Download or read book The Early Human World written by Peter Robertshaw and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of early human life using an incredible variety of primary sources. -- from back cover.
Download or read book DK Eyewitness Books Early Humans written by DK and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-04-11 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover how the world's first people lived from cave dwellings to the tools of the Iron Age with DK Eyewitness Books: Early Humans. Learn how early people hunted and gathered their food, which people made jewelry out of leopards' teeth, how bread was made in the Bronze Age, how mummies and bog bodies have been preserved, and much, much more in Eyewitness: Early Humans!
Download or read book Children of Time written by Anne H. Weaver and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient relics--stone tools, bones, footprints, and even DNA--offer many clues about our human ancestors and how they lived. At the same time, our kinship with our human ancestors lies as much in their sense of humor, their interactions with others, their curiosity and their moments of wonder, as it does in the shape of their bones and teeth. And the evolution of human behavior left no direct fossil traces. Children of Time brings this vanished aspect of the human past to life through Anne Weaver's scientifically- informed imagination. The stories move through time, following the lives of long-ago hominins through the eyes of their children. Each carefully researched chapter is based on an actual child fossil--a baby, a five-year- old, a young adolescent, and teenagers. The children and their families are brought to life through illustrator Matt Celeskey's vividly rendered paleoenvironments where they encounter saber-toothed cats, giraffids, wild dogs, fearsome crocodiles, and primitive horses. Their adventures invite readers to think about what it means to be human, and to speculate on the human drama as it unfolds in many dimensions, from social organization and technology to language, music, art, and religious consciousness. Visit the website at www.children-of-time.com.
Download or read book The Past in Perspective written by Kenneth L. Feder and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging and up-to-date chronological introduction to human prehistory, this text introduces students to the big picture of human evolutionary history, presenting the human past within the context of fundamental themes of cultural evolution.
Download or read book Ritual Play and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies written by Colin Renfrew and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents unique new insights into the development of human ritual and society through our heritage of play and performance.
Download or read book First Migrants written by Peter Bellwood and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first publication to outline the complex global story of human migration and dispersal throughout the whole of human prehistory. Utilizing archaeological, linguistic and biological evidence, Peter Bellwood traces the journeys of the earliest hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist migrants as critical elements in the evolution of human lifeways. The first volume to chart global human migration and population dispersal throughout the whole of human prehistory, in all regions of the world An archaeological odyssey that details the initial spread of early humans out of Africa approximately two million years ago, through the Ice Ages, and down to the continental and island migrations of agricultural populations within the past 10,000 years Employs archaeological, linguistic and biological evidence to demonstrate how migration has always been a vital and complex element in explaining the evolution of the human species Outlines how significant migrations have affected population diversity in every region of the world Clarifies the importance of the development of agriculture as a migratory imperative in later prehistory Fully referenced with detailed maps throughout
Download or read book Student Study Guide to The Early Human World written by Peter Robertshaw and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Student Study Guides are important and unique components that are available for each of the books in The World in Ancient Times series. Each of the Student Study Guides is designed to be used with the main text at school or sent home for homework assignments. The activities in the Student Study guide will help students get the most out of their history books. Each student study guide includes a chapter-by-chapter two-page lesson that uses a variety of interesting activities to help a student master history and develop important reading and study skills.
Download or read book Early Human Kinship written by Nicholas J. Allen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Human Kinship brings together original studies from leading figures in the biological sciences, social anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics to provide a major breakthrough in the debate over human evolution and the nature of society. A major new collaboration between specialists across the range of the human sciences including evolutionary biology and psychology; social/cultural anthropology; archaeology and linguistics Provides a ground-breaking set of original studies offering a new perspective on early human history Debates fundamental questions about early human society: Was there a connection between the beginnings of language and the beginnings of organized 'kinship and marriage'? How far did evolutionary selection favor gender and generation as principles for regulating social relations? Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in conjunction with the British Academy
Download or read book Sapiens written by Yuval Noah Harari and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century New York Times Bestseller A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas. Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become? Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.
Download or read book Prehistoric Peoples written by Philip Brooks and published by Armadillo. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the continent of Africa, millions of years ago, humanlike creatures walked the earth for the very first time. Rediscover their prehistoric world and find out what it was like to live through the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, and how the first settled communities grew up.Did you know that the earliest pottery was invented in Japan around 12,500 years ago, or that the Neanderthalpeople buried their dead with ritualistic ceremonies?Learn about this and much more in this fascinatingreference book for 8- to 12-year-olds.
Download or read book Catching Fire written by Richard Wrangham and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-08-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking apes". Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. "This notion is surprising, fresh and, in the hands of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big, new ideas do not come along often in evolution these days, but this is one." -Matt Ridley, author of Genome
Download or read book First Peoples in a New World written by David J. Meltzer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.
Download or read book The First Humans written by Frederick E. Grine and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-05-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are some issues in human paleontology that seem to be timeless. Most deal with the origin and early evolution of our own genus – something about which we should care. Some of these issues pertain to taxonomy and systematics. How many species of Homo were there in the Pliocene and Pleistocene? How do we identify the earliest members the genus Homo? If there is more than one Plio-Pleistocene species, how do they relate to one another, and where and when did they evolve? Other issues relate to questions about body size, proportions and the functional adaptations of the locomotor skeleton. When did the human postcranial “Bauplan” evolve, and for what reasons? What behaviors (and what behavioral limitations) can be inferred from the postcranial bones that have been attributed to Homo habilis and Homo erectus? Still other issues relate to growth, development and life history strategies, and the biological and archeological evidence for diet and behavior in early Homo. It is often argued that dietary change played an important role in the origin and early evolution of our genus, with stone tools opening up scavenging and hunting opportunities that would have added meat protein to the diet of Homo. Still other issues relate to the environmental and climatic context in which this genus evolved.
Download or read book Blood Relations written by Chris Knight and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of symbolic culture is generally linked with the development of the hunger-gatherer adaptation based on a sexual division of labor. This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women. Culture became established, says Knight, when evolving human females began to assert collective control over their own sexuality, refusing sex to all males except those who came to them with provisions. Women usually timed their ban on sexual relations with their periods of infertility while they were menstruating, and to the extent that their solidarity drew women together, these periods tended to occur in synchrony. The result was that every month with the onset of menstruation, sexual relations were ruptured in a collective, ritualistic way as the prelude to each successful hunting expedition. This ritual act was the means through which women motivated men not only to hunt but also to concentrate energies on bringing back the meat. Knight shows how this hypothesis sheds light on the roots of such cultural traditions as totemic rituals, incest and menstrual taboos, blood-sacrifice, and hunters’ atonement rites. Providing detailed ethnographic documentation, he also explains how Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and other magico-religious myths can be read as derivatives of the same symbolic logic.
Download or read book Man the Hunter written by Richard Borshay Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 974 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.
Download or read book The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE written by Ian Tattersall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To be human is to be curious. And one of the things we are most curious about is how we came to be who we are--how we evolved over millions of years to become creatures capable of inquiring into our own evolution. In this lively and readable introduction, renowned anthropologist Ian Tattersall thoroughly examines both fossil and archaeological records to trace human evolution from the earliest beginnings of our zoological family, Hominidae, through the appearance of Homo sapiens to the Agricultural Revolution. He begins with an accessible overview of evolutionary theory and then explores the major turning points in human evolution: the emergence of the genus Homo, the advantages of bipedalism, the birth of the big brain and symbolic thinking, Paleolithic and Neolithic tool making, and finally the enormously consequential shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies 10,000 years ago. Focusing particularly on the pattern of events and innovations in human biological and cultural evolution, Tattersall offers illuminating commentary on a wide range of topics, including the earliest known artistic expressions, ancient burial rites, the beginnings of language, the likely causes of Neanderthal extinction, the relationship between agriculture and Christianity, and the still unsolved mysteries of human consciousness. Complemented by a wealth of illustrations and written with the grace and accessibility for which Tattersall is widely admire, The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE invites us to take a closer look at the strange and distant beings who, over the course of millions of years, would become us.
Download or read book Who We Are and How We Got Here written by David Reich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?
