Stone Age Hominids Research Paper

While survival would have been a key goal for the first Tennesseans as the years went by, the four prehistoric tribes evolved and developed increasingly more advanced techniques to move from simply surviving to living. These four prehistoric tribes include the Paleo tribe, the Archaic tribe, the Woodland tribe and the Mississippian tribe. These tribes dealt with changing climates and fluctuating food sources, which defined their developing lifestyles and left clues for future generations to study and share.

Ancient civilizations have had profound effects of what we know as the modern world today. The primary purpose for anything that lives is to survive. Throughout history animals, plants and humans have adapted to their surroundings. All living things have changed throughout time. The thing that differs humans from rest is, humans are more cognitively advanced. Over the course of time the shape and size of the human skull has changed. The size of the human brain has increased, which has allowed humans to adapt more to their surroundings. To survive, humans were making tools for hunting and to cut with. The closer you lived to the equator the darker your skin may have been, so you could adapt to the intensity of the sun’s rays. If you lived further

During the Paleolithic time period, people traveled in small tribes consisting of 20 to 30 people. In these tribes, men and women had equal social status and had equal jobs. The men were in charge of hunting game and the women gathered plants and other sources of nutrition. In reality, the women were bringing in a much more significant percentage of the total nutrition. In the Paleolithic era both parents were also there to raise their children because these small groups of people could only travel so far from the others in the tribe. At this time these tribes had few religious beliefs but studies suggest they worshiped some animals, and sculptures were found of pregnant women suggesting that they worshiped fertility.

The social lives of the Paleolithic foragers greatly differ from that of the Neolithic farmers. This is mostly because of their way of acquiring food. The foragers had plenty of time after they hunted and gathered there food because that was all they had to do while the farmers constantly had to maintain their fields. The foragers spent their free time making art such as cave painting and constructing tools. With what little time the farmers had they used it to build structures, tools and containers for the next harvest. One thing they both had in common was the specific jobs that they assigned to men and women based on each gender’s abilities. In the Paleolithic time the men were the hunters, since they were more muscular,

Hunting was important to the early man. This was how they would find food and the necessities that they needed from animals. In document #1, the cave painting found in Lascaux, France, shows a herd of deer attacking a group of people that have bows and arrows. The painting shows the human figures using the bows and arrows to attack and kill the deer. This evidence may suggest that this group of people are nomadic; meaning they migrate to areas where a food source is available. A quote by Jacob Bronowski’s documentary, The Ascent of Man, in

They would also collect nuts, berries, wild fruits, and roots from trees, but when all the resources were extinguished. Their tribe would move on to a new environment with supportable resources. Fire was developed a million years ago and was used in many ways like hunting and foraging, protection against predators, and for cold weather. Some of the Paleolithic people believed in Animism. This is the belief that everything had its own spirit, like people, animals, trees, rivers, mountains, and the sky. This interaction between them developed the visible events of everything around them like weather, health, and wars. In their society they had people known as Shamans or Witchdoctors. They were greatly respected and at the same time greatly feared because they were said to have some special powers that could be worked to the good or bad of the community. These societies engaged themselves in rituals like war dances, hunting dances, rain dances, and medicine dances. This was said to shape a favorable destiny to the community by controlling the unseen spirits. Paleolithic art is normally oriented with hunting scenes, animal carvings, animals, or fertility.

And then transitioned to the Neolithic with the sculpture of the women and the physical remains of the Otzi caveman. The sculpture showed how they expressed and recorded their ways through art and Otzi showed how important personal items were.

The Neolithic Era lasted from about 9,000-3,000 BCE. We are not exactly sure of when it started but this is the best estimate. The Neolithic Era was a period of human history when the start of agriculture arose and came before the first civilizations. The Neolithic Revolution took place in many different regions of the world. They where not that advanced so they made tools out of wood, stone and bone.

dy of plant fossils and the understanding the evolution of plant life and ecology of earlier eras is known as paleobotany. Paleobotanists concern with fossil records of plants and their geologic history greatly describes the main concept of paleobotany. Only a small percentage of the plants that ever lived left evidence of existence. The major plant fossils that have been discovered are mineralized wood, flowers in amber, leaf imprints in coal, or other plant life many years ago. Paleobotanists document fossil records and use this evidence to find the past evolution of plants.

Bailyn notes, “No less for being invisible, these vital spirits inhered in the heavens, the earth, the seas, and everything within. They drove the stars in the sky and gave life to every bird, animal, and person that existed, and they were active within the earth’s material--rocks, hills, lakes, and rivers--and in the wind, the cold, the heat, and the seasons(Bailyn 1)”. When it came to their beliefs, they believed in nature and how if they were good to the Gods they would be rewarded with good harvests and successful huts to survive. Rituals like food preparation and dancing, dancing around the fire, asking nature for rain, were all actions giving veneration to the spirits of nature. They Believed that everyone was the same no one was better than anyone else, the chiefs of the tribes always tried to maintain order and made sure everyone was as happy and pleased as it was possible.

They hunted deer, elk and buffalo herds. There were no parts of the animals left over. For example the hides were used for clothing, the meat for food and bait,and the bones and teeth for weapons such as spears, fish hooks, and arrows. They usually went where their food went, which meant that they were always on the move. Tribes that were always traveling were called nomadic. But when they were introduced to farming and agriculture they didn't have to follow their food anymore, because they could grow it where ever they were. This decreased the number of nomadic

The first beginning we had hunter and gatherers, and that became something that everybody started doing. People would use resources around them, and they would not stay in permanent settlements. Than a new life began and it was called Emergence of Agriculture. People know started having permanent settlements, the population has became bigger, and their health might be becoming shaky. These changes might have been better or worse.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to assimilate our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Well here is how it would go: We would wander around until we found a food source and then we would see how many people it could sustain. When it couldn't feed anymore people, we would move on and find a new food source. It’s simple. It’s easy. You only have to go in search of food when you need it. It’s practical. I agree that farming was the worst mistake in the history of the human race because it led to the division of social classes and it had a negative effect on human health.

The first scholars that existed named the whole period of human devolvement the “Stone Age.” The stone age is divided into three periods which are Paleolithic which means the old Greek age, Mesolithic and Neolithic which is the new Greek age. The Paleolithic and Neolithic stone ages have many great differences and has changed greatly between the two periods.

They would hunt and gather food in order to survive. This led the way to tribalism where a group of hunter-gatherers would stay together in order to have a better chance of surviving.