1.
Blackfoot Confederacy
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The Siksika, the Kainai or Kainah, and the Northern Piegan or Peigan or Piikani reside in Canada, the Southern Piegan/Piegan Blackfeet or Pikuni are located in the United States. They followed the herds as they migrated between what are now the United States and Canada, as far north as the Bow River. In the first half of the 18th century, they acquired horses and firearms from white traders and their Cree, the Blackfoot used these to expand their territory at the expense of neighboring tribes. Now riding horses, the Blackfoot and other Plains tribes could also extend the range of their buffalo hunts, periods of starvation and deprivation followed, and the Blackfoot tribe was forced to adopt ranching and farming, settling in permanent reservations. In the 1870s, they signed treaties with both the United States and Canada, ceding most of their lands in exchange for annuities of food and medical aid, as well as help in learning to farm. Nevertheless, the Blackfoot have worked to maintain their traditional language, originally the Blackfoot/Plains Confederacy consisted of three peoples based on kinship and dialect, but all speaking the common language of Blackfoot, one of the Algonquian languages family. The three were the Piikáni, the Káínaa, and the Siksikáwa and they later allied with the unrelated Tsuu Tina, who became merged into the Confederacy and, with the Atsina, or Aaninin. Each of these highly decentralized peoples were divided into many bands, the band was the basic unit of organization for hunting and defence. The largest ethnic group in the Confederacy is the Piegan, also spelled Peigan or Pikuni and their name derives from the Blackfoot term Piikáni. They are divided into the Piikani Nation in present-day Alberta, a once large and mighty division of the Piegan were the Inuksik of southwestern Montana. Today they survive only as a clan or band of the South Peigan, the modern Kainai Nation is named for the Blackfoot-language term Káínaa, meaning Many Chief people. These were historically called the Blood, from a Plains Cree name for the Kainai, Miko-Ew. The common English name for the tribe is Blood or the Blood tribe, the Siksika Nations name derives from Siksikáwa, meaning Those of like. The Siksika also call themselves Sao-kitapiiksi, meaning Plains People, the Sarcee call themselves the Tsu T’ina, meaning a great number of people. During early years of conflict, the Blackfoot called them Saahsi or Sarsi, the Sarcee are from an entirely different language family, they are part of the Athabascan or Dené language family, most of whose members are located in the Subarctic of Northern Canada. Specifically, the Sarcee are an offshoot of the Beaver people and they later joined the Confederacy and essentially merged with the Pikuni. The Gros Ventre people call themselves the Haaninin, also spelled Aaninin, the French called them Gros Ventres, misinterpreting a physical sign for waterfall, and the English called them the Fall Indians, related to waterfalls in the mountains. The Blackfoot referred to them as the Piik-siik-sii-naa or Atsina, because of years of enmity, early scholars thought the Aaninin were related to the Arapaho Nation, who inhabited the Missouri Plains and moved west to Colorado and Wyoming
2.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
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The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas and their descendants. The term Amerindian is used in Quebec, the Guianas, Indigenous peoples of the United States are commonly known as Native Americans or American Indians, and Alaska Natives. Application of the term Indian originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for Asia, eventually, the Americas came to be known as the West Indies, a name still used to refer to the islands of the Caribbean Sea. This led to the blanket term Indies and Indians for the indigenous inhabitants, although some indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers—and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are—many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. The impact of their agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time, although some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, chiefdoms, states, and empires. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by peoples, some countries have sizable populations, especially Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Greenland, Guatemala, Mexico. At least a different indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas. Some, such as the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guaraní, Mayan languages, many also maintain aspects of indigenous cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization, and subsistence practices. Like most cultures, over time, cultures specific to many indigenous peoples have evolved to incorporate traditional aspects, some indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Western culture and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples. The specifics of Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the dates and routes traveled, are the subject of ongoing research. According to archaeological and genetic evidence, North and South America were the last continents in the world with human habitation. During the Wisconsin glaciation, 50–17,000 years ago, falling sea levels allowed people to move across the bridge of Beringia that joined Siberia to northwest North America. Alaska was a glacial refugium because it had low snowfall, allowing a small population to exist, the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of North America, blocking nomadic inhabitants and confining them to Alaska for thousands of years. Indigenous genetic studies suggest that the first inhabitants of the Americas share a single population, one that developed in isolation. The isolation of these peoples in Beringia might have lasted 10–20,000 years, around 16,500 years ago, the glaciers began melting, allowing people to move south and east into Canada and beyond. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets. Another route proposed involves migration - either on foot or using primitive boats - along the Pacific Northwest coast to the south, archeological evidence of the latter would have been covered by the sea level rise of more than 120 meters since the last ice age
3.
John Wesley Powell
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John Wesley Wes Powell was a U. S. soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He is famous for the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition, a river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers. Powell served as director of the U. S. Geological Survey and proposed, for development of the arid West. Powell was born in Mount Morris, New York, in 1834 and his father, a poor itinerant preacher, had emigrated to the U. S. from Shrewsbury, England, in 1830. His family moved westward to Jackson, Ohio, then Walworth County, Wisconsin, before settling in rural Boone County, as a young man he undertook a series of adventures through the Mississippi River valley. In 1855, he spent four months walking across Wisconsin, during 1856, he rowed the Mississippi from St. Anthony, Minnesota, to the sea. In 1857, he rowed down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi River, in 1858 he rowed down the Illinois River, then up the Mississippi and the Des Moines River to central Iowa. At age 25, he was elected in 1859 to the Illinois Natural History Society, Powell studied at Illinois College, Illinois Institute, and Oberlin College, over a period of seven years while teaching, but was unable to attain his degree. During his studies Powell acquired a knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin, Powell had a restless nature and a deep interest in the natural sciences. This desire to learn natural sciences was against the wishes of his father. In 1860 when Powell was on a tour he decided that the Civil War was inevitable, he decided to study military science. Powells loyalties remained with the Union and the cause of abolishing slavery, on May 8,1861, he enlisted at Hennepin, Illinois, as a private in the 20th Illinois Infantry. He was described as age 27, height 5 6-1/2 tall, light complected, gray eyes, auburn hair and he was elected sergeant-major of the regiment, and when the 20th Illinois was mustered into the Federal service a month later, Powell was commissioned a second lieutenant. He enlisted in the Union Army as a cartographer, topographer, during the Civil War, he served first with the 20th Illinois Volunteers. While stationed at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he recruited a company that became Battery F of the 2nd Illinois Light Artillery with Powell as captain. On November 28,1861, Powell took a leave to marry the former Emma Dean. At the Battle of Shiloh, he lost most of his arm when struck by a minie ball while in the process of giving the order to fire. The raw nerve endings in his arm would continue to cause him pain for the rest of his life
4.
Ethnography
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Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study, an ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, the resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group. The typical ethnography is a study and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate. In all cases it should be reflexive, make a contribution toward the understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the reader. An ethnography records all observed behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations, the word ethnography is derived from the Greek ἔθνος, meaning a company, later a people, nation and -graphy meaning field of study. Ethnographic studies focus on large groups of people who interact over time. Ethnography is a design, where the researcher explains about shared learnt patterns of values, behaviour, beliefs. The field of anthropology originated from Europe and England designed in late 19th century and it spread its roots to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the main contributors like EB Tylor from Britain and Lewis H Morgan, franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, were a group of researchers from United States who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature. He gives the point of the native and this became the origin of field work. Since Malinowski was very firm with his approach he applied it practically and he was interested in learning the language of the islanders and stayed there for a long time doing his field work. The field of ethnography became very popular in the late 19th century, again, in the latter part of the 19th century, the field of anthropology became a good support for scientific formation. Though the field was flourishing it had a lot of threat to encounter, post colonialism, the research climate shifted towards post-modernism and feminism. Therefore, the field of anthropology moved into discipline of social science, gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated Völker-Beschreibung as an area of study. This became known as ethnography, following the introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin, there are different forms of ethnography, confessional ethnography, life history, feminist ethnography etc. Two popular forms of ethnography are realist ethnography and critical ethnography, realist ethnography, is a traditional approach used by cultural anthropologists
5.
Archaeology
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of palaeontology, Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world, Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past, in broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, the science of archaeology grew out of the older multi-disciplinary study known as antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied history with attention to ancient artifacts and manuscripts. Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, philosophical interest in the remains of Greco-Roman civilization and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the late Middle Age. Antiquarians, including John Leland and William Camden, conducted surveys of the English countryside, one of the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation was Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other monuments in southern England. He was also ahead of his time in the analysis of his findings and he attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes. Excavations were also carried out in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum and these excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738. The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, however, prior to the development of modern techniques, excavations tended to be haphazard, the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were overlooked. The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington and he undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, one of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith, James Hutton, the application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites
6.
Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation
7.
National Museum of Natural History
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The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an area of 1,500,000 square feet with 325,000 square feet of exhibition and public space. The museums collections contain over 126 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, the United States National Museum was founded in 1846 as part of the Smithsonian Institution. The museum was housed in the Smithsonian Institution Building, which is better known today as the Smithsonian Castle. A formal exhibit hall opened in 1858, the growing collection led to the construction of a new building, the National Museum Building. Covering a then-enormous 2.25 acres, it was built in just 15 months at a cost of $310,000, congress authorized construction of a new building on June 28,1902. The regents began considering sites for the new building in March, the D. C. architectural firm of Hornblower & Marshall was chosen to design the structure. Testing of the soil for the foundations was set for July 1903, the Natural History Building opened its doors to the public on March 17,1910, in order to provide the Smithsonian Institution with more space for collections and research. The building was not fully completed until June 1911, the structure cost $3.5 million dollars. The Neoclassical style building was the first structure constructed on the side of the National Mall as part of the 1901 McMillan Commission plan. In addition to the Smithsonians natural history collection, it housed the American history, art. Between 1981 and 2003, the National Museum of Natural History had 11 permanent, there were six directors alone between 1990 and 2002. Turnover was high as the directors were disenchanted by low levels of funding. Robert W. Fri was named the director in 1996. One of the largest donations in Smithsonian history was made during Fris tenure, kenneth E. Behring donated $20 million in 1997 to modernize the museum. Fri resigned in 2001 after disagreeing with Smithsonian leadership over the reorganization of the scientific research programs. J. Dennis OConnor, Provost of the Smithsonian Institution was named acting director of the museum on July 25,2001, eight months later, OConner resigned to become the vice president of research and dean of the graduate school at the University of Maryland
8.
Franz Boas
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Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the Father of American Anthropology. His work is associated with the movement of anthropological historicism, studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying geography. He then participated in an expedition to northern Canada where he became fascinated with the culture. He went on to do work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology. Among his most significant students were Manuel Gamio, A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology. Franz Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia, although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society. Boass parents were educated, well-to-do, and liberal, they did not like dogma of any kind, due to this, Boas was granted the independence to think for himself and pursue his own interests. Early in life he displayed a penchant for both nature and natural sciences, Boas vocally opposed anti-Semitism and refused to convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew. This is disputed however by Ruth Bunzel, a protégée of Boas, according to his biographer, He was an ethnic German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America. In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote, The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force. My father, liberal, but not active in affairs, my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public matters. My parents had broken through the shackles of dogma and my father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom. From kindergarten on, Boas was educated in history, a subject he enjoyed. In gymnasium, he was most proud of his research on the distribution of plants. In 1879, he hoped to transfer to Berlin University to study physics under Hermann von Helmholtz, the combination of physics and geography also may have been accomplished through a major in physics and a minor in geography. Boas, due to deafness, encountered difficulties studying tonal languages such as Laguna
9.
Mound Builders
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Since the 19th century, the prevailing scholarly consensus has been that the mounds were constructed by indigenous peoples of the Americas. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers made contact with living in a number of later Mississippian cities, described their cultures. By the time of United States westward expansion two hundred years later, Native Americans were generally not knowledgeable about the civilizations that produced the mounds, research and study of these cultures and peoples has been based mostly on archaeology and anthropology. At one time, the mound builder was applied to the people believed to have constructed these earthworks. In the 16th through 19th centuries, Europeans and Americans generally thought that an other than one related to the historic Native Americans had built the mounds. The namesake cultural trait of the Mound Builders was the building of mounds and these burial and ceremonial structures were typically flat-topped pyramids or platform mounds, flat-topped or rounded cones, elongated ridges, and sometimes a variety of other forms. They were generally built as part of villages that arose from more dense populations, with a specialization of skills. The early earthworks built in Louisiana c.3500 BCE are the ones known to be built by a hunter-gatherer culture. The best-known flat-topped pyramidal structure, which at over 100 feet tall is the largest pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mexico, is Monks Mound at Cahokia in present-day Collinsville, Illinois. At its peak about 1150 CE, Cahokia was a settlement with 20, 000-30,000 people. Some effigy mounds were constructed in the shapes or outlines of culturally significant animals, the most famous effigy mound, Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, ranges from 1 to just over 3 feet tall. 20 feet wide, over 1,330 feet long, many different tribal groups and chiefdoms, involving an array of beliefs and unique cultures over thousands of years, built mounds as expressions of their cultures. The general term, mound builder, covered their shared architectural practice of earthwork mound construction and this practice, believed to be associated with a cosmology that had a cross-cultural appeal, may indicate common cultural antecedents. The first mound building was a marker of political and social complexity among the cultures in the Eastern United States. Watson Brake in Louisiana, constructed about 3500 BCE during the Middle Archaic period, is the oldest dated mound complex in North America and it is one of eleven mound complexes from this period found in the Lower Mississippi Valley. We can conclude that these mound builders were very organized people, hundreds or even thousands of workers had to dig up tons of earth with the hand tools available. Then the dirt had to be moved long distances. The most complete reference for these earthworks is Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, written by Ephraim G. Squier and it was published in 1848 by the Smithsonian
10.
Earthworks (archaeology)
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In archaeology, earthworks are artificial changes in land level, typically made from piles of artificially placed or sculpted rocks and soil. Earthworks are often known as barrows in England, and mounds in North America, Earthworks can themselves be archaeological features, or they can show features beneath the surface. They are believed to have used as monuments for spiritual ritual ceremonies. Long barrows are oblong-shaped mounds that are used for burials, tumuli are mounds of earth created over a tomb, it has the same meaning as barrow. A cross dyke or cross-ridge dyke is a bank and ditch, found in Europe and often belonging to the later Bronze Age or Iron Age. Often marked on Ordnance Survey maps in the UK. Ridge and furrows are sets of parallel depressions, mottes are mound structures made of earth and stone that once held castles. A round barrow is a mound that is in a shape that was used during Neolithic times as a burial mound. Geoglyph, a design or motif Earthworks can vary in height from a few centimetres to the size of Silbury Hill at 40 metres. They can date from the Neolithic to the present, the structures can also stretch for many tens of kilometres. In area, they can cover many hectares, for example, Maiden Castle, shallow earthworks are often more visible as cropmarks or in aerial photographs if taken when the sun is low in the sky and shadows are more pronounced. Similarly, earthworks may be visible after a frost or a light dusting of snow. Earthworks can be detected and plotted using Light Detection and Ranging and this technique is particularly useful for mapping small variations in land height that would be difficult to detect by eye. It can be used to map features beneath forest canopy and for features hidden by other vegetation, LIDAR results can be input into a geographic information system to produce three-dimensional representations of the earthworks. An accurate survey of the earthworks can enable them to be interpreted without the need for excavation, for example, earthworks from deserted medieval villages can be used to determine the location, size, and layout of lost settlements. Often these earthworks can point to the purpose of such a settlement, Earthworks in North America include mounds built by Native Americans known as the Mound Builders. Ancient people who lived in the American Midwest commonly built effigy mounds, possibly the most famous of these effigy mounds is Serpent Mound. Located in the Ohio, this 411-meterlong earthen work is thought to memorialize alignments of the planets, cone-shaped or conical mounds are also numerous, with thousands of them scattered across the American Midwest, some over 80 feet tall. These conical mounds appear to be marking the graves of one person or even dozens of people
11.
Prehistory
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Prehistory means literally before history, from the Latin word for before, præ, and Greek ιστορία. Neighbouring civilisations were the first to follow, most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing is known as the protohistory of the culture. By definition, there are no records from human prehistory. Clear techniques for dating were not well-developed until the 19th century and this article is concerned with human prehistory as defined here above. There are separate articles for the history of the Earth. However, for the race as a whole, prehistory ends when recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BC. For example, in Egypt it is accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently. The three-age system is the periodization of prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective predominant tool-making technologies, Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age. The notion of prehistory began to surface during the Enlightenment in the work of antiquarians who used the word primitive to describe societies that existed before written records, the first use of the word prehistory in English, however, occurred in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836. The main source for prehistory is archaeology, but some scholars are beginning to more use of evidence from the natural and social sciences. This view has been articulated by advocates of deep history, human population geneticists and historical linguists are also providing valuable insight for these questions. Human prehistory differs from history not only in terms of its chronology, restricted to material processes, remains and artifacts rather than written records, prehistory is anonymous. Because of this, reference terms that use, such as Neanderthal or Iron Age are modern labels with definitions sometimes subject to debate. Palaeolithic means Old Stone Age, and begins with the first use of stone tools, the Paleolithic is the earliest period of the Stone Age. The early part of the Palaeolithic is called the Lower Palaeolithic, evidence of control of fire by early humans during the Lower Palaeolithic Era is uncertain and has at best limited scholarly support. The most widely accepted claim is that H. erectus or H. ergaster made fires between 790,000 and 690,000 BP in a site at Bnot Yaakov Bridge, Israel. The use of fire enabled early humans to cook food, provide warmth, Early Homo sapiens originated some 200,000 years ago, ushering in the Middle Palaeolithic
12.
Pre-Columbian era
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For this reason the alternative terms of Precontact Americas, Pre-Colonial Americas or Prehistoric Americas are also in use. In areas of Latin America the term used is Pre-Hispanic. Other civilizations were contemporary with the period and were described in European historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Maya civilization, had their own written records, because many Christian Europeans of the time viewed such texts as heretical, men like Diego de Landa destroyed many texts in pyres, even while seeking to preserve native histories. Only a few documents have survived in their original languages, while others were transcribed or dictated into Spanish, giving modern historians glimpses of ancient culture. Indigenous American cultures continue to evolve after the pre-Columbian era, many of these peoples and their descendants continue traditional practices, while evolving and adapting new cultural practices and technologies into their lives. Now, the study of pre-Columbian cultures is most often based on scientific. Asian nomads are thought to have entered the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge, now the Bering Strait, genetic evidence found in Amerindians maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA supports the theory of multiple genetic populations migrating from Asia. Over the course of millennia, Paleo-Indians spread throughout North and South America, exactly when the first group of people migrated into the Americas is the subject of much debate. One of the earliest identifiable cultures was the Clovis culture, with sites dating from some 13,000 years ago, however, older sites dating back to 20,000 years ago have been claimed. Some genetic studies estimate the colonization of the Americas dates from between 40,000 and 13,000 years ago, the chronology of migration models is currently divided into two general approaches. The first is the short chronology theory with the first movement beyond Alaska into the New World occurring no earlier than 14, 000–17,000 years ago, followed by successive waves of immigrants. The second belief is the long chronology theory, which proposes that the first group of people entered the hemisphere at an earlier date, possibly 50. In that case, the Eskimo peoples would have arrived separately and at a later date, probably no more than 2,000 years ago. The North American climate was unstable as the ice age receded and it finally stabilized by about 10,000 years ago, climatic conditions were then very similar to todays. Within this timeframe, roughly pertaining to the Archaic Period, numerous archaeological cultures have been identified, the unstable climate led to widespread migration, with early Paleo-Indians soon spreading throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally distinct tribes. The paleo-indians were hunter-gatherers, likely characterized by small, mobile bands consisting of approximately 20 to 50 members of an extended family and these groups moved from place to place as preferred resources were depleted and new supplies were sought. During much of the Paleo-Indian period, bands are thought to have subsisted primarily through hunting now-extinct giant land animals such as mastodon, Paleo-Indian groups carried a variety of tools
