursue their prey and butchers who could wait nearby at...

Table of contents

• World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500
• Table of Contents
• Chapter One: Prehistory
• Chapter Two: Early Middle Eastern and Northeast African Civilizations
• Chapter Three: Ancient and Early Medieval India
• Chapter Four: China and East Asia to the Ming Dynasty
• Chapter Five: The Greek World from the Bronze Age to the Roman Conquest
• Chapter Six: The Roman World from 753 BCE to 500 CE
• Chapter Seven: Western Europe and Byzantium circa 500 - 1000 CE
• Chapter Eight: Islam to the Mamluks
• Chapter Nine: African History to 1500
• Chapter Ten: The Americas
• Chapter Eleven: Central Asia
• Chapter Twelve: Western Europe and Byzantium circa 1000 - 1500 CE