¦ In light of scientific advances in our understanding of human origins, what have we learned about our relationship to the earth and other living species?
¦ How did the physical and mental abilities that humans gradually evolved enable them to adapt their way of life to new environments during the Great Ice Age?
¦ After nearly 2 million years of physical and cultural development, how did human communities in different parts of the world learn to manipulate nature?
¦ What cultural achievements characterized life in the Neolithic period?
Paintings and engravings on stone created tens of thousands of years ago by early humans have been found on every continent. Someone in Central Africa carved this image of cattle around 5000 B. c.E., when the Sahara was not a desert but a verdant savanna supporting numerous species of wildlife. Why the image was carved and what significance it originally held will likely remain a mystery, but for us it is a beautiful work of art that reveals much about our human ancestry.
Long before the invention of writing, societies told themselves stories about how human beings and the natural world were created. Some, like the Yoruba (yoh-roo-bah) people of West Africa, related that the first humans came down from the sky; others, like the Hopi
Of Southwest North America, related that they emerged out of a hole in the earth. Although such creation myths typically explain how a people's way of life, social divisions, and cultural system arose, historical accuracy in the modern sense was not their primary purpose. As with the story of Adam and Eve in the Hebrew Bible, their goal was to define the moral principles that people thought should govern their dealings with the supernatural world, with each other, and with the rest of nature.
In the nineteenth century evidence began to accumulate that human beings had quite different origins. Natural scientists were finding remains of early humans who resembled apes. Other discoveries suggested that the familiar ways of life based on farming and herding did not arise within a generation or two of creation, as many myths suggested, but tens of thousands of years after humans first appeared. This evidence provides insights into human identity that are as meaningful as those propounded by the creation myths.
World History
