Homidae, a family that includes Humans, is split by Homidae and Poridae then to Pongo, which are Orangutans.
Then the Homidae is also split into Homindae and Gorillini, and then Homindae split again into the genus Homo and the genus Pan, the pan would be Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and Homo is Latin for a human being.
The creatures that would one day become Humans are "Arboral simians", mostly quadrupeds (walk on four legs), and mainly ate fruit, and that we mainly lived in trees.
Well due to aridity (dry) or Savanah hypothesis. That says the number of trees diminished, and after that humans left the trees and began to walk on two legs, a good example is "Australopithecus afarensis" which are southern Ethiopia apes.
As humans, we want to know what happened to the older humans so we did some digging and found three human skulls, the first skull was named: "Paranthropus aethiopicus", which translates to: "human near Ethiopia", which is 2.5 million years old.
Now this skull is interesting because it has a ridge on top of the skull, sorta like a bony dorsal fin, well since it had that "dorsal fin" named the sagittal crest. Which tells us that it is a "Temporalis" muscle,
Next was Homo Erectus, which was found to be around 2 million to 700k years old.
The last is Homo sapiens, which are human skulls, and the oldest ones current humans have found are around 130k years old.
Palaeolithic societies were largely dependent on foraging and hunting.
The hominid species evolved through natural selection over millions of years.
And groups of hunters and gatherers often moved around for food before humans discovered agriculture.
Palaeolithic literally means "Old stone", but mainly this refers to the years when humans relied on hunting, gathering and foraging for food sources.
And since we haven't discovered agriculture yet, we had to worry about overfishing in rivers and lakes out of fear of depleting an important food source, or a draught that could destroy vital plants for consumption to feed the communities.
Thus we learned to do gathering and hunting in rotations, while some days we do some hunting, other days we do gathering, this ensured that we did not run out of natural resources for our communities.
Then around 11,000 years ago, humans started migrating and exploring the world they started making tools and methods to support them in their new environments.
Most studies on early humans use biology and natural selection, however, it is also important to also focus on the social-cultural side of human evolution.
For example, most people believe that Neanderthal were worrying about what their next meal would be, it could not be further from the truth, as Neanderthal in Europe and Southwest Asia had religious beliefs and funerals.
A burial site in Shanidar Cave in modern-day north-eastern Iraq suggests that a Neanderthal family covered their dead bodies with flowers, which implies a belief in something beyond death and a sense of spirituality.
Homo-sapiens did not change much over the last 120,000 years but a large amount of cultural evolution.
As humans started living in groups and in villages, our brains started to evolve to supplement our social skills. For the larger brains, our skulls started growing larger to compensate for our increasing brain size and giving birth was starting to become a problem, giving birth was getting more difficult due to larger skulls, longer gestation periods, and longer periods of infant dependency, for the mothers had to rely more on the village around them to assist them in giving which in turn assisted in the cultural evolution of humans.
Then our brains started being creative, as we started using "creativity" for cultural spiritual and art purposes, burial rituals.
Thus the increase in births, we started having more populous and dense human communities, when these communities increased is when conflict and competition for areas, food and land.
These groups are not as big as cities are now, but were large enough that you could, have some manual labour groups, security and able to reproduce outside your own group.
Anthropologists were able to get to these conclusions about these peloPaleolithic people by extrapolating from the experiences of modern hunter-gatherer communities, such as the Khoisan of the African Kalahari Desert.
In a tribe, there would be bands of hunter-gatherers comprised of 20-25 people and around 20 bands make a tribe.
To make enough food for a community or tribe, most Anthropologists say that for those who lived in the time between 150,000 to 12,000 years ago, most tribes used around 70 miles of unfertile land with minor resources.
Or 7 miles of fertile land to meet the needs of the community.
Before the advent of agriculture Paleolithic humans had little control over the environment they inhabited, and most came to an agreement with other tribes and settlements mainly around bodies of water.
And the agreement of doing certain jobs, as most of the women did the cleaning, gathering and childcare. While the men took care of the hunting.
But this is not fully set in stone,
as some communities in Eurasia shared the work between genders equally.
These humans made technologies such as tools and weapons to deal with the environments around them. Using stones and natural fibres,
art, language and spiritual life during these ages were very important to most.
Tools used by Paleolithic humans were classified by Anthropologists as:
Lower Paleolithic, Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (the New Stone Age).
Palaeolithic believed that Paleolithic humans used a system to divide work labour and resources. The stone tools used were a sign of culture and technological advancement while the cave drawings depicted group hunting.
Language was a vital part of human advancement as without the advent of language, there would be very little settlements, trade, and socialized without the creation Language.
Cave paintings from 35,000 years ago show that they were heavily invested in sharing knowledge and expressing emotions.
But most old cave paintings are too faded to see by today's humans.
But later cave paintings are still around and are often tourist attractions to visitors.
Tools were mainly made by chipping down stones such as flint, for example.
You might use the flint as a scraping tool to remove the hide of an animal, or to kill one, to dig as a shovel.
And most of the food they ate were: grains, meats, foraged vegetables, and fruits.
Most societies were about 20-50 people living in tight-knit communities, like a neighbourhood. When gathering food, while hunting and gathering you are subjected to what the land can provide for you. As in not doing agriculture or domestication of animals, which happened at a later time. Hunting and gathering are highly time innocent compared to modern farming and food collecting. So you were really reliant on the plants to provide enough for your group of 20-50 people.
Resources were limited as they did not know how to farm grains to feed themselves. So they often migrated distances to search for food sources. So they were nomads, nomads are people living off the land and having no permanent home, unlike these days where you purchase a home and stay in it permanently until you move. These people moved around a lot due to the scarcity of food in their areas forcing them to relocate.
They would not have permanent homes as they would build shelters like primitive huts, and tents and take shelter in caves.
They started making Micro-liths, which are small stones made for more specific tools, around 25-30,000 years ago. They started making throwable spears, bows and arrows, making hunting less dangerous.
Then 16,000 years ago wild grains were harvested, not human-grown gain but naturally found grain, and tools like stone sickles on grain.
To get the grains out of its husk, you would use a mortar and pestle, which is used to crush objects, normally a rock in the shape of a bowl and a heavier stone to crush grain inside the rock bowl.
The husks are inedible and the things inside the husks are named endosperm.
Also, Humans back then thought of planting the grain nearer to where they lived.
And that started their creation of cities rather than groups.
When light is going through the air, or through a glass prism, and when the light hits the prism at the correct angle, the path of the light gets bent, and the different frequencies will turn into different colours of light as it will refract into multiple colours.
No comments:
Post a Comment