History: Let's start at the very beginning...
"Let's Start at the Very Beginning - a Very Good Place to Start!"
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| This is the Chauvet Cave in Ardèche, France dated from 30,000-28,000 BC; it is a pictograph of lions Have you ever seen those cave paintings... Fancy right? While true written language didn’t really happen until 3000 BCE or so - we have “cave paintings” or pictographs (painted) and petroglyphs (carved) to look at. We take this info - combine it with lots of others (skeletons etc) and we get a hazy picture of early man. He certainly wasn’t a pretty boy…. https://www.britannica.com/video/194292/Homo-species-debates-human Something else to explore: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species?sort_by=field_age_timeline_maximum_value There were a lot of these early “humans”... The different varieties of humans lived from 3.3 million years ago to the end of the glaciers - which was called the Pleistocene epoch (era). This means that they co-existed with mammoths, Canadian camels and elephants that lived in England. What was that like? https://youtu.be/MlypUhdhZP4 And early man was MOVIN’
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Stone age - ages
In order to understand complex topics - it is always best to break things down. So - scientists have broken the stone age into:
The Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age (30,000 BCE–10,000 BCE)
The Mesolithic Period or Middle Stone Age (10,000 BCE–8,000 BCE)
The Neolithic Period or New Stone Age (8,000 BCE–3,000 BCE)
The Timeline
It was a LONG time spent getting out of the trees - onto two feet - figuring out simple tools and getting to where there was language.
Oldest tool dates to 3.3 million years ago - but at this point we are talking pebbles used as tools. Remember Jane Goodall realizing that the chimpanzees used a piece of grass to get termites - these are the types of tools that we are talking about at this point.
Things got more sophisticated about a million years ago where a hand ax was found:
And language
Some sort of communication was key but it also took a long time to get there. General estimates put the development of some sort of communication at 1 million years ago which corresponds to more complex tools that would need teaching to be able to duplicate.
It also would be needed for migration - "bring your family group!" said one early man to another. And fire was put at about a million years ago too. Mind you - the last ice age ended about 12,000 BCE so these developments occurred during the ice ages.
Art
Art is as old as time - no really - it’s very old!
Evidence of art can be found at 100,000 BCE (this video says 65,000 though - there is always debate!)
Art was likely used as a communication. These are nomadic people and if one nomadic person wanted to let another nomadic person know that a place is part of an angry sabertooth tiger territory then they paint a picture. Check out these cave paintings (search for cave paintings)
https://whc.unesco.org/en/interactive-map/?search=cave+art
Other Art
Yes - they had other art including cave art, carvings in the walls of the cave (petroglyphs) and small models especially of Venus (exaggerated women) out of tusks and bone
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| Venus of Willendorf as shown at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria Enjoy! |