What Is "Prehistory"?
Prehistory—meaning human societies without writing or widespread written records—survived until Western culture and industrial society completed their globalization in the 20th century, making the topic of a course that begins with some very old fossils seem more current than you may think.
You learn about dozens of archaeological sites all over the world and learn about stone-tool making, mammoth hunting, and temple building as you explore man's earliest origins and the earliest civilizations.
Themes to Remember: Human Achievement Woven through this narrative is a set of pervasive themes:
- Emerging human biological and cultural diversity (as well as our remarkable similarities across surprising expanses of time and space)
- The impact of human adaptations to climatic and environmental change
- The importance of seeing prehistory not merely as a chronicle of archaeological sites and artifacts, but of people behaving with the extraordinary intellectual, spiritual, and emotional dynamism that distinguish the human.
This is a world tour of prehistory with profound links to who we are and how we live today.
2.5 Million Years of History This 36-lecture narrative covers human prehistory from our beginnings more than 2.5 million years ago up to and beyond the advent of the world's first preindustrial civilizations.
Due to the large spans of time and geography covered in this series, these lectures are divided into six sections:
Section I: Beginnings This section surveys the archaic world of the first humans, you travel into the remote past, learning why the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould was probably right to observe that we all come from the same African twig on the bushy tree of human evolution.
You examine prehistory from
Australopithecus africanus through
Homo habilis (the first tool-making hominid), and
Homo erectus (whose remains were first found on Java but whose origins lie in Africa) through the hardy Neanderthals who lived and hunted successfully in Europe despite the bitter grip of the last Ice Age 100,000 and more years ago. You focus on the first human settlement of Africa as early as 800,000 years ago.
Section II: Modern Humans This section tells the story of the great diaspora of anatomically modern humans in the late Ice Age. Whether and how these modern humans spread from the African tropics into southwestern Asia and beyond remains one of the great controversies among scholars of prehistory.
You follow
Homo sapiens sapiens north into Europe some 45,000 years ago. You meet the Cro-Magnons, among the first known artists as well as hunter-gatherers, who exhibited degrees of spiritual awareness, social interaction, and fluid intelligence.
You venture into the frigid open plains of the Ukraine and Eurasia, where big-game hunters flourished in spite of nine-month winters. Moving to the Americas, debate over the origins of the first human settlement continues.
Section III: Farmers and Herders This section describes perhaps the most important development in all human prehistory: the beginnings of agriculture and animal domestication.
This defining chapter began about 12,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers in the Near East broke from the long human tradition of intensely mobile foraging and turned to more settled ways of life built around cultivating cereal grains or tending animals.
Section IV: Eastern Mediterranean Civilizations Professor Fagan describes early civilizations in an increasingly complex eastern Mediterranean world, discussing many theories accounting for the appearance of urban civilization and overall attributes of preindustrial civilizations.
You examine Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia and the intricate patchwork of city-states between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. You explore ancient Egypt, the Minoan civilization of Crete, the Mycenaeans, and the Hittites.
You learn about the Uluburun shipwreck of southern Turkey, a sealed capsule of international trade from 3,000 years ago.
Section V: Africans and Asians You analyze the beginnings of South Asian civilization and the mysterious Harappan civilization of the Indus, which traded with Mesopotamia. Professor Fagan resumes the story of South Asian civilization after the collapse of the Harappan and shows how Mauryan rulers on the Ganges encouraged trading much farther afield.
You see the impact of monsoons which revolutionized maritime trading among Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and explore Meroe, Aksum, and the coastal civilization of East Africa.
Several lectures cover the beginnings of civilization in China and Southeast Asia.
Section VI: Ancient Americans Professor Fagan takes you into sophisticated chiefdoms and civilizations that developed in the Americas over the past 3,500 years, including Pueblo cultures of the North American Southwest and the Mississippian culture of the South and Southeast. You learn about Mesoamerican civilization, primordial Olmec culture of the lowlands, and the spectacular ancient Maya civilization.
Moving to the highlands, you visit the city-states of Monte Albán in the Valley of Oaxaca and Teotihuacán near the Valley of Mexico. Professor Fagan also describes the rise of Aztec civilization, followed by a journey to the Andes. Finally, you explore the southern highlands, with the rise of Tiwanaku near Lake Titicaca, the Chimu civilization of the coast, and the huge Inka empire.
The series closes by analyzing the closing centuries of prehistoric times during the European age of discovery and summarizing the main issues and themes of the course:
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION
The ingredients of civilization
Many different elements must come together before a human community develops to the level of sophistication commonly referred to as civilization. The first is the existence of settlements classifiable as towns or cities. This requires food production to be efficient enough for a large minority of the community to be engaged in more specialized activities - such as the creation of imposing buildings or works of art, the practice of skilled warfare, and above all the administration of a centralized bureaucracy capable of running the machinery of state.
Civilization requires at least a rudimentary civil service.
In the organization of a civil service, a system of writing is an almost indispensable aid. This is not invariably the case because at least one civilization, that of the Incas in Peru, will thrive without
writing. But the development of writing greatly enhances civilization. And with a script comes history.
Our knowledge of prehistory derives from surviving objects - the evidence of archaeology. History, by contrast, is based on documents. These various interconnections mean that history, civilization and writing all begin at the same time. That time is about 3100 BC.
Mesopotamia and Egypt: 3100 BC
In about 3200 BC the two earliest civilizations develop in the region where southwest Asia joins northeast Africa. Great rivers are a crucial part of the story. The
Sumerians settle in what is now southern Iraq, between the mouths of the Euphrates and the Tigris.
Egypt develops in the long narrow strip of the Nile valley.
Rivers offer two main advantages to a developing civilization. They provide water to irrigate the fields, and they offer the easiest method of transport for a society without paved roads. Rivers will play an equally important role in two other early civilizations - those of the
Indus and of northern
China.
The Indus: 2500 BC
It is not known whether contact with Mesopotamia inspires the first civilization of India or whether it is a spontaneous local development, but by about 2500 BC the neolithic villages along the banks of the Indus are on the verge of combining into a unified and sophisticated culture.
The
Indus civilization, with its two large cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, expands over a larger region than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It will survive, in a remarkably consistent form, for about 1000 years.
The Aegean: 2000 BC
The next region to develop a distinctive civilization centres on the Aegean Sea. The bays and inlets of the rugged coastal regions of Greece, and the many small islands strung like pearls across this relatively sheltered sea, combine to make this an ideal area for trade (and piracy) among people whose levels of nautical skill make short hops a necessary precaution.
The
Aegean civilization stands at the start of the very lively tradition of Mediterranean culture. It begins in the large island which is perfectly placed to guard the entrance to the Aegean - Crete.
China: 1600 BC
The longest consistent civilization in the human story so far is that of
China. This vast eastern empire seems set apart from the rest of the world, fiercely proud of its own traditions, resisting foreign influences. Its history begins in a characteristically independent manner.
There are no identifiable precedents for the civilization of the Shang dynasty, which emerges in China in about 1600 BC. Its superb
bronze vessels seem to achieve an instant technological perfection. Its written texts introduce characters recognizably related to
Chinese writing today. This is a civilization which begins as it will continue - with confidence.
America: 1200 BC
Around this time the earliest American civilizations have their beginnings, with the Olmecs in
central America and the Chavin in the
Andes.
Both these cultures develop large towns, centred on temples. Both are now famous for their sculpture. And each, in its own region, is at the start of a succession of civilizations leading directly to the two which are discovered and destroyed in the 16th century by the Spanish - the Aztecs in central America and the Incas in the Andes.
The Mediterranean: from 1000 BC
The first distinctively Mediterranean civilization, that of the
Aegeans, comes to a sudden and still unexplained end in around 1200 BC. Some 200 years later an energetic seafaring people, the
Phoenicians, become extensive traders. From their base in Lebanon they establish colonies along the coast of Africa and even into the Atlantic.
Their example, as Mediterranean imperialists, will be followed by the
Greeks and then by the
Romans. The Mediterranean becomes the world's most creative arena for the clash and synthesis of civilizations - a status which it has never entirely lost.
Regional civilizations: AD 400 - 1500
With the dominance of
Greece and Rome in the west (both successfully managing a transition from pagan to Christian empires), of
China in the east, and of strongly individual cultures in central and south
America, each successive civilization in any region tends at this time to be a variation on local traditions. But sometimes there are upheavals which introduce an entirely new culture within already long-civilized parts of the world.
One such is
Islam. The establishment of the caliphate in Damascus and then Baghdad leads to distinctively Muslim civilizations in an unbroken belt from north Africa to north India.
Global civilization: 16th - 20th century AD
The first sustained contact between Europe and America, in the 16th century, opens the door to a new concept - world-wide civilizations, evolving through colonies and empires. Spanish civilization is exported to
Latin America. English culture spreads even further, in an empire which includes India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and eventually many parts of Africa.
From the 16th to the 19th century it is this imperial impulse which carries European civilization round the world, often as a thin veneer over older and very robust local cultures. But by the 20th century there are different forces at work.
For much of the 20th century ideology has been the driving force in the export of two very different concepts of civilization, American capitalism and Russian Communism. At the same time mass communication has made it possible to export a region's popular culture to the rest of the world - notably that of America through radio, cinema and television.
Other influences, whether multinational companies or the internet, have a similar effect. The danger is of a worldwide sameness. But there is a corresponding benefit. Within economic limits, human communities are now free as never before to adopt the aspects of civilization which appeal to them - regardless of where they happen to be on the planet.
Read more:
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION
FUTURE civilization:
Ultima Tower – Future City Concept
Eugene Tsui has designed a concept city called
The Ultima Tower that would help solve the global population crisis. Acting as a human termite nest, and costing $150 billion, these two mile high green towers would house over one million people in a one mile wide area. Instead of floors, the building’s interior would consist of a multi-dimensional ecosystem complete with neighborhood districts and 30-50 meter high skies. Lakes, streams, rivers, hills and ravines comprise the soil landscape on which residential, office, commercial, retail and entertainment buildings can be built.
Considering the huge costs involved, and the current suburban culture, it is unlikely we will see anything like this taken seriously in our lifetimes. However, considering over
half of the world’s population is already living in cities, ideas like this may one day be realized.
History of the first civilizations
informative kau.
Originally Posted by pepau
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