On Prehistory
One of the fundamental questions in teaching history is, Where does one start? Particularly in teaching World History, where does the story begin? We usually begin with Sumer and Egypt, because these are the oldest civilizations we know who had the means to write their own accounts. The study of history depends, first of all, upon written sources. Of course, the first histories tell us a lot about the time before writing, but you have to take those accounts with a large grain of salt. The ancients relay traditional lore which goes from the reliable to the legendary to the mythical. Still, these are the stories we have.
The study of “Prehistory” is the study of human society before the invention of writing. It is largely the domain of archaeology, genetics, botany, geology, etc. Of course, we use those tools to interpret events and learn about people after the invention of writing. And when we venture beyond the bounds of literate societies to study contemporary pre-literate societies, we are heavily reliant on archaeology. We can make a story out of human activity before written sources; we simply lack names (of persons and of peoples), firm dates (usually), and contemporary narratives.
Prehistory also plays an ideological role in the understanding of our present circumstances. Political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Marx have definite views of primitive humanity and how our society is derived from Man in a State of Nature. We have to be careful not to inject our ideological preferences onto prehistoric people in order to win points in current debate; nevertheless, the origins of many fundamental human institutions are beyond the scope of our most ancient written sources. Many things were just taken for granted as “the way things are” by the first people to write about themselves. Many other things have their origins explained in myth and legend. What science can tell us about how people lived and developed can inform our study of society in the here and now, but we have to be careful in our handling of what we think we know.
In any case, if I were writing a textbook on World History, or teaching a course on it, I would include a unit on Prehistory. This essay explores what I think are the fundamental facts we need to understand from the time before people could write about themselves.
a. The oldest continuous culture on earth belongs to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. They have been where they are now for some 40,000 years.
b. There was a time when there was more than one variety of human being around. We can only conjecture about the relations between Sapiens and Neanderthals – not to mention the mysterious Denisovans – but the fact that the Neanderthals and Denisovans have passed on some of their genes to modern humans tells us that whether contact between groups was always friendly (it probably was not), different sorts of humans mated with each other, and therefore saw each other as “people.”
c. It is worth noting that there is greater genetic diversity among sub-Saharan African peoples than among all the rest of the people of the world (which is one of the ways we can tell that Africa is humanity’s starting point). At the same time, the Peopling of the World is not only about people moving north and east out of the Horn of Africa; it is also about people moving south into the rest of Africa.
a. Prehistoric people made art – beautiful art. They expressed themselves in pictorial form, and later in carving and modeling figures. They made music. We can surmise that they told stories. We can look at their artwork and we can dig up some of their musical instruments, but of course their stories are beyond our recall.
b. Looking at their art, we suspect that some of it had a magical or religious use. We find other things that show us ritual activity. We find that even Neanderthals buried their dead, and the preparation of the bodies of the deceased show some kind of ritual (particularly in the use of red ochre), and in at least one famous case, grieving (in the deposition of flowers in the grave). Care of the dead varied, of course, and burial was not universal. But the point to be made is that religion is a natural part of human society and answers certain fundamental needs.
c. We find that from an early time, people prepared their food. Cooking is more than adding fire to organic material. The fact that human beings peel fruit, shell nuts, cut away parts of meat and plants that are less easily chewed or digested is unique. It concentrates food value, which had a profound effect on human development. The pattern in the Hunter-Gatherer societies we know is mostly that men hunt (in a group for the whole community), while women gather (each woman and her children for their own family). From this come several interesting consequences.
d. One of the great leaps forward from the Stone Age is the domestication of the dog, which took place long, long before the domestication of other animals. This is because the dog, which is descended from an extinct species of gray wolf and was first domesticated in Central Asia some 19,000 years ago, was of immediate benefit in hunting with the tribe, as well as guarding the home. Indeed, one could argue that Dog and Man domesticated each other, and human beings learned as much from dogs as dogs learned from them.
a. The new diet of the First Farmers changed them in various ways. One of those ways is the origin of pale skin, which is not a response to the lack of sunlight, but to a diet low in Vitamin D. The first “white(-ish)” people were not Northern Europeans, but Middle Eastern First Farmers, some of whom had a genetic mutation that proved beneficial to them in giving them the ability to manufacture Vitamin D more efficiently from sunlight.
b. Among the first foods developed were bread and beer. It was once thought that bread was the first discovery, with beer as a byproduct of baking. It is now thought that people probably first discovered beer naturally from cooking wild grains. This spurred the domestication of grain. Making bread was a means of using the dregs of beer (which in its early form was more like a thin gruel than the clear liquid we drink) in a productive way. By mixing the fermented dregs in a dough, the dough was raised before baking and made tastier to eat. This explanation, while it seems to hold good for the ancient Near East, does not preclude other societies doing it the other way round, such as Central America with its domestication of maize.
c. Agriculture led to the development of irrigation techniques, which required cooperation on a scale never seen before. Towns led to the specialization of crafts. More wealth – and the need to protect that wealth (or the desire to steal it) also led to the consolidation of the first kingdoms, which led to the expansion of war, which is always a push to the development of technology.
a. This is the age of kings and heroes. The Bronze Age is the age of the Mycenean Greeks and the Trojan War, the age of the Hittites vs. the Egyptians, the age of Sumer and Akkad, the age of Abraham and the Patriarchs.
b. It is the dawn of Writing. So we get the first accounts and the first names. We get to talk about people and events in more than an overall sort of way. We are now able to start talking about History, but not everybody can be dealt with in this way.
c. Beyond the areas where there was writing, there are other peoples that still have to be studied as prehistoric; for instance, you have the Proto-Indo-Europeans beginning to expand. These are the people who domesticated the horse and developed the chariot. They spread their language and its successor dialects from the Atlantic to Ceylon to the western fringes of China.
d. Bronze Age Europe and the Middle East formed a vast, interconnected world, bound together by trade in tin, copper, amber, and other products. It was also an age of migrations and exchange of ideas. The megalithic structures built on the Atlantic coast from North Africa to Scandinavia seem to be connected with the spread of certain religious ideas.
e. In addition to talking about Sumer, Akkad, and the Semites; Egypt and the Hittites; Minoans and Myceneans; and the Indo-Europeans, we see China developing its first great civilization and casting its first bronzes, the best of which became imperial heirlooms for many hundreds of years thereafter. We also can look into the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley.
f. The Bronze Age came to a point of Collapse c. 1177 BC. The Sea Peoples either helped cause it or were displaced by it. In any case, when the dust clears, we are in a new world. People are beginning to work iron. As the new Iron Age got under way, the successor civilizations rediscovered writing and wrote down their accounts of their own past in the foundational histories and epics we still study today. Along about the Eighth Century BC, Homer and Hesiod write of the Trojan War and the Age of Heroes. Israel, faced with the pressure of Babylon and Egypt, refer back to their own founding and to their covenant with God. Rome is founded. Written sources of ever greater reliability proliferate and it gets easier to write History.
The study of “Prehistory” is the study of human society before the invention of writing. It is largely the domain of archaeology, genetics, botany, geology, etc. Of course, we use those tools to interpret events and learn about people after the invention of writing. And when we venture beyond the bounds of literate societies to study contemporary pre-literate societies, we are heavily reliant on archaeology. We can make a story out of human activity before written sources; we simply lack names (of persons and of peoples), firm dates (usually), and contemporary narratives.
Prehistory also plays an ideological role in the understanding of our present circumstances. Political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Marx have definite views of primitive humanity and how our society is derived from Man in a State of Nature. We have to be careful not to inject our ideological preferences onto prehistoric people in order to win points in current debate; nevertheless, the origins of many fundamental human institutions are beyond the scope of our most ancient written sources. Many things were just taken for granted as “the way things are” by the first people to write about themselves. Many other things have their origins explained in myth and legend. What science can tell us about how people lived and developed can inform our study of society in the here and now, but we have to be careful in our handling of what we think we know.
In any case, if I were writing a textbook on World History, or teaching a course on it, I would include a unit on Prehistory. This essay explores what I think are the fundamental facts we need to understand from the time before people could write about themselves.
1. The Peopling of the WorldI don’t think that a history – or a prehistory, even – can make much of the science of human origins. That humanity begins in Africa is the consensus of all biologists. At some point, human beings -- Neanderthals first, then Sapiens – left Africa and began expanding around the world. Given the ice sheets expanding and receding across Eurasia at this time, humans’ expansion follows the coastal areas: from the Middle East around the Mediterranean for Neanderthals, from the Middle East to south Asia to east Asia to Oceania for Sapiens. Finally, northeast Asian peoples crossed into North America and made their way south to fill the habitable parts of the globe. Certain points should be made here.
a. The oldest continuous culture on earth belongs to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. They have been where they are now for some 40,000 years.
b. There was a time when there was more than one variety of human being around. We can only conjecture about the relations between Sapiens and Neanderthals – not to mention the mysterious Denisovans – but the fact that the Neanderthals and Denisovans have passed on some of their genes to modern humans tells us that whether contact between groups was always friendly (it probably was not), different sorts of humans mated with each other, and therefore saw each other as “people.”
c. It is worth noting that there is greater genetic diversity among sub-Saharan African peoples than among all the rest of the people of the world (which is one of the ways we can tell that Africa is humanity’s starting point). At the same time, the Peopling of the World is not only about people moving north and east out of the Horn of Africa; it is also about people moving south into the rest of Africa.
2. Stone Age Material CultureThe things that people made tell us a lot about the lives they lived. Stone is more than just rocks; we have to talk about flint and obsidian for tool-making. Likewise, we can see people using bone for tools, for decoration, for building material. Wood is used for construction of dwellings and for weapons, as well as fuel for fire, the mastery of which is a major step forward. Animal products such as fur, leather, sinew are used. Grasses provide fiber. Clothing is invented. At some point, pottery begins to be made. Prehistoric people were solving the same problems with these materials that we solve with things made of plastic and metal. They were, in their own terms, modern: they had all the latest improvements.
3. The Hunter-Gatherer LifeBoth from our study of the remains of prehistoric sites and from our study of hunter-gatherer societies that survived into modern times, we can understand a lot about the origins of human society. Certain institutions date from this time and are so ingrained into humanity that all subsequent attempts to change people through philosophy or law have failed. We are still now, at bottom, the people we were then.
a. Prehistoric people made art – beautiful art. They expressed themselves in pictorial form, and later in carving and modeling figures. They made music. We can surmise that they told stories. We can look at their artwork and we can dig up some of their musical instruments, but of course their stories are beyond our recall.
b. Looking at their art, we suspect that some of it had a magical or religious use. We find other things that show us ritual activity. We find that even Neanderthals buried their dead, and the preparation of the bodies of the deceased show some kind of ritual (particularly in the use of red ochre), and in at least one famous case, grieving (in the deposition of flowers in the grave). Care of the dead varied, of course, and burial was not universal. But the point to be made is that religion is a natural part of human society and answers certain fundamental needs.
c. We find that from an early time, people prepared their food. Cooking is more than adding fire to organic material. The fact that human beings peel fruit, shell nuts, cut away parts of meat and plants that are less easily chewed or digested is unique. It concentrates food value, which had a profound effect on human development. The pattern in the Hunter-Gatherer societies we know is mostly that men hunt (in a group for the whole community), while women gather (each woman and her children for their own family). From this come several interesting consequences.
The beginning of Private Property is shown in that each woman gathers only for her own family. Why don’t others steal from her, since they outnumber her (chimps would do this)? Because each woman has a husband out hunting, and the men all have weapons. Which shows us that Marriage begins as a bonded pair, male and female, raising children together. The possibility of having to gather the men to resolve disputes which could disrupt, and therefore endanger, the community shows the first shadow of Government – the idea that the whole community has to solve some problems together, while all other problems are left to the individual or family.
d. One of the great leaps forward from the Stone Age is the domestication of the dog, which took place long, long before the domestication of other animals. This is because the dog, which is descended from an extinct species of gray wolf and was first domesticated in Central Asia some 19,000 years ago, was of immediate benefit in hunting with the tribe, as well as guarding the home. Indeed, one could argue that Dog and Man domesticated each other, and human beings learned as much from dogs as dogs learned from them.
4. The Neolithic Revolution.Beginning about 11,000 BC, human beings began to domesticate the first crops and farm animals. Wheat, barley, flax, sheep and goats, etc. changed our way of life profoundly. People built towns in order to live by and tend their crops, which is the meaning of “civilization.” Meanwhile, others kept herds and lived in tents in order to better care for them. The two groups – the town dwellers and the pastoralists – have looked askance at each other ever since, but both are a result of the Neolithic Revolution. People began to spin yarn and make cloth. Sun-baked bricks were invented as a building material.
a. The new diet of the First Farmers changed them in various ways. One of those ways is the origin of pale skin, which is not a response to the lack of sunlight, but to a diet low in Vitamin D. The first “white(-ish)” people were not Northern Europeans, but Middle Eastern First Farmers, some of whom had a genetic mutation that proved beneficial to them in giving them the ability to manufacture Vitamin D more efficiently from sunlight.
b. Among the first foods developed were bread and beer. It was once thought that bread was the first discovery, with beer as a byproduct of baking. It is now thought that people probably first discovered beer naturally from cooking wild grains. This spurred the domestication of grain. Making bread was a means of using the dregs of beer (which in its early form was more like a thin gruel than the clear liquid we drink) in a productive way. By mixing the fermented dregs in a dough, the dough was raised before baking and made tastier to eat. This explanation, while it seems to hold good for the ancient Near East, does not preclude other societies doing it the other way round, such as Central America with its domestication of maize.
c. Agriculture led to the development of irrigation techniques, which required cooperation on a scale never seen before. Towns led to the specialization of crafts. More wealth – and the need to protect that wealth (or the desire to steal it) also led to the consolidation of the first kingdoms, which led to the expansion of war, which is always a push to the development of technology.
5. The Discovery of Metal.First copper, then bronze were discovered. Mining and smithing became major crafts. The Stone Age gave way in area after area to the Age of Bronze. When we get to the Bronze Age, we can begin to talk about lots of things.
a. This is the age of kings and heroes. The Bronze Age is the age of the Mycenean Greeks and the Trojan War, the age of the Hittites vs. the Egyptians, the age of Sumer and Akkad, the age of Abraham and the Patriarchs.
b. It is the dawn of Writing. So we get the first accounts and the first names. We get to talk about people and events in more than an overall sort of way. We are now able to start talking about History, but not everybody can be dealt with in this way.
c. Beyond the areas where there was writing, there are other peoples that still have to be studied as prehistoric; for instance, you have the Proto-Indo-Europeans beginning to expand. These are the people who domesticated the horse and developed the chariot. They spread their language and its successor dialects from the Atlantic to Ceylon to the western fringes of China.
d. Bronze Age Europe and the Middle East formed a vast, interconnected world, bound together by trade in tin, copper, amber, and other products. It was also an age of migrations and exchange of ideas. The megalithic structures built on the Atlantic coast from North Africa to Scandinavia seem to be connected with the spread of certain religious ideas.
e. In addition to talking about Sumer, Akkad, and the Semites; Egypt and the Hittites; Minoans and Myceneans; and the Indo-Europeans, we see China developing its first great civilization and casting its first bronzes, the best of which became imperial heirlooms for many hundreds of years thereafter. We also can look into the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley.
f. The Bronze Age came to a point of Collapse c. 1177 BC. The Sea Peoples either helped cause it or were displaced by it. In any case, when the dust clears, we are in a new world. People are beginning to work iron. As the new Iron Age got under way, the successor civilizations rediscovered writing and wrote down their accounts of their own past in the foundational histories and epics we still study today. Along about the Eighth Century BC, Homer and Hesiod write of the Trojan War and the Age of Heroes. Israel, faced with the pressure of Babylon and Egypt, refer back to their own founding and to their covenant with God. Rome is founded. Written sources of ever greater reliability proliferate and it gets easier to write History.