Activity 1: After reading the background information and ...



Paleolithic to Neolithic Society

Activity 1: After reading the background information and two case studies (below); write an 600-800 word* essay describing the hunter-gatherer societies of the Paleolithic Era, discuss the following topics in your paper:

1.Nomadic lifestyle 2.Invention of early tools, farming and simple weapons 3.Understanding of how to make fire 4. Social Organization 5.Development of oral language 6.Creation of “cave art” 7.Paleolithic diet

*(800 words=1 page typed, Times New Roman font, single spaced, size 12, standard margins) Do NOT quote the information, summarize only.

Background Information of Paleolithic Peoples

Archeological evidence indicates that during the Paleolithic era, hunting-foraging bands of humans gradually migrated from their origin in East Africa to Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas, adapting their technology and cultures to new climate regions.



A. Humans used fire in new ways: to aid hunting and foraging, to protect against predators, and to adapt to cold environments.

B. Humans developed a wider range of tools specially adapted to different environments from tropics to tundra.

C. Economic structures focused on small kinship groups of hunting-foraging bands that could make what they needed to survive. However, not all groups were self-sufficient; they exchanged people, ideas, and goods

Paleolithic and Neolithic Societies

The Stone Age

One of the principal characteristics separating hominids from their immediate ancestors was tool use; it has been traditional to divide human prehistory into eras based on levels of technological capability. Hominids made their tools out of many materials, such as wood, bone, and animal skins. But the most noteworthy were the ones made of stone. The first period of history is known as the Stone Age. This era is broken down into at least two periods: the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age (10,000 to 2.5 million years ago) and Neolithic or New Stone Age (5,000 to 10,000 years ago). The change from Paleolithic to Neolithic is associated with the end of the Ice Age.

Early Tool-making

During the Paleolithic era, Homo habilis and Homo erectus used crude tools, including clubs and choppers to crack open bones, rudimentary axes, and scrapers to prepare animal hides. The earliest humans—Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and Homo sapiens sapiens—improved upon these tools and created new ones. Tools were generally designed to provide shelter, protection and defense, and foods and clothing. The earliest hominids lived in natural shelters like caves and canyons. Fire was developed one million years ago and then hominids made tent like structures and simple huts to live in. By the end of the Paleolithic the hominids were building more advanced wood and stone structures. They also developed weapons like clubs and rocks. They devised tools for hunting and food preparation which could also be a weapon, such as the bow and arrow, spears, axes and knives.

Paleolithic Religion

Paleolithic peoples were very spiritualistic. Animism is the belief that everything had its own spirit: people, animals, trees, rivers, mountains, and the sky. The interaction of these spirits within this unseen world was what shaped the visible events of everything around them: weather, wars, and health.

Those who demonstrated certain powers, the shamans or witchdoctors, were both greatly respected and greatly feared. They were understood to possess special magical powers that could be worked to the good-or the bad--of the community. The community as a whole felt that it exercised some controlling influence over events--by their ability to "pre-enact" the necessary events of their lives. Thus the community engaged in ritualistic war dances, hunting dances, rain dances, medicine dances and rituals, which supposedly had the power to predispose or control the behavior of the unseen spirits in order to assure a forthcoming favorable outcome--whatever the event or whatever the community's particular need.

Hunting and Gathering: the New Stone Age As time passed hominids began to organize themselves in social groups. This would eventually give birth to family units and these families would tend to cluster together by ties of kinship. As clans became larger they usually mixed with neighboring groups that grew into bands or tribes.

Paleolithic groups sustained themselves by hunting and gathering. This practice is known as foraging. Rather than produce food themselves, hunter-gatherer societies lived off the resources from the land. They killed birds and animals for food, especially mammoths, bison, deer and rodents. They also picked roots and berries from surrounding trees. When the resources dried up, the band or tribe moved to a new area with sustainable resources.

The early tribes also developed a form of government. This organization was based on chiefs, leaders and religious figures to head the tribe. They were to main figure to these early hunter-gatherer societies and are responsible for keeping them together. The early tribes also worshipped deities and practiced a variety of religious rituals. It is said that Cro-Magnon buried their dead over 100,000 years ago, indicating the belief in an afterlife. The religious ceremonies became more sophisticated with the sacrificing to gods, goddesses and spirits. The early tribes were very artistic people, they were known to play music and paint on cave walls.

Case Study: Neander Valley

Modern man was really forced to stop and think when unusual fossils (bones) were found in 1856 near Duesseldorf, Germany in the Neander Valley. Workers were mining for limestone in a cave when they came across a skull, and other various bones. This is, of course, how Neanderthal gets its name.

This was not the first discovery of Neanderthal fossils though. It was about 1829 or 1830 when fragments from the skull of a Neanderthal child were found in Belgium, and in 1848 a full skull of an adult was found in Gibraltar. But the find in the Neander Valley began all of the excitement, it stirred up many questions and theories.

These remains found in the cave near Duesseldorf were examined by Rudolf Vichow, a German Anatomist. He concluded that it was just a Homo sapiens(modern human) with rickets. Vichow claimed that the flattened head was due to some form of injury. A biologist named Thomas Huxley declared that it was an ancestor of modern humans. Paleontologist Marcellin Boule argued that Neanderthals were not direct ancestors of Homo sapiens sapiens and so called them Homo neanderthalensis. Boule also gave the impression that these creatures were stupid. Of course this is disputable with the evidence of the average brain size of a Neanderthal compared with that of a modern human.

There was a dispute to whether Neanderthals were direct ancestors or an extinct species of their own. Immediately, they were portrayed as slouched over, violent, brute/ape-like cavemen. And this image was carried on until almost 1960. At this time, scientists realized that the first found Neanderthal had arthritis, and they did in fact walk upright. It is said that if you were to put a "cleaned up" Neanderthal with a group of modern day humans, there would not be much difference at all.

The average height is thought to be about 5 feet tall. Their bodies were probably quite stocky, or muscular, with very strong legs-most likely due to traveling or wandering. They had low brow ridges. Their front teeth were quite large, larger than the modern human’s and worn- indicating much use for chewing. Neanderthals’ average brain size is larger than some modern humans.

According to evidence, they lived between 130,000 and 35,000 years ago, dating back to the fourth glaciation. Neanderthals seemed to live primarily in Europe and in Western Asia; this is concluded because most of the fossils were found in these areas.

Many Mousterian tools were found with the fossil remains, consisting of different kinds of scrapers and points. Many believe they primarily hunted reindeer and whenever possible the larger animals such as mammoths, cave bears, etc. Neanderthals were probably hunter/gatherer groups. If so, their diets consisted of mainly small animals, vegetation, and less often the larger animals. They would have used whatever was in their environment for food and tools.

Evidence shows that they possibly buried their dead. Remains have been found in shallow "graves" often buried with items such as flowers, tool, etc., perhaps as offerings to the dead.

Sources Fagan, Brian M., The Journey From Eden, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London,1990.

Wenke, Robert J., Patterns in Prehistory: humankind’s first three million years, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, 1980, 1984, 1990.

What are the key characteristics of Paleolithic art?

It seems a bit flippant to try to characterize the art from a period that encompasses most of human history. Paleolithic art is intricately bound to anthropological and archaeological studies that professionals have devoted entire lives toward researching and compiling. The truly curious should head in those directions. That said, to make some sweeping generalizations, Paleolithic art:

Concerned itself with either food (hunting scenes, animal carvings) or fertility (Venus figurines). Its predominant theme was animals.

Is considered to be an attempt, by Stone Age peoples, to gain some sort of control over their environment, whether by magic or ritual.

Represents a giant leap in human cognition: abstract thinking.

Case Study

Engines of our Ingenuity

No. 1908: BLOMBOS CAVE by John H. Lienhard

Today, let's visit Blombos Cave. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

You and I have to struggle with our of Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear thinking: We've been trained to believe that, only about thirty-five-thousand years ago, the fine upright Cro-Magnons arose to displace the brutish Neanderthals. Well, that's all being turned on its ear by the Blombos Cave site.

Blombos Cave overlooks the Indian Ocean, on the south coast of South Africa. In 1993 it stunned the anthropological world when it yielded hundred-thousand-year-old, finely-formed, bone tools -- two or three times the age of such tools from Europe. And the people who made them were, anatomically, Modern Humans -- like you and me.

Let me give some benchmark dating here: the Paleolithic Era (which means the Era of Old Stone). It starts with the first human tool-making two and a half million years ago. It ends after the last Ice Age and the beginnings of agriculture. After that, we talk about the Neolithic Era (the Era of New Stone). It lasted until we took up metalworking, and we invented writing.

The older Paleolithic Era took place in two parts: Lower and Upper. During the latter part, the Upper Paleolithic Era, Modern Humans appeared and rapidly extended tool making beyond simple chipped rocks. For a long time, we'd believed all that'd started just a little over thirty thousand years ago.

But most of the evidence for that had come out of Europe. Now Blombos Cave has moved the rise of Modern Humans back to a time long before the Neanderthals vanished. It has tripled the length of the Upper Paleolithic Era, and it places the cradle of Modern Humans down at the far tip of the African continent

Among those oldest-known bone tools we find spear points, awls, spatulas. We find standard forms of tools. We find the first evidence of fishing. We find fine stonework of a kind that didn't turn up in Europe until twenty-thousand years ago. We find different areas of the cave devoted to specific activities.

The most remarkable discovery is that of purely artistic technologies. Ochre was widely used. Ochre is a form of iron ore that makes a fine paint. It can be used on human bodies or on walls. And those chunks of ochre themselves have been scribed with abstract designs. The cave has also yielded up a seventy-five-thousand-year-old snail-shell necklace -- the oldest ever found.

All this suggests something beyond just tool making. These uses of an esthetic, symbolic language would hardly have been possible without speech, as well. And speech was also something we'd thought was only thirty thousand years old.

It's neat to find our grandparents doing so well, so long ago. As I was reading about that old necklace, my wife showed me a similar one in a jewelry catalog. She said, "I guess we haven't come as far as we'd thought." Well, it's true. We really did not start being smart just the day before yesterday.

J. N. Wilford, Tiny African Shells May Be Oldest Beads. New York Times, Science Times, Tuesday, April 20, 2004, pg. D3.

I have not complicated this text by introducing the term Mesolithic. The Mesolithic Era was the relatively brief transition from the end of the ice age to the fully evolved agricultural Neolithic Era.

Nineteenth-century studies of skulls. From left to right: European, African, and ape. The theory was that the more vertical facial angle represented a more advanced race. Notice the African skull has been rotated clockwise to flatten the facial angle. Notice too, that the individuals have been selected to make the case. This kind of bias undoubtedly carried over, and slowed the realization that Africa is the probable cradle of modern hominids.

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H. Lienhard.

Excerpts from The Ascent of Man

By J. Bronowski - Little, Brown & Company/Boston & Toronto, 1973

Chapter 1: Lower than the Angels

Change in diet is important in a changing species over a time as long as fifty million years. The earliest creatures in the sequence leading to man were nimble-eyed and delicate-fingered insect and fruit eaters like the lemurs. Early apes and hominids, from Aegyptopithecus and Proconsul to the heavy Australopithecus, are thought to have spent their days rummaging mainly for vegetarian foods. But the light Australopithecus broke the ancient primate habit of vegetarianism.

The change from a vegetarian to an omnivorous diet, once made, persisted in Homo erectus, Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens. From the ancestral light Australopithecus onwards, the family of man ate some meat: small animals at first, larger ones later. Meat is a more concentrated protein than plant, and eating meat cuts down the bulk and the time spent in eating by two-thirds. The consequences for the evolution of man were far-reaching. He had more time free, and could spend it in more indirect ways, to get food from sources (such as large animals) which could not be tackled by hungry brute force. Evidently that helped to promote (by natural selection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone the gratification of desire.

But the most marked effect of an indirect strategy to enhance the food supply is, of course, to foster social action and communication. A slow creature like man can stalk, pursue and corner a large savannah animal that is adapted for flight only by co-operation. Hunting requires conscious planning and organization by means of language, as well as special weapons.

Hunting cannot support a growing population in one place; the limit for the savannah was not more than two people to the square mile. At that density, the total land surface of the earth could only support the present population of California, about twenty millions, and could not support the population of Great Britain. The choice for the hunters was brutal: starve or move. They moved away over prodigious distances. By a million years ago, they were in North Africa. By seven hundred thousand years ago, or even earlier, they were in Java. By four hundred thousand years ago, they had fanned out and marched north, to China in the east and Europe in the west. These incredible spreading migrations made man, from an early time, a widely dispersed species, even though his total numbers were quite small- perhaps one million.

What is even more forbidding is that man moved north just after the climate there was turning to ice. In the great cold the ice, as it were, grew out of the ground. The northern climate had been temperate for immemorial ages -literally for several hundred million years. Yet before Homo erectus settled in China and northern Europe, a sequence of three separate Ice Ages began. The first was past its fiercest when Peking man lived in caves, four hundred thousand years ago. It is no surprise to find fire used in those caves for the first time. The ice moved south and retreated three times, and the land changed each time. The icecaps at their largest contained so much of the earth's water that the level of the sea fell four hundred feet. After the second Ice Age, over two hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthal man with his big brain appears, and he became important in the last Ice Age.

The cultures of man that we recognize best began to form in the most recent Ice Age, within the last hundred or even fifty thousand years. That is when we find the elaborate tools that point to sophisticated forms of hunting: the spear-thrower, for example, and the baton that may be a straightening tool; the fully barbed harpoon; and, of course, the flint master tools that were needed to make the hunting tools.

It is clear that then, as now, inventions may be rare but they spread fast through a culture. For example, the Magdalenian hunters of southern Europe fifteen thousand years ago invented the harpoon. In the early period of the invention, the Magdalenian harpoons were unbarbed; then they were barbed with a single row of fish hooks; and at the end of the period, when the flowering of cave art took place, they were fully barbed with a double row of hooks. The Magdalenian hunters decorated their bone tools, and they can be pinned to precise periods in time and to exact geographical locations by the refinement of style which they carry. They are, in a true sense, fossils that recount the cultural evolution of man in an orderly progression.

Man survived the fierce test of the Ice Ages because he had the flexibility of mind to recognize inventions and to turn them into community property. Evidently the Ice Ages worked a profound change in the way man could live. They forced him to depend less on plants and more on animals. The rigors of hunting on the edge of the ice also changed the strategy of hunting. It became less attractive to stalk single animals, however large. The better alternative was to follow herds and not to lose them - to learn to anticipate and in the end to adopt their habits, including their wandering migrations. This is a peculiar adaptation - the transhumance mode of life on the move. It has some of the earlier qualities of hunting, because it is a pursuit; the place and the pace are set by the food animal. And it has some of the later qualities of herding, because the animal is tended and, as it were, stored as a mobile reservoir of food. …

Fire is the symbol of the hearth, and from the time Homo sapiens began to leave the mark of his hand thirty thousand years ago, the hearth was the cave. For at least a million years man, in some recognizable form, lived as a forager and a hunter. We have almost no monuments of that immense period of prehistory, so much longer than any history that we record. Only at the end of that time, on the edge of the European ice-sheet, we find in caves like Altamira (and elsewhere in Spain and southern France) the record of what dominated the mind of man the hunter. There we see what made his world and preoccupied him. The cave paintings, which are about twenty thousand years old, fix forever the universal base of his culture then, the hunter's knowledge of the animal that he lived by and stalked.

One begins by thinking it odd that an art as vivid as the cave paintings should be, comparatively, so young and so rare. Why are there not more monuments to man's visual imagination as there are to his invention? And yet when we reflect, what is remarkable is not that there are so few monuments, but that there are any at all. Man is a puny, slow, awkward, unarmed animal - he had to invent a pebble, a flint, a knife, a spear. But why to these scientific inventions, which were essential to his survival, did he from an early time add those arts that now astonish us: decorations with animal shapes? Why, above all, did he come to caves like this, live in them, and then make paintings of animals not where he lived but in places that were dark, secret, remote, hidden, inaccessible?

The obvious thing to say is that in these places the animal was magical. No doubt that is right; but magic is only a word, not an answer. In itself, magic is a word which explains nothing. It says that man believed he had power, but what power? We still want to know what the power was that the hunters believed they got from the paintings.

Here I can only give you my personal view. I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of anticipation: the forward-looking imagination. In these paintings the hunter was made familiar with dangers which he knew he had to face but to which he had not yet come. When the hunter was brought here into the secret dark and the light was suddenly flashed on the pictures, he saw the bison as he would have to face him, he saw the running deer, he saw the turning boar. And he felt alone with them as he would in the hunt. The moment of fear was made present to him; his spear-arm flexed with an experience which he would have and which he needed not to be afraid of. The painter had frozen the moment of fear, and the hunter entered it through the painting as if through an air-lock.

For us, the cave paintings re-create the hunter's way of life as a glimpse of history; we look through them into the past. But for the hunter, I suggest, they were a peep-hole into the future; he looked ahead. In either direction, the cave paintings act as a kind of telescope tube of the imagination: they direct the mind from what is seen to what can be inferred or conjectured. Indeed, this is so in the very action of painting; for all its superb observation, the flat picture only means something to the eye because the mind fills it out with roundness and movement, a reality by inference, which is not actually seen but is imagined.

Art and science are both uniquely human actions, outside the range of anything that an animal can do. And here we see that they derive from the same human faculty: the ability to visualize the future, to foresee what may happen and plan to anticipate it, and to represent it to ourselves in images that we project and move about inside our head, or in a square of light on the dark wall of a cave or a television screen.

We also look here through the telescope of the imagination; the imagination is a telescope in time, we are looking back at the experience of the past. The men who made these paintings, the men who were present, looked through that telescope forward. They looked along the ascent of man because what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.

The men who made the weapons and the men who made the paintings were doing the same thing - anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come from what is here. There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognize ourselves in the past on the steps to the present. All over these caves the print of the hand says: 'This is my mark. This is man.'

Chapter 2: The Harvest of the Seasons

The history of man is divided very unequally. First there is his biological evolution: all the steps that separate us from our ape ancestors. Those occupied some millions of years. And then there is his cultural history: the long swell of civilization that separates us from the few surviving hunting tribes of Africa, or from the food -gatherers of Australia. And all that second, cultural gap is in fact crowded into a few thousand years. It goes back only about twelve thousand years - something over ten thousand years, but much less than twenty thousand. From now on I shall only be talking about those last twelve thousand years which contain almost the whole ascent of man as we think of him now. Yet the difference between the two numbers, that is, between the biological time-scale and the cultural, is so great that I cannot leave it without a backward glance.

It took at least two million years for man to change from the little dark creature with the stone in his hand, Australopithecus in Central Africa, to the modern form, Homo sapiens. That is the pace of biological evolution - even though the biological evolution of man has been faster than that of any other animal. But it has taken much less than twenty thousand years for Homo sapiens to become the creatures that you and I aspire to be: artists and scientists, city builders and planners for the future, readers and travelers, eager explorers of natural fact and human emotion, immensely richer in experience and bolder in imagination than any of our ancestors. That is the pace of cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ratio of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.

Once it takes off: that is the crucial phrase. Why did the cultural changes that have made man master of the earth begin so recently? Twenty thousand years ago man in all parts of the world that he had reached was a forager and a hunter, whose most advanced technique was to attach himself to a moving herd as the Lapps still do. By ten thousand years ago that had changed, and he had begun in some places to domesticate some animals and to cultivate some plants; and that is the change from which civilization took off. It is extraordinary to think that only in the last twelve thousand years has civilization, as we understand it, taken off. There must have been an extraordinary explosion about 10,000 B.C. - and there was. But it was a quiet explosion. It was the end of the last Ice Age.

We can catch the look and, as it were, the smell of the change in some glacial landscape. Spring in Iceland replays itself every year, but it once played itself over Europe and Asia when the ice retreated. And man, who had come through incredible hardships, had wandered up from Africa over the last million years, had battled through the Ice Ages, suddenly found the ground flowering and the animals surrounding him, and moved into a different kind of life.

It is usually called the 'agricultural revolution'. But I think of it as something much wider, the biological revolution. There was intertwined in it the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals in a kind of leap-frog. And under this ran the crucial realization that man dominates his environment in its most important aspect, not physically but at the level of living things plants and animals. With that there comes an equally powerful social revolution. Because now it became possible - more than that, it became necessary - for man to settle. And this creature that had roamed and marched for a million years had to make the crucial decision: whether he would cease to be a nomad and become a villager. We have an anthropological record of the struggle of conscience of a people who make this decision: the record is the Bible, the Old Testament. I believe that civilization rests on that decision. As for people who never made it, there are few survivors. There are some nomad tribes who still go through these vast transhumance journeys from one grazing ground to another: the Bakhtiari in Persia, for example. And you have actually to travel with them and live with them to understand that civilization can never grow up on the move.

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