HIS 101

1.  History and Human Beginnings

II  Periods of History

III:  Evolution of Human Beings

Our solar system is about 4.6 billion years old.

The first living things on Earth are thought to be single cell prokaryotes. The oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old.  Bacteria and Archaea are the oldest self-replicating organisms and may have developed over 4 billion years ago.  Just what constitutes life and precisely when and where it originated are still debated questions.  But genetically based life forms evolved to form multi-cellular organisms.

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale:  A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004) provides an interesting introduction to human evolution.  Dawkins begins with modern humans and traces our evolution all the way back to the beginnings of life.  Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist.  This book is written from a scientific perspective and provided valid scientific information.   But it should also be noted that Dawkins is a convinced atheist and has written books expounding that point of view.

Whatever one's views on religion, the biological evolution of all animals and plants, including human beings, is no longer subject to debate.

Dawkins traces human evolution backwards through 39 stages or rendezvous points.  Rendezvous 39 is with the Eubacteria.   Rendezvous 1 through 10 are outlined below.  Rendezvous 10 is with the Rodents and Rabbits.

Rodents and Rabbitkind.  75 million years ago.  Rendezvous 10.

Cologos and Tree Shrews.  70 million years ago.  Rendezvous 9.

K/T Boundary 65 million years ago.  End of the age of dinosaurs and beginning of the age of mammals

Lemurs and bushbabies.  63 million years. Rendezvous 8.

Tarsiers.  58 million years ago. Rendezvous 7.

New World Moneys.  40 Million years ago. Rendezvous 6.

Old World Monkeys in Africa.  25 million years ago. Rendezvous 5.

Gibbons split 18 million years ago. Rendezvous 4.

Orang utans split from the African Great Apes about 14 million years ago.  Rendezvous 3.

Gorillas and chimpanzees/humans separated about 7 million years ago.  Gorillas are entirely vegetarian. Rendezvous 2.

According to molecular evidence, the split between chimpanzees and human ancestors took place about 6 million years ago.  It could have been between 5 and 7 million years ago. Rendezvous 1.

About 2 million years ago, after their separation from us, chimpanzees split between the common chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo.

Human Evolution

Australopithecines come in a variety of subspecies.  The oldest fossils of these Ape men are 4.4 million years old.  These fossils are intermediate to chimpanzees.  There is evidence that these creatures walked upright.  Upright posture is one of the key differences between us and the Great African Apes.

Homo habilis.   Walk upright.  Brain size of 750 cc.

Homo erectus also called homo ergaster.  1.8 million years ago to 250,000 years ago.  Used fire.  Made stone tools.  Peking Man and Java Man belong to the category of homo erectus.

Archaic humans.  900,000 to 28,000 years ago

Neanderthal Man.  Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.  Dies out 28,000 years ago.  Neanderthal Man is not a direct ancestor of modern humans.

Modern humans.  Homo sapiens sapiens ~160,000 to now

IV:  Paleolithic

The Paleolithic refers to the Old Stone Age.  This period extends from the first evidence of tool usage by human creatures almost 2,000,000 years ago till the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago.  Human creatures have been using tools for a long time.  Several human species have evolved.  Anatomically modern humans have existed for only 200,000 years.  Thus the Paleolithic extends back further than the existence of our species.

All humans living today belong to our species:  home sapiens sapiens.  But it is our species, which moved to the next stages of cultural evolution:  the development of agriculture and, later, the development of civilizations..

Historians writing about the Paleolithic, before writing systems were invented during the age of civilizations), depend on human fossil remains and various human artifacts.  Tools made of stone survived.  Human history has been classified in several ways:  One is by the tool use.  Old Stone Age (Paleolithic), New Stone Age (Neolithic), Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

During the Paleolithic, humans lived as food gatherers, hunters, and scavengers.  The Hunter-Gatherer Way of Life characterized all human societies.  But at the end of the last Ice Age, modern humans began to domesticate plants and animals.  This created the Agricultural Revolution and a sedentary village way of life.

V:  Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution

The Neolithic refers to the New Stone Age.  More complex stone tools, some of them polished, were developed at the end of the last Ice Age by the peoples of Western Asia about 12,000 years ago.  These tools are also associated with the domestication of plants and animals.  The Neolithic goes hand in hand with the Agricultural Revolution.  Hunter-Gatherer Societies in Western Asia (modern day Iran) were the first people to domesticate wild grasses and animals to begin an agricultural way of life.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies (New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, 1999) asks the question why Western Civilization came to dominate the world.  Why did the Europeans colonize the New World and destroy the Inca and Aztec Empires?  Why not the reverse?

His answers are rooted in geography and the agricultural revolution that began in Southwest Asia about 8,500 B.C.E.

VI.  Characteristics of Civilization

Culture realms of the world today