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- 1. PREHISTORY – FORMATION OF SOCIETIESCREATED BY BRIAN SALAS MIDWESTERNCAREERCOLLEGE JULY 2019
- 2. What was life like in the pre-modern era?
- 3. Travel ■ 25 miles ■ Communication – horse, on foot, ship ■ Little sense of the wider world ■ Hear news from merchants, travelers ■ Need to live in a big city to learn about others ■ Little care for empires, government ■ Taxation, warfare – main intrusions into daily life
- 4. Health ■ Life expectancy – 30 years ■ Almost no medicine ■ High infant mortality rate ■ No understanding of diseases, germs ■ Plagues unstoppable ■ Black death killed 1/3 of the population ■ Still possible to live to 80
- 5. Beliefs ■ Gods, spirits in all aspects of life ■ Animism – objects have a spiritual essence ■ No understanding of science, rationality – Monsters, witches are everywhere – Every bad thing that occurs a punishment from the gods ■ Polytheism vs. Monotheism
- 6. Jobs ■ Nearly everyone was a farmer ■ Greater specialization in the cities – artisans, merchant, soldier, priest ■ Subsistence farming ■ Land = greatest source of wealth for an empire – More people to pay taxes, more food – Empires always want to be growing
- 7. Cities ■ Most people lived in the countryside ■ Few cities with small populations ■ Large city = 50,000 people ■ Rome = 1 million ■ Xi’an = 1 million ■ ModernTokyo = 40 million
- 8. Cities ■ Difficult to provide the needs for so many individuals ■ Poor transportation networks ■ Hard to feed so many people ■ Crowded, filthy ■ Have your shop and animals on the first floor, sleep on the second floor ■ Poor/nonexistent sanitation
- 9. Science and Inventions ■ Slow progression ■ Difficult for ideas to be transferred ■ Books are expensive and difficult to copy ■ No idea that tomorrow will be better/different than today
- 10. How do we know what we know about history?
- 11. How do we know what we know about history? ■ Written accounts – books, letters, coins ■ Oral accounts – legends, myths ■ Material culture – architecture, statues, pottery, garbage ■ Scientific methods - carbon 14 dating, tree rings
- 12. Representation ■ Records are biased towards the intellectual elite ■ 90% illiteracy rate ■ History is not representative of the common person ■ Women rarely mentioned
- 13. BC/AD vs BCE/CE ■ BCE = Before the Common Era ■ CE = Common Era
- 14. Migration out of Africa
- 15. Migration out of Africa ■ Can trace the migration through DNA testing ■ Highest genetic diversity in Africa
- 16. Migration ■ Bering Strait Land Bridge – Lower sea levels allowed the settlement of the Americas – Cut off from the rest of the world until Columbus ■ Taking rafts to settle islands in the pacific – Better knowledge of navigation than modern humans
- 17. Nomads ■ Almost all early humans were nomads ■ Hunters and gatherers ■ Along the sea – fishing, shell collecting ■ Unable to own much
- 18. Nomads ■ Lived in small communities ■ 150 friends ■ Tribal leader, high levels of equality
- 19. What do we know about them? ■ No writing until 3000 BCE ■ All stories as oral traditions ■ No architecture ■ Spearheads, tools
- 21. Ancient Art
- 22. Ancient Art
- 23. Animal Domestication ■ 15,000-10,000 years ago? ■ Wolves hung around humans to get food scraps ■ Those less afraid were more successful ■ Of 148 large mammals, only 14 domesticated ■ Human Impact ■ Many large land animals killed off
- 24. Agriculture ■ 13,000 years ago ■ First seen in Israel – built permanent settlements near natural grain fields ■ Mesopotamia – invention of farming, development of society ■ Pros – reliable supply of food ■ Cons – required to stay in one location, vulnerable – Leads to greater social divisions
- 26. Formation of Society ■ More people living together permanently = need to better organize society ■ Living with people you do not know, how do you get along? ■ Necessity to create laws ■ Create a government to enforce the laws
- 27. Kings and Emperors ■ With social stratification, inequalities increase ■ Emergence of a powerful ruler ■ Often considered divine or divinely guided
- 28. Religion ■ Emergence of a priesthood ■ Often the most powerful figures ■ Religion becomes more organized and ritualistic, social requirements placed on the individual
- 29. Specialization ■ People in villages/cities can no longer perform all tasks for survival alone ■ Specialized jobs – merchant, artisan, warrior ■ Conducive to new ideas, inventions
- 30. Warfare ■ Warfare on a larger scale but also fewer small disputes ■ No longer defending your small tribe and family ■ New concept of loyalty to the state
- 31. Writing ■ Merchants needed a way to keep track of sales/purchases – A limit to memory ■ Markings to denote the number of objects ■ Symbol to indicate the type of object ■ Grew in complexity over time ■ All early writing systems were symbols, not alphabets
- 32. Writing ■ Importance – information can be permanently stored ■ Transfer of knowledge from one person to thousands ■ Before – once you died, all your knowledge was lost – Oral traditions ■ Information is the key to improvement
- 33. Writing ■ Cuneiform – wedge shaped ■ Hieroglyphics ■ Chinese
- 34. Cuneiform ■ Stylus ■ Clay tablets
- 35. Hieroglyphics
- 36. Chinese
- 37. Money ■ Barter – trade three sheep for ten bushels of wheat ■ Coin and paper money not until much later
- 38. Why Did Cities EmergeWhereThey Did?
- 39. Why Did Cities EmergeWhereThey Did? ■ The importance of geography ■ One of the most significant factors determining human behavior
- 40. Geography ■ Good source of water ■ Drinking and transportation ■ Fertile land for Crops ■ Natural resources – minerals (copper), stone quarries, coal, oil – Modern resources – information, ideas ■ Defense
- 41. First Civilizations ■ Mesopotamia –Tigris and Euphrates Rivers ■ Egypt – Nile River ■ China –Yellow River ■ India – Indus River