The beginnings of humanity to civilization

Prepared by: Vesel Makolli (part of the book The history of the world by British historian Somerset Fry)

Today, the Earth is believed to be about six billion years old. Man (if we count his primitive ancestors) has only existed for about 750 years, while civilized man, a man who cultivates the land, produces food, and has some form of organized community life, has existed on Earth only six thousand years ago. up to eight thousand years. This is about one millionth of the total age of the world.

In this relatively short period of time, man progressed from hunter and shepherd, to inventor of the wheel, skilled potter, and creature who felt the need for organized society, to an educated being capable of rising from Earth and descending to Moon.

For thousands of years man lived almost like an animal. Early man developed very slowly. At that time, the Earth was covered with a thick layer of ice, and large glaciers spread over its entire surface. This period is called the Ice Age.

The preserved remains of the first primitive man are about 750 thousand years old. We call it Australopithecus and its footprints were found in Africa. Perhaps in the future, with scientific methods, such as methods for determining the approximate age using radioactive carbon, we will find some older ancestors. Australopithecus was not human in the true sense of the word. He had a very small brain, less than half of ours. It took a quarter of a million years for man to develop to the next stage as Pithecanthropus which could be said to be the first specimen of a quasi-human being. He makes the transition between ape and man. His remains have been found in Indonesia, Africa, Europe and China. It appears to have appeared half a million years ago. His head rested straight on his spine, and his eyes were positioned so as to achieve a three-dimensional image, which allowed him to judge distance. His brain was slightly larger. It seems that he already knew how to make primitive tools from stone and flint.

That early period, extending from about 500 years to about 10 BC, is called the Stone Age, or Paleolithic. It is divided into three periods: lower, middle and upper, and each one represents an important step in the development of humanity. Pithecanthropus is a proto-man from the Lower Paleolithic.

The next type of proto-man appeared around 80 thousand years before Christ. We call it

Neanderthal, since his bones were first found in Neanderthal, a valley in Germany. His brain was almost three times the size of the brain of Pithecanthropus and slightly smaller than the brain of modern man. Although he was very intelligent, by 25 years before Christ, he had almost completely disappeared. Recently, the remains of a Neanderthal grave dating back to 60 years before Christ were excavated in Baghdad. This proves that the Neanderthal man already knew about the rituals characteristic of civilization...

The Neanderthal was slowly dying out. Parallel to him at that time, there is another ancestor of the modern man in the world whom we call Homo Sapiens (which means "reasonable man" in Latin). As far as we know, he had no relation to the Neanderthal and his ancestry is unknown.

It appeared probably at the end of the Upper Neolithic.

Homo Sapiensi appeared in different parts of the world at the same time. His skull was much more developed than that of his ancestors and therefore he developed much faster.

He also lived in caves, especially those whose openings faced the south, to shelter from the cold and winds from the north and east. He tried to calm down as much as possible in those caves and tents and learned to make tools and weapons and make fire...

By the end of the Upper Stone Age, about 15 thousand years BC, man already had an arrow, a sword, an ax, then tools with a handle for agriculture and crafts, harpoons for fishing, and even needles for sewing clothes made of wool and linen...

This very progress shows the already significant superiority of the new man over his predecessors. He now for the first time begins to take an interest in things around him that are not only related to food or the search for shelter. In other words, the young man felt the need to express himself. Thus we come across the beginnings of art, very rough representations of that part of his environment that he considered important. Carved figures of animals were found in the Sahara, where the conditions for life existed at that time. Caves in Spain and France revealed extraordinary things to us - paintings, works of art of the young man. In Altamira, Spain, a life-size drawing of a bison was found, probably made 35 thousand years ago, and in the caves of Lesco, in France, about 12 thousand years BC ...

By the end of the Upper Paleolithic, the new man had already spread widely on Earth. He had already organized small communities in most of the areas where he settled whether in the Middle East, the Balkan Peninsula or Central Africa. He had already begun to choose permanent companions and live in a kind of family unit, which would later become one of the main features of civilization.

The next period of human development is the Middle Stone Age, or Mesolithic. Compared to the Paleolithic, it was very short and was mainly characterized by rapid advances in precision and the use of stone tools. This progress, of course, was not the same in all countries.

In the semicircular fertile belt that stretches from the foothills of northwestern Iraq to the Persian Gulf, the Mesolithic period began about 10 years before Christ and lasted about three thousand years. In northern and western Europe, on the contrary, this era lasted much longer, mainly because the influence of civilization from that area reached northwestern Europe very slowly.

Around 7000 BC. the new man had already settled in that fertile area and lived there in separate clan communities for several generations. He had enough time to know his environment, to learn how to use it and to appreciate the mood of nature. He had already noticed that water helps vegetables and grains grow. He saw that the sun turns clay into a strong and resistant material, so he started building mud huts.

He was already standing, in fact, on the threshold of a great step forward in his development, right on the border between prehistory and civilization. He was ready to produce his own food and raise livestock, which will be one of the most important steps in the development of mankind.

In this new age, called the Neolithic age (or the New Stone Age, because stone tools were already so perfect), man began to engage in agriculture, growing plants for food and domesticating animals to serve as food. haul cargo and food. They began to grow rice in China and India, beans and potatoes in both Americas, and wheat and barley in the fertile belt...

The young man adapted his way of life to agriculture; he tamed the goats, sheep and cattle so that he no longer had to hunt them. Soon he began to trade one crop with another, one animal with another. This idea of ​​trade and exchange spread quickly and brought man into contact with other human communities.

At this stage, man can be said to have been civilized. The earliest civilized people were probably the Sumerians who lived in Mesopotamia.