Mid term powerpoint
- 1. Mid-Term By: Brandon Whyte
- 2. First Migrants The first 150,000 years or more of human experience was an exclusively African story. Around 250,000 years ago, in Africa, Homo Sapiens first emerged. Evidence of hunting and fishing, not just the scavenging of dead animals, marks a new phase in human food collection. Settlements were planned around the seasonal movement of game and fish. With Origins in Africa perhaps 250,000 years ago, members of Homo Sapiens have migrated to every environmental niche on the plant over the past 100,000 years. Early migrants moved into parts of Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, and the Pacific, spreading to every inch of the planet.
- 3. Realm of the Spirits The religious or spiritual dimension of Paleolithic has been hard to uncover because so little is left and it tell us little about what the people thought. There is, however, clear evidence for a rich ceremonial life. Rock art inside caves and from living spaces suggests a “ceremonial space” separate from ordinary living. We seem to believe that there was no full time religious specialists who led these ceremonies. Objects such as the Willendorf Venus suggest that people believed in gods or spirits who bring them desires, in this case good fertility as the Willendorf Venus shows.
- 4. Life in Paleolithic Societies The process of settling down among gathering and hunting peoples- and the changes that followed from it- marked a major turn in human history, away from countless millennia of nomadic journeys by very small communities. Many idea and techniques helped these nomadic people become a little more settled, one such technique, know as “insulting the meat”, involved highly negative comments about the size or quality of an animal killed by a hunter and the expectation that a successful hunter would disparage his own kill. Others began to become more artistic, like the Jomon Figurines, who are female figurines dated perhaps as long as 4,000 years ago, that scholars believe had a ritual function, associated with fertility, much like the Willendorf Venus.
- 5. Early Agriculture The chief feature of the long Paleolithic era- and the first human process to operate on a global scale- was the initial settlement of the earth. Then, beginning around 12,000 years ago, a second global pattern began to unfold- agriculture. Often called the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution, it referred to the deliberate cultivation of particular plants as well as the taming and breeding of particular animals. With agriculture people were able to settle in a single spot forming the first civilizations.
- 6. First Civilizations With agriculture on the rise, it allowed more people to settle in one place and closer together, all while working together. The formation of civilizations soon arose. A few of the first major civilizations were the Olmec, Norte Chico, Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, and the Chinese Civilization: Shang Dynasty. Major contributors to the success of the civilizations, not only were they working together, but all of them had advanced agricultural experience, they were by some major body of water, and the domestication of animals allowed them steady food throughout the year when crops could not grow.
- 7. Rise of Empires: Persian and Greek The classical era in Eurasia witnessed the flowering of second wave civilizations in the Mediterranean world. Emerging from these was the Persian empire and Greek Civilization, physically adjacent to each other, experienced a centuries long interaction and clash. It was one of the most consequential cultural encounters of the classical world.
- 8. Rise of Empires: Roman and Chinese While the adjacent civilizations of the Greek and Persians collided, two other classical empires were taking shape, the Roman Empire on the far western side of Eurasia and China’s Imperial state on the far eastern end. They were giant empires of their time, shaping the lives of close to half of the world’s population. They flourished at roughly the same time (200 B.C.E- 200 C.E) and roughly similar area (about 1.5 million square miles). Unlike the Greeks and the Persians, the Roman and Chinese were only dimly aware of each other and had almost no direct contact.
- 9. The Collapse of Empires The collapse of the empires happened for a few reasons, their sheer size was too big, which made operations very expensive. Wars riddles the empires to destruction. The leaders also tried to overextend and make their empires to big for their control. As a result of the empires collapsing, many things change such as urban life, population sizes decreased drastically, there was no longer massive trading that once took place, and the security of people living in the empires was no longer in affect and people were not protected by their “empires”.