Notes on the Paleolithic Period and the Origins of Agriculture and Civilization

Paleolithic Period (50,000 - 15,000 Years Ago)

• Also known as the Old Stone Age.
• Modern humans were nomadic hunters and gatherers.
  • Small groups moved in familiar patterns based on seasonal changes and wildlife movement.
• Nutrition primarily came from gathering roots, berries, fruits, and seeds.
• Hunting was less fruitful and more dangerous but provided meat protein.
• Females were generally associated with gathering, males with hunting, but both participated in each other's activities.

Glaciation and Climate Change

• The period between 200,000 and 15,000 years ago marked the last worldwide glaciation (ice age).
• Immense ice sheets covered areas like present-day Canada and extended as far south as New York City.
  • At its peak, New York City would have been under a nearly mile-high section of glacier.
• Coastlines extended outward due to water being caught in ice sheets.
• By 15,000 years ago, a warming trend began, causing glaciers to retreat.
• Rivers, lakes, and shorelines started resembling their present state.
• Plant life and most animals flourished, except those adapted to colder climates.

Transition to Sedentary Existence

• Human recognition that they could remain in familiar places for longer periods due to plentiful plant life, animals, and fish.
• Understanding of plant growth cycles, seasonal changes, and the nature of seeds.
• Humans in locales like the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea and the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys became more sedentary.
• Sedentary existence supported a larger population due to more readily available nutrition and less moving around.
• Encouragement to focus more directly on controlling the growth or availability of food.
• Periodic dry periods put pressure on these groups.
  • Groups were still relatively small, perhaps 50 to 100 individuals.
• Archeological evidence of more permanent habitation, with construction of homes and storage areas clearly indicating a sedentary lifestyle.
• Early villages were based on a gathering economy.
• Genetic research indicates that some species of wolves were being engineered into "dogs".

Domestication and Agriculture

• Around 14,000 years ago, humans began to take control over the production of grains by planting and harvesting crops.
• By 10,000 years ago, agriculture was being developed.
• Goats, sheep, and cattle were domesticated in the same locales where they naturally thrived.
• These animals provide meat, milk, fur/hides, labor, bones for tools, and do not eat humans.
• By about 8,000 B.C.E., some human groups in and around the eastern Mediterranean Sea and Middle East had established farming communities with domesticated large mammals.
• Construction of small villages with storage places and pottery to hold and store grains.
• Herding goats, sheep, and/or cattle.
• Possible division of arable lands between families and simple irrigation techniques.
• Construction of walls to enclose and protect villages from wild animals and unsettled people.
• Possible establishment of control positions and spiritual/religious practices.
• Archeological evidence of larger "houses" indicating more important roles.
• Rebuilding or extending walls suggests prosperous villages requiring social organization.

The Significance of Female Figurines

• Ample evidence in many early societies of crafted figurines which are clearly anatomically female.
• Often considered to symbolize fertility, giving the concept of "mother earth" or an earth goddess a great deal of significance.

Consequences of Agriculture

• Agriculture leads to the production of a "surplus" of food stuffs.
• Investment in storage facilities.
• Ability of villages to see some specialization of labor take shape.
  • If more food than needed is grown, some growers/farmers could focus on other aspects of communal life.
  • Individuals or families could specialize in crafting urns or pottery vessels and exchanging them for foodstuffs, shirts, metal tools, weapons, cabinets, etc.
• Diverse occupations could arise, including leadership roles, architects/builders, warriors, traders, or priestesses.
• Individuals with connections to seasonal changes, predicting rains or river floods, took on spiritual positions.

The Use of Metals and Metallurgy

• During the Neolithic or New Stone Age, people began to understand how to use copper.
  • How to separate it from other rocks and manipulate it into copper tools and weapons.
• Trade occurred, as copper artifacts have been found in locations not near outcroppings of the metal.
• Copper mixed with tin results in bronze, marking the "Bronze Age".
  • Required access to needed minerals or connection through trade.
• From about 7000 to 6000 years ago, tools and weapons were produced, giving those with access to the metals an advantage over other groups.
• Bronze is stronger than copper, and both are more malleable than stone.
• Around 4500 years ago, the production of iron tools and weapons began, providing another advantage in tools and weapons.
• The origins of all three were varied, but all marked advances in understanding the manipulation of the natural environment and provided advantages.
• The peoples who migrated to the Americas never developed these technologies.
  • Central American societies used extremely hard volcanic rock (obsidian) for effective weapons and tools.

Growing Prosperity and Wealth

• More diverse occupations were a sign of growing prosperity and wealth.
• Early villages continued to grow in size indicating population growth.
• Buildings showed more diversity.
• Different abilities, levels of ambition, luck in having more fertile land, family’s survival of disease all played roles in accumulating wealth and/or social status.
• Some families became more important, assuming larger residences indicate social hierarchies developing.
• Sedentary life, based on agriculture providing a surplus, allowed for population expansion, diversity and specialization of occupations, and growing possibilities for trade and other forms of wealth accumulation.

From Villages to Cities and Civilizations

• It will take about 5,000 years for those small, walled villages to increase sufficiently in physical size and population to be considered “cities” and studied as the foundation for “civilizations.”

Civilization: Concepts for Consideration

• The word itself is of Latin origin, referring to being civil, living in an urban environment.
• Involves an attitude differentiating those who are rational, reasonable, controlled, proper, and sophisticated from those who are primitive, savage, dirty, untidy, childlike, and living outside the walls.
• Generally, civilization refers to forms of complex social, political, and cultural development characterized by:
  • Agriculture with connected technology such as plows, harnesses, storage capability, irrigation systems, perhaps ovens, bronze, copper and eventually iron tools, etc., allowing for a surplus of food supplies.
    • $Surplus \implies$ some percentage of the population did NOT have to depend on farming for survival
  • Increase in population reaching demographic density greater than earlier villages.
  • Settled patterns of habitation in towns or cities, often with a variety of peoples.
  • Hierarchically organized political (including military), legal/judicial, and religious systems, with wealth or control of property as a foundation for positions.
  • The development of writing and a literate-strata of society, or some other form of record-keeping to note taxes, trade, wealth accumulation, history, myths, social status, religious format.
  • Notable changes in gender roles, rights, privileges occurring, usually to the detriment of females, along with changes in status/privileges based on wealth/social class distinctions.
    • Control over female’s reproductive choices, their sexual behavior, became important in terms of legitimacy and establishing productive connections between families.
  • Complex commercial networks involving internal markets and long-distance trade.
    • Development of established value common currency for the city, rules regulating economic transactions, and officials to administer the rules of various economic activities, including the collection of taxes and fees.
• Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system developed in the Sumerian cities (Mesopotamia), was first used to record various economic transactions.
• All of the above was the result of conscious actions taken by women and men, with the earliest developments created without the benefit of models, involving a considerable amount of trial and error.