The first human beings emerged over 3 million years ago, probably in Africa. Some eventually devised stone tools, thus inaugurating the Paleolithic revolution, a life based on hunting and gathering nuts, berries, and edible plants. About 40,000 years ago human beings of a different sort—people similar to us in their aptitude for tools and language—appeared in Africa, Europe, and Asia displacing those humans who had preceded them.
The earth was colder than it is now, and the northward advance of these Eurasian hunters was halted by immense sheets of ice, some as broad as Australia and over 10,000-feet thick—the height of ten Empire State buildings. These ice slabs, which had been expanding for tens of thousands of years, gouged deep holes in the earth’s crust.
Paleolitic hunters in Asia pushed deeper into the arctic tundra, pursuing big game—especially woolly mammoths. Weighing nearly ten tons, about as much as a school bus, a single mammoth provided enough meat to feed two dozen hunters nearly all winter. Its fur could be worn as clothing and its fat could be burned for heat. Its bones, when stretched with fur, functioned as simple tents. A woolly mammoth was a kind of movable mall, and Paleolithic hunters regarded it with the avidity of shoppers at a clearance sale.
Some Paleolithic hunters eventually crossed into what is now Alaska. What occurred next is a matter of conjecture. (See Mapping the Past, “Debate over the Earliest Route to the Americas,” p. 6.) Eventually these Paleo-Indians, moving south, happened upon lush grasslands, on which grazed vast herds of large mammals; mammoths and equally enormous mastodons, with massive legs and stout feet; giant beavers the size of bears; 20-foot-long ground sloths weighing over 6,000 pounds; strange monsters such as glyptodonts, which resembled armadillos but weighed over a ton; and also countless camels, horses, cheetahs, caribou, and deer.
World History
