Introductory Anthropology and Early Agrarian Societies

Flashcards covering the development of early hominids, their tool-making traditions, the migration of Homo sapiens, and the characteristics of early agrarian civilizations.

Bipedalism

The biological development of walking upright on two legs, which allowed early hominids access to their hands for grabbing food and using tools.

Ardipithecus rumidus

An early hominid that lived between $4.5$ to $4.3$ million years ago in the Great Rift Valley, exhibited a degree of bipedalism, and primarily ate fruit and forage.

Australopithecus apernasus

A hominid species living from $3.9$ to $1.8$ million years ago whose name means "southern ape."

Lucy

A famous specimen of Australopithecus found in the Afar region of Ethiopia.

all the one tools

The earliest style of tools, also referred to as Olafon tools, appearing around $2.5$ million years ago and consisting of a stone core broken in half to create a jagged edge.

Homo erectus

A hominid appearing in East Africa around $2$ million years ago that lived on the ground, migrated to Eurasia $1.8$ million years ago, and included more meat in its diet.

Schulian tools

Improved tools created by Homo erectus involving a stone core split down the center to create hand axes with flaked and sharpened edges.

Neanderthals

A hominid species with complex culture that overlapped with Homo sapiens for roughly $3.5$ thousand years and buried their dead in complex burial rites.

Homo sapiens

A species that emerged $300,000$ years ago, characterized by technical skill, cultural creativity, and whose oldest remains were found at Double Air Food in Morocco dating to $314,000$ ago.

level law tools

Tools appearing around $400,000$ years ago which were carefully shaped from a chipped stone core to produce a more effective spear point.

dream time

An Aboriginal Australian concept in which an elder constructs an imaginary reality that traces a person's lineage back to the creation of the world.

Venus figures

Small statues appearing $26,000$ years ago in Europe and the Anatolian Peninsula, thought to represent fertility goddesses or ancestral women in a lineage.

Agrarian societies

Societies where a minimum number of people are engaged in the farming of cereal grains, often characterized by social stratification.

State

A compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory.

Empire

A large multireligious and multiethnic state consisting of a conquered kingdom and several defeated kingdoms.

Fertile Crescent

A region in the Middle East along the Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan, and Nile rivers where agriculture and early civilizations developed.

einkorn wheat

A type of early grain that humans in Mesopotamia and Anatolia bred to develop an interdependency where the plant requires human intervention to shed its seed.

Catalhoyuk

An early agrarian settlement in present-day Turkey where people practiced ancestor worship by painting the bones of the deceased.

Surplus production

The ability of workers to produce more than enough to meet immediate needs, which allows for specialized workers like priests, potters, and guards.