The Super Summary of World History (6 page)

Most textbooks explain that the paintings were spiritual in purpose, and played a vital part in tribal customs; however,
without
writing
we
do
not
know
why
these paintings came to be, and explanations telling us why are speculation.
[5]
Thus, student of history, beware of those telling you what no one can possibly know.

The history of the human race is short in comparison to its prehistory. If we start with
Homo
erectus
there are well over one million years in prehistory, and about five thousand years for history. In addition, the world’s most important inventions and discoveries take place in prehistory. The invention of agriculture, animal husbandry, the wheel, the discovery of how to make and use fire, how to mine and refine metals, the invention of language, and the invention of writing all take place in prehistory. It was in the prehistoric era that humans began burying their dead, establishing early cities, and developing new ways of living together. Every foundational theme underlying the human race began in prehistory.

During the prehistoric era humans must have engaged in mass migrations that eventually led to
Homo
sapiens
covering the globe by about 9,000 BC. Anthropologist theorize that modern humans originally migrated out of Africa into the Middle East and Europe, thereafter into Russia, India, China, Indochina, the Pacific Ocean area, including Australia, and finally across the Bering Sea to North and then South America
[6]
. Great disagreements exist over the timing of the crossing to North America with the old theories claiming a 10,000 BC crossing, but newer theories putting the migration at 16,000 BC or earlier. No one is certain what happened because time covers up a lot of evidence; thus, the activities and movements of the earliest humans are largely unknown. Another set of facts lost to time is how humans developed into three races. As early humans are so few it seems they had to start as one race, separating out thereafter; however, all our explorations have failed to find a widely accepted explanation for racial differences in humans.

Figure 2 Cave Painting 30,000 BC, Valtorta Cave

There are certain fundamental processes that identify the human race. Wherever
Homo
sapiens
have wandered we find important fundamental traits—here is a list of 10 important ones:

Ten
Human
Traits

1.    Art—
Homo
sapiens
constantly create beautiful things. Rock carvings and paintings, statuettes, antler carvings, flutes, bead necklaces, and rope adornments of all kinds. This is not an exhaustive list, but art is a common commodity with modern humans. Not so with proto humans as we find almost no art from their era, and the few samples we do find are not sophisticated.

2.    Buildings—Humans like to construct shelters. Some of the most impressive structures were the mammoth bone houses put together by early hunters. As time went forward the buildings became more elaborate. Some proto-humans managed to construct long houses and huts, but only modern humans construct monuments like the Mayan pyramids in Meso-America or the skyscrapers of Chicago.

3.    Machines—mankind has moved forward using machines. Some machines are very simple like the bow and other extremely complex like a moon rocket, but only machines allowed people to advance from the caves to the stars. The invention and use of ever more impressive machines is
the
hallmark of human kind. There are
six
basic
machines
: the wheel and axial, the lever, inclined plane, wedge, pulley, and screw. From these seemingly easy ideas men reached the moon and sent machines beyond our solar system.

4.    Governments—wherever humans go, at least since the advent of writing, we find governance. For good or evil people organize. Groups form and leaders emerge. Then the leaders assume the task of making sure the group prospers. Once government is in place it never goes away, unless by annihilation through disease, disaster, or enemy action—after which it soon returns.

5.    Communication—people not only organize they communicate with one another in various ways. The spoken word for communication purposes (language) starts about 250,000 BC. The fact that humans organized into groups leads to speculation that language was required; however, it is nearly impossible to know when true language use started. What is clear is that the development of language with its ability to transfer exacting ideas between people was a key turning point in human development (Hey, that’s my chicken!). Homo sapiens would have problems moving beyond the caves without language because ideas would remain locked away in the individual’s head. Sharing knowledge and ideas moves us forward.

6.    Social Organizations—before written history people grouped themselves together by kinship, family and tribe, at least as far as anyone can tell from ancient indications of kinship. The earliest humans and proto humans buried their dead, often in cemeteries and sometimes placing more than one individual into a grave. This might indicate kinship. After writing developed we see that clans, tribes, and kin are the basic organizational units of society. From what we can tell, this has been true for 50,000 years or more.

7.    Warfare—From the start killing other humans was common. Early on the fights were most likely small, but as soon as large civilizations came about large wars became common. The more organized the civilization the larger the wars.

8.    Religion—is a constant with
Homo
sapiens
. Even proto humans buried their dead with what appears to be personal items. As soon as writing begins we read references to gods. Strangely, from many early human societies we find that the gods demand blood sacrifice. In some cases the preferred blood was human. Even in Meso-America, far away in time and distance from Europe and Mesopotamia, blood was necessary to appease the gods. Why this is part of early religion remains a mystery.

9.    Desire for more—this is another constant with
Homo
sapiens
. Somehow, what is there is never enough. Humans were always going forward to the next horizon both physically and mentally. Of course, not all fit into this category, but it is a most common human trait. Only people seem to have this kind of desire. Ants and bees build and they search for other locations for their habitation; however, they simply reproduce what has gone before. Humans want to make what has gone before obsolete, just like the computer you bought yesterday.

10.    Time—it seems humans have always recognized the concept of time. Early monuments tract the sun and calendars are early inventions of many civilizations. The knowledge that time moves, things change, and people die has a profound effect on human thinking, and human thinking is the key stuff of history.

Neolithic
Revolution—Agriculture 8,500
BC

After modern humans established themselves the world over they were still hunters and gatherers. In Europe during the Neolithic Age, bands of people were settling into at least semi-permanent dwellings, using bones and hides of the woolly mammoth to cover living areas that contained fire pits and storage. Graveyards start appearing near the ancient villages. In some burials all the heads are facing in the same direction, beads often cover the body, and the corpse often had personal items such as hairbrushes, shoes, bows, spears and the like, buried with it.

In Europe farming was slow to develop, however, in the warmer regions of the world a new farming lifestyle was starting about 8,000 BC on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the Middle East, the Nile River in Egypt, and the Indus River on the Indian subcontinent. People began founding permanent living places with cultivated crops grown in the rich soils of these river valleys, and they acquired herd animals for meat, hides and milk. The crops might have been growing wild in these areas and humans developed the idea of planting the seeds of these wild plants so they could control their growth. By planting the seeds at a certain time of year they would all come to ripeness at the same time thereby allowing the people to harvest them all at once, and giving the farmers a great surplus of food. By somehow storing the extra grain (maybe in clay pots) they could survive the winter (non-growing) season. With goats or cattle for milk, meat, and hides the stationary folks could build a nice life without the necessity of following the herds as a hunter-gatherer society must. By abandoning the nomadic life people could build permanent structures to live in, accumulate more goods, and have a lot more to eat. By constructing irrigation systems the sedentary types could increase their crop yields and the amount of land under cultivation. Their biggest problems may have involved how to store the surplus so it would not spoil. Much of this is speculation because it all happened in prehistory; accordingly, we cannot know the true sequence of events. What we do know is these permanent communities grew in size to become the first cities.

Around 8,500 BC at the walled city of
Jericho
, in the Jordan Valley of modern day Israel, domesticated cereals made their appearance. Jericho was a 10 acre walled citadel where we find the first evidence of settled farming based on domesticated corps.

The
most
important
event
in
the
existence
of
humanity
was
the
invention
of
agriculture
and
animal
husbandry,
which
started
about
8,500
BC.
I
cannot
emphasize
this
enough
.
Food
was
and
is
the
underpinning
of
every
human
activity.
Western society is currently awash in food, and we do not think of it as the foundation for all we see around us. The discovery of agriculture made an abundance of food possible. Before farming, people in hunter-gatherer groups spent their time hunting or preparing to hunt. Meat is hard to store for long periods without refrigeration (or even with it), thus, tribes had to follow the herds if one wanted to stay near the grocery store, so to speak.

With agriculture and animal husbandry creating a food surplus people could sit out harsh times and survive. A surplus of food allowed the
specialization
of
work,
as some people could do work unrelated to hunting or farming. Now the person who excelled at making shoes could do that and the farmer could use his surplus to purchase the shoes. The net result was the farmer had food and very good shoes, and the shoemaker had food, very good shoes, and could spend his time doing what he did best. Others could use their time to trade with far away peoples who had resources, such as metal, the locals did not have.
Refining
metal
ore
into copper, bronze, or iron was a time-consuming task and required a lot of skill. People busy hunting all day would have problems mining the ore and refining it, not to mention the movement from area to area would prevent the investment in tools or skills needed to mine and refine the ore. Once people acquired permanent homes a few people could invest their time in
mining
and developing the skills to make copper or bronze objects because the metal items would sell at a high price, thus giving the metalworker a good return on his time and resource investment. In fact, the development of metallurgy was vital to the advance of stationary civilizations. The foundations of a modern specialized economy started prior to written history with the growth of cities and specialization of work.

The growing towns soon had permanent structures, specialists in many crafts, and built-in incentives to invent new ways of working and living. One of the new ideas involved
writing
, and that was the start of history because people began keeping track of what was going on around them. People may have tried putting things in writing as far back as 6,000 BC, but the real development took place in the Middle East in the Euphrates River area about
3,500
BC
in
Sumer
. It was a big step toward the modern world.