Book contents
- The Cambridge World HistoryVolume I
- The Cambridge World History
- The Cambridge World History
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Table
- Contributors
- Preface
- Book part
- 1 Introduction and overview
- Part I Historiography, method, and themes
- Part II The Paleolithic and the beginnings of human history
- 13 Before the farmers: culture and climate, from the emergence ofHomo sapiensto about ten thousand years ago
- 14 Early humans: tools, language, and culture
- 15 Africa from 48,000 to 9500BCE
- 16 Migration and innovation in Palaeolithic Europe
- 17 Asian Palaeolithic dispersals
- 18 The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of Australasia
- 19 The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of the Americas
- Index
- References
13 - Before the farmers: culture and climate, from the emergence ofHomo sapiensto about ten thousand years ago
from Part II - The Paleolithic and the beginnings of human history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge World HistoryVolume I
- The Cambridge World History
- The Cambridge World History
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Table
- Contributors
- Preface
- Book part
- 1 Introduction and overview
- Part I Historiography, method, and themes
- Part II The Paleolithic and the beginnings of human history
- 13 Before the farmers: culture and climate, from the emergence ofHomo sapiensto about ten thousand years ago
- 14 Early humans: tools, language, and culture
- 15 Africa from 48,000 to 9500BCE
- 16 Migration and innovation in Palaeolithic Europe
- 17 Asian Palaeolithic dispersals
- 18 The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of Australasia
- 19 The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of the Americas
- Index
- References
Summary
By comparing humans with other cultural creatures one can identify the traits that mark the distinctiveness of human culture. The strictly environmental influences on human cultures can be considered as comprising two elements: climate and ecology. Global climate depends on the relationship between Earth and the sun. If climate is the context of the story, the experiences of Homo sapiens are its subject. In sum, the lives of pre-agricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early farmers who succeeded them that when archaeologists first found the foragers' villages in the 1930s, they assumed the inhabitants were farmers and some recent scholarship has returned to something like the same notion. The migrations that took Homo sapiens beyond the range explored by Homo erectus probably occurred, in part at least, as a result of the pursuit of fat-rich species across the frontiers of retreating cold as the ice of the Ice Age receded.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge World History , pp. 313 - 338Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
References
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