1.
Upper Paleolithic
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The Upper Paleolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity, modern humans are believed to have emerged about 195,000 years ago in Africa. Although these humans were modern in anatomy, their lifestyle changed very little from their contemporaries, such as Homo erectus, about 50,000 years ago, there was a marked increase in the diversity of artifacts. In Africa, bone artifacts and the first art appear in the archeological record, between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago, this new tool technology spread with human migration to Europe. The new technology generated an explosion of modern humans which is believed to have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. The Upper Paleolithic has the earliest known evidence of organized settlements, in the form of campsites, artistic work blossomed, with cave painting, petroglyphs, carvings and engravings on bone or ivory. The first evidence of fishing is also noted, from artifacts in places such as Blombos cave in South Africa. More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and this probably contributed to increasing group identification or ethnicity. By 50, 000–40,000 BP, the first humans set foot in Australia, by 45,000 BP, humans lived at 61° north latitude in Europe. By 30,000 BP, Japan was reached, and by 27,000 BP humans were present in Siberia above the Arctic Circle, at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, a group of humans crossed the Bering land bridge and quickly expanded throughout North and South America. Both Homo erectus and Neanderthals used the same crude stone tools, archaeologist Richard G. Klein, who has worked extensively on ancient stone tools, describes the stone tool kit of archaic hominids as impossible to categorize. It was as if the Neanderthals made stone tools, and were not much concerned about their final forms and he argues that almost everywhere, whether Asia, Africa or Europe, before 50,000 years ago all the stone tools are much alike and unsophisticated. These new stone-tool types have been described as being distinctly differentiated from each other, the invaders, commonly referred to as the Cro-Magnons, left many sophisticated stone tools, carved and engraved pieces on bone, ivory and antler, cave paintings and Venus figurines. The Neanderthals continued to use Mousterian stone tool technology and possibly Chatelperronian technology and these tools disappeared from the archeological record at around the same time the Neanderthals themselves disappeared from the fossil record, about 40,000 years ago. Settlements were often located in valley bottoms, possibly associated with hunting of passing herds of animals. Hunting was important, and caribou/wild reindeer may well be the species of single greatest importance in the anthropological literature on hunting. Technological advances included significant developments in flint tool manufacturing, with industries based on fine blades rather than simpler and shorter flakes, burins and racloirs were used to work bone, antler and hides. Advanced darts and harpoons also appear in period, along with the fish hook, the oil lamp, rope
2.
Mesolithic
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In archaeology, the Mesolithic is the culture between Paleolithic and Neolithic. The term Epipaleolithic is often used for areas outside northern Europe, Mesolithic has different time spans in different parts of Eurasia. It was originally post-Pleistocene, pre-agricultural material in northwest Europe about 10,000 to 5000 BC, in the archaeology of Northern Europe, for example for archaeological sites in Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Ukraine, and Russia, the term Mesolithic is almost always used. In the archaeology of other areas, the term Epipaleolithic may be preferred by most authors, in the New World, neither term is used. Other authors use the term Mesolithic for a variety of Late Paleolithic cultures subsequent to the end of the last glacial period whether they are transitional towards agriculture or not, conversely, those that are in course of transition toward artificial food production are assigned to the Mesolithic. Therefore, care must be taken in translating Mesolithic as Middle Stone Age, subdivisions of earlier and later were added to the Stone Age by Thomsen and especially his junior colleague and employee Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae. John Lubbock kept these divisions in his work Pre-historic Times in 1865 and he saw no need for an intermediate category. When Hodder Westropp introduced the Mesolithic in 1866, as an intermediate between Paleolithic and Neolithic, a storm of controversy immediately arose around it. A British school led by John Evans denied any need for an intermediate, the ages blended together like the colors of a rainbow, he said. A European school led by Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet asserted that there was a gap between the earlier and later, edouard Piette claimed to have filled the gap with his discovery of the Azilian Culture. Knut Stjerna offered an alternative in the Epipaleolithic, a continuation of the use of Paleolithic technology, the start and end dates of the Mesolithic vary by geographical region. Childes view prevails that the term covers the period between the end of the Pleistocene and the start of the Neolithic. If the Mesolithic is more similar to the Paleolithic it is called the Epipaleolithic, the Paleolithic was an age of purely hunting and gathering while in the Neolithic domestication of plants and animals had occurred. Some Mesolithic peoples continued with intensive hunting, others were practising the initial stages of domestication. The type of remains the diagnostic factor, The Mesolithic featured composite devices manufactured with Mode V chipped stone tools. The Paleolithic had utilized Modes I–IV and the Neolithic mainly abandoned the chipped microliths in favor of polished, not chipped, the first period, known as Mesolithic 1, followed the Aurignacian or Levantine Upper Paleolithic periods throughout the Levant. By the end of the Aurignacian, gradual changes took place in stone industries, small stone tools called microliths and retouched bladelets can be found for the first time. The microliths of this period differ greatly from the Aurignacian artifacts
3.
Maglemosian culture
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Maglemosian is the name given to a culture of the early Mesolithic period in Northern Europe. In Scandinavia, the culture was succeeded by the Kongemose culture, the name originates from the Danish archeological site Maglemose, situated near Gørlev and Høng on western Zealand, southwest of lake Tissø. Here the first settlement of the culture was excavated in 1900, during the following century a long series of similar settlements were excavated from England to Poland and from Skåne in Sweden to northern France. The Maglemosian people lived in forest and wetland environments, using fishing and hunting tools made from wood, bone and it appears that they had domesticated the dog. Some may have lived settled lives, but most were nomadic, huts made of bark have been preserved, and the tools were made of flint, bone, and horn. A characteristic of the culture are the sharply edged microliths of flintstone, used for spear, another notable feature is the leister, a characteristic type of fishing spear, used for gigging. When the Maglemosian culture reigned, sea levels were lower than now and Europe. The cultural period overlaps the end of the last ice age, when the ice retreated, therefore, there is hope that the emerging discipline of underwater archaeology may reveal interesting finds related to the Maglemosian culture in the future. CBA Research Report 141,2004, s, 23ff Danish-language texts Geoffrey Bibby, Spadens vidnedsbyrd, Wormanium 1980, ISBN 87-8516-071-7 s. 109f Gyldendal og Politikens Danmarkshistorie, Bind 1, I begyndelsen, fra de ældste tider til ca. 86ff Anders Fischer, En håndfuld flint, Skalk nr, 8ff Anders Fischer, Mennesket og havet i ældre stenalder, i, Carin Bunte, Arkeologi och Naturvetenskab, Lund 2005, s. 276ff Kim Aaris-Sørensen, Uroksejagt, Skalk nr, 10ff Ole Grøn, Teltning, Skalk nr. 13f Søren A. Sørensen, Hytte ved sø, Skalk nr, 25ff Peter Vang Petersen, Bjørnejagt, Skalk nr. 3ff Poul og Kristian Krabbe, Vest for Valhal, Skalk nr, 11ff Axel Degn Johansen, Ikke en sky og ikke en vind
4.
Kunda culture
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The oldest known Kunda culture settlement in Estonia is Pulli settlement. The Kunda Culture is succeeded by the Narva culture who use pottery, most Kunda settlements are located near the edge of the forests beside rivers, lakes, or marshes. Elk were extensively hunted, perhaps helped by trained domestic hunting-dogs, on the coast seal hunting is represented. Pike and other fish were taken from the rivers, there is a rich bone and antler industry, especially in relation to fishing gear. Tools were decorated with geometric designs, lacking the complexity of the contemporary Maglemosian Culture communities to the southwest. The Kunda culture appears to have undergone a transition from the Palaeolithic Swiderian culture located previously over much of the same range, one such transition settlement, Pasieniai 1C in Lithuania, features stone tools of both Late Swiderian and early Kunda. One shape manufactured in both cultures is the retouched tanged point, the final Swiderian is dated 7800–7600 BC by calibrated radiocarbon dating, which is in the Preboreal period, at the end of which time with no gap the early Kunda begins. Evidently the descendants of the Swiderians were the first to settle Estonia when it became habitable, other post-Swiderian groups extended as far east as the Ural mountains. Kunda, Estonia Pulli, Estonia Luga Pasieniai, Lithuania Ristola, Finland Velizh Zvejnieki, Latvia
5.
Narva culture
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A successor of the Mesolithic Kunda culture, Narva culture continued up to the start of the Bronze Age. The technology was that of hunter-gatherers, the culture was named after the Narva River in Estonia. The people of the Narva culture had little access to flint, therefore, they were forced to trade, for example, there were very few flint arrowheads and flint was often reused. The Narva culture relied on local materials, heavy use of bones and horns is one of the main characteristics of the Narva culture. The bone tools, continued from the predecessor Kunda culture, provide the best evidence of continuity of the Narva culture throughout the Neolithic period, the people were buried on their backs with few grave goods. The Narva culture also used and traded amber, a few hundred items were found in Juodkrantė, one of the most famous artifacts is a ceremonial cane carved of horn as a head of female elk found in Šventoji. The people were primarily fishers, hunters, and gatherers and they slowly began adopting husbandry in middle Neolithic. They were not nomadic and lived in same settlements for periods as evidenced by abundant pottery, middens. The pottery shared similarities with Comb Ceramic culture, but had specific characteristics, one of the most persistent features was mixing clay with other organic matter, most often crushed snail shells. The pottery was made of 6-to-9 cm wide clay strips with minimal decorations around the rim, the vessels were wide and large, the height and the width were often the same. The bottoms were pointed or rounded, and only the latest examples have narrow flat bottoms, from mid-Neolithic Narva pottery was influenced and eventually disappeared into the Corded Ware culture. For a long time believed that the first inhabitants of the region were Finno-Ugric. In 1931, Latvian archeologist Eduards Šturms was the first to note that artifacts found near Zebrus Lake in Latvia were different, in early 1950s settlements on the Narva River were excavated. Lembit Jaanits and Nina Gurina grouped the findings with similar artifacts from eastern Baltic region, at first it was believed that Narva culture ended with appearance of the Corded Ware culture. However, newer research extended it up to the Bronze Age, as Narva culture spanned several millenniums and encompassed a large territory, archaeologists attempted to subdivide the culture into regions or periods. For example, in Lithuania two regions are distinguished, southern and western, there is an academic debate what ethnicity represented the Narva culture, Finno-Ugrians or other Europids, preceding arrival of the Indo-Europeans. It is also unclear how the Narva culture fits with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, overview of Neolithic sites on Narva River in Estonia
6.
Swiderian culture
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Swiderian culture, also published in English literature as Sviderian and Swederian, is the name of Final Palaeolithic cultural complexes in Poland and the surrounding areas. The type-site is Świdry Wielkie, in Otwock near the Swider River, the Swiderian is recognized as a distinctive culture that developed on the sand dunes left behind by the retreating glaciers. The crude flint blades of Early Swiderian are found in the area of Nowy Mlyn in the Holy Cross Mountains region, late Swiderian is characterized by blades with a blunted back. The Swiderian culture plays a role in the Palaeolithic-Mesolithic transition. It has been accepted that most of the Swiderian population emigrated at the very end of the Pleistocene to the northeast following the retreating tundra. Recent radiocarbon dates prove that some groups of the Svidero-Ahrensburgian Complex persisted into the Preboreal, unlike western Europe, the Mesolithic groups now inhabiting the Polish Plain were newcomers. This has been attested by a 300-year-long gap between the youngest Palaeolithic and the oldest Mesolithic occupation, the oldest Mesolithic site is Chwalim, located in western Silesia, Poland, it outdates the Mesolithic sites situated to the east in central and northeastern Poland by about 150 years. Thus, the Mesolithic population progressed from the west after a 300-year-long settlement break, the Ukrainian archaeologist L. Zalizniak believes Kunda culture of Central Russia and the Baltic zone, and other so-called post-Swiderian cultures, derive from the Swiderian culture. The raw materials of the assemblage at Sujala originate in the Varanger Peninsula in northern Norway. Proposed parallels with the blade technology among the earliest Mesolithic finds in southern Norway would have placed the find closer or even before 10000 BP. However, a connection to early North Norwegian settlements is contradicted by the shape of the tanged points. There, counterparts of the Sujala cores can also be found, the Sujala assemblage is currently considered unquestionably post-Swiderian and is dated by radiocarbon to 9265-8930 BP, the true age being approximately 8300-8200 CalBC. Such an Early Mesolithic influence from Russia or the Baltic might imply an adjustment to previous thoughts on the colonization of the Barents Sea coast
7.
Prehistory of Transylvania
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The Prehistory of Transylvania describes what can be learned about the region known as Transylvania through archaeology, anthropology, comparative linguistics and other allied sciences. Transylvania proper is a plateau or tableland in northwest central Romania and it is bounded and defined by the Carpathian Mountains to the east and south, and the Apuseni Mountains to the west. As a diverse and relatively protected region, the area has always been rich in wildlife, the mountains contain a large number of caves, which attracted both human and animal residents. The Peştera Urşilor, the Cave of Bears, was home to a number of cave bears whose remains were discovered when the cave was found by humans in 1975. Other caves in the area sheltered early humans, Prehistory is the longest period in the history of mankind, developing from times when the writing was still unknown. Chronologically it stretches from the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age to the Iron Age, the chronological frame of the Paleolithic coincides with that of the Pleistocene, and is marked by four great glaciations, as established in the Alps. Likewise, in the Ciurul Mare Cave in the Pǎdurea Craiului Mountains speleologists have discovered some distinctively male, female, an anthropological analysis has identified Cro-Magnon and even Neanderthal characteristics in these footprints. The economy of the Paleolithic communities consisted mainly of exploiting natural resources, gathering, fishing, as early as the Lower Paleolithic, human groups either hunted or trapped game. We can assume that in Transylvania, alongside mammoths or deer, horses were an important food source. The Lower Paleolithic in Transylvania, because data are scarce, is largely a mystery, if the discovery of an Acheulean lithic item at Căpuşu Mic and of several Pre-Mousterian lithic items at Tălmaciu are a certain fact, their precise stratigraphic position remains to be established. The Middle Paleolithic – Mousterian – covers a period much shorter than that of the prior epoch. The Mousterian period is closest to the alpine Paleolithic, both periods were characterized by the presence of numerous quartzite slivers and chips, with the bones of hunted game outnumbering the tools. Consequently, specialists consider this Mousterian to be an Eastern Charentian”, the process of regional diversification among cultures was accelerated in the Upper Paleolithic through the middle to upper Würm. The onset of the Aurignacian culture seems to have paralleled the late Mousterian facies in the Carpathian caves, northwestern Transylvania is the site where layers of the Middle Aurignacian culture have been identified, as signaled by the presence of blade scrapers, refitted core, burins. In Banat, the settlements of Tincova, Coşova and Româneşti-Dumbrăviţa, have produced flint tools demonstrating that the Aurignacian in this area evolved closely with that in Central Europe. The Eastern Gravettian had a long evolution, featuring several stages of development as documented especially by the settlements in Moldova, the populations evolving at the onset of the Bölling oscillation and which have continued to the end of the Preboreal have been generally attributed to the Epipaleolithic. Consequently, this period could be associated with the interval between 13,000 and about 9, 500-9,000 BP. These communities continued the lifestyles of the Upper Paleolithic, the area of Porţile de Fier is settled by a population attributed to the Late Epigravettian or Mediterranean Tardigravettian
8.
Prehistory of Southeastern Europe
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For the history of Earth before the occupation by the genus homo, including the period of early hominins, see Geology of Europe and Human evolution. The changes between these are gradual, for example, depending on interpretation, protohistory might or might not include Bronze Age Greece, Minoan, Mycenaean, Thracian and Venetic cultures. By one interpretation of the criterion, Southeastern Europe enters protohistory only with Homer. At any rate, the period ends before Herodotus in the 5th century BC, the earliest evidence of human occupation discovered in the Balkans, in Kozarnika Bulgaria, date from at least 1.4 million years ago. There is evidence of presence in the Balkans from the Lower Paleolithic onwards. According to Douglass W. Bailey, The Palaeolithic period, literally the “Old Stone Age”, is an ancient cultural level of development characterized by the use of unpolished chipped stone tools. The transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic is directly related to the development of modernity by hominids around 40,000 years BP. To denote the significance and degree of change, this dramatic shift from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic is sometimes called the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. In the late Pleistocene, various components of the culture and environmental features indicate continual change. The aforementioned aspects leave some doubt that the term Upper Palaeolithic Revolution is appropriate to the Balkans, in general, continual evolutionary changes are the first crucial characteristic of the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic in the Balkans. The notion of the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution that has developed for core European regions is not applicable to the Balkans. This particularly significant moment and its origins are defined and enlightened by other characteristics of the transition to upper Old Stone Age, the environment, climate, flora and fauna corroborate the implications. During the last interglacial period and the most recent glaciation of the Pleistocene, the glaciations did not affect southeastern Europe to the extent that they did in the northern and central regions. The evidence of forest and steppe indicate the influence was not so drastic, some species of flora, the Balkans today still abound in species endemic only to this part of Europe. The notion of gradual transition best defines Balkan Europe from about 50,000 BP, in this sense, the material culture and natural environment of the Balkans of the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene were distinct from other parts of Europe. Douglass W. ” Thus, in speaking about southeastern Europe, in this regard, the absence of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in the Balkans does not seem to be surprising. Civilisations develop new and distinctive characteristics as they respond to new challenges in their environment, in 2002, some of the oldest modern human remains in Europe were discovered in the Cave With Bones, near Anina, Romania. Nicknamed John of Anina, the remains are approximately 37,800 years old and these are some of Europe’s oldest remains of Homo sapiens, so they are likely to represent the first such people to have entered the continent
9.
Levantine corridor
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The Levantine corridor is the relatively narrow strip between the Mediterranean Sea to the northwest and deserts to the southeast which connects Africa to Eurasia. This corridor is a route of migrations of animals between Eurasia and Africa. In particular, it is believed that early hominins spread from Africa to Eurasia via the Levantine corridor, the corridor is named after the Levant. The Levantine Corridor is the part of the Fertile Crescent. Botanists recognize this area as a route of plant species. The first sedentary villages were established around fresh water springs and lakes in the Levantine corridor by the Natufian culture, the term is used frequently by archaeologists as an area that includes Cyprus, where important developments occurred during the Neolithic revolution
10.
Natufian culture
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The Epipaleolithic Natufian culture /nəˈtuːfiən/ existed from around 12,500 to 9,500 BC in the Levant, a region in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population even before the introduction of agriculture, the Natufian communities may be the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world. Natufians founded Jericho which may be the oldest city in the world, some evidence suggests deliberate cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, by the Natufian culture, at Tell Abu Hureyra, the site of earliest evidence of agriculture in the world. Generally, though, Natufians exploited wild cereals, Dorothy Garrod coined the term Natufian based on her excavations at Shuqba cave in Wadi an-Natuf, in the western Judean Mountains. The Natufian culture was discovered by British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod during her excavations of Shuqba cave in the Judaean Hills, prior to the 1930s, the majority of archaeological work taking place in Palestine was biblical archaeology focused on historic periods, and little was known about the regions prehistory. She discovered a layer sandwiched between the Upper Palaeolithic and Bronze Age deposits characterised by the presence of microliths. She identified this with the Mesolithic, a period between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic which was well represented in Europe but had not yet been found in the Near East. A year later, when she discovered similar material at el-Wad Terrace, Garrod suggested the name the Natufian culture, as early as 1931, both Garrod and Neuville drew attention to the presence of stone sickles in Natufian assemblages and the possibility that this represented very early agriculture. Radiocarbon dating places this culture from the terminal Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene. The period is split into two subperiods, Early Natufian and Late Natufian. The Late Natufian most likely occurred in tandem with the Younger Dryas, the Natufian developed in the same region as the earlier Kebaran industry. It is generally seen as a successor, which evolved out of elements within that preceding culture, more generally there has been discussion of the similarities of these cultures with those found in coastal North Africa. In fact, Weiss et al. have shown that the earliest known usage of plants was in the Levant 23,000 years ago at the Ohalo II site. Loring Brace cross-analysed the craniometric traits of Natufian specimens with those of ancient and modern groups from the Near East, Africa. Settlements occur in the belt where oak and Pistacia species dominated. The underbrush of this woodland was grass with high frequencies of grain. The habitations of the Natufian are semi-subterranean, often with a dry-stone foundation, the superstructure was probably made of brushwood. No traces of mudbrick have been found, which became common in the following Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, the round houses have a diameter between three and six meters, and they contain a central round or subrectangular fireplace
11.
Khiamian
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The Khiamian is a period of the Near-Eastern Neolithic, marking the transition between the Natufian and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. Some sources date it from about 10,000 to 9,500 BCE and it currently dates between 10,200 and 8800 BC according to the ASPRO chronology. They have served to identify sites of this period, which are found in Israel, as well as in Jordan, Sinai, aside from the appearance of El Khiam arrow heads, the Khiamian is placed in the continuity of the Natufian, without any major technical innovations. However, for the first time houses were built on the level itself. Otherwise, the bearers of the El Khiam culture were still hunter-gatherers, the Khiamien also sees a change occur in the symbolic aspects of culture, as evidenced by the appearance of small female statuettes, as well as by the burying of aurochs skulls. According to Jacques Cauvin, it is the beginning of the worship of the Woman, zivilisationen – wie die Kultur nach Sumer kam. The birth of the gods and the origins of agriculture, catastrophic early Holocene sea level rise, human migration and the Neolithic transition in Europe
12.
Zarzian culture
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Zarzian culture is an archaeological culture of late Paleolithic and Mesolithic in Southwest Asia. The period of the culture is estimated about 18, 000–8,000 years BC and it was preceded by the Baradostian culture in the same region and was related to the Imereti culture of the Caucasus. The culture was named and recognised of the cave of Zarzi in Iraqi Kurdistan, here were found plenty of microliths. Their forms are short and asymmetric trapezoids, and triangles with hollows, andy Burns states The Zarzian of the Zagros region of Iran is contemporary with the Natufian but different from it. The only dates for the entire Zarzian come from Palegawra Cave, and date to 17, 300-17, 000BP and it seems to have evolved from the Upper Palaeolithic Baradostian. There are only a few Zarzian sites and the area appears to have been sparsely populated during the Epipalaeolithic. Faunal remains from the Zarzian indicate that the form of structures indicate a hunter-gatherer subsistence strategy, focused on onager, red deer. Better known sites include Palegawra Cave, Shanidar B2 and Zarzi, the Zarzian culture seems to have participated in the early stages of what Kent Flannery has called the broad spectrum revolution. The Zarzian culture is associated with remains of the domesticated dog. It seems to have extended north into the Gobustan region and into Eastern Iran as a forerunner of the Hissar, epipaleolithic Prehistory of Iran History of Mesopotamia Trialetian cuture Natufian culture Khiamian
13.
Neolithic
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It ended when metal tools became widespread. The Neolithic is a progression of behavioral and cultural characteristics and changes, including the use of wild and domestic crops, the beginning of the Neolithic culture is considered to be in the Levant about 10, 200–8800 BC. It developed directly from the Epipaleolithic Natufian culture in the region, whose people pioneered the use of wild cereals, which then evolved into true farming. The Natufian period was between 12,000 and 10,200 BC, and the so-called proto-Neolithic is now included in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic between 10,200 and 8800 BC. By 10, 200–8800 BC, farming communities arose in the Levant and spread to Asia Minor, North Africa, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. Early Neolithic farming was limited to a range of plants, both wild and domesticated, which included einkorn wheat, millet and spelt, and the keeping of dogs, sheep. By about 6900–6400 BC, it included domesticated cattle and pigs, the establishment of permanently or seasonally inhabited settlements, not all of these cultural elements characteristic of the Neolithic appeared everywhere in the same order, the earliest farming societies in the Near East did not use pottery. Early Japanese societies and other East Asian cultures used pottery before developing agriculture, unlike the Paleolithic, when more than one human species existed, only one human species reached the Neolithic. The term Neolithic derives from the Greek νέος néos, new and λίθος líthos, stone, the term was invented by Sir John Lubbock in 1865 as a refinement of the three-age system. In the Middle East, cultures identified as Neolithic began appearing in the 10th millennium BC, early development occurred in the Levant and from there spread eastwards and westwards. Neolithic cultures are attested in southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia by around 8000 BC. The total excavated area is more than 1,200 square yards, the Neolithic 1 period began roughly 10,000 years ago in the Levant. A temple area in southeastern Turkey at Göbekli Tepe dated around 9500 BC may be regarded as the beginning of the period. This site was developed by nomadic tribes, evidenced by the lack of permanent housing in the vicinity. At least seven stone circles, covering 25 acres, contain limestone pillars carved with animals, insects, Stone tools were used by perhaps as many as hundreds of people to create the pillars, which might have supported roofs. Other early PPNA sites dating to around 9500–9000 BC have been found in Jericho, Israel, Gilgal in the Jordan Valley, the start of Neolithic 1 overlaps the Tahunian and Heavy Neolithic periods to some degree. The major advance of Neolithic 1 was true farming, in the proto-Neolithic Natufian cultures, wild cereals were harvested, and perhaps early seed selection and re-seeding occurred. The grain was ground into flour, emmer wheat was domesticated, and animals were herded and domesticated
14.
Ancient Greek
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Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. It is often divided into the Archaic period, Classical period. It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine. Koine is regarded as a historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it closely resembled Attic Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects, Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language, Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms, homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic, the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period and they have the same general outline, but differ in some of the detail. The invasion would not be Dorian unless the invaders had some relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Often non-west is called East Greek, Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, and Northern Peloponnesus Doric. The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek and this dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek, by about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek
15.
Epipaleolithic
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Epipaleolithic is a term used for the final Upper Palaeolithic industries occurring at the end of the final glaciation which appear to merge technologically into the Mesolithic. The period is dated from c. 20,000 BP to c. 10,500 BP. The term is used as a synonym of Mesolithic. Inversely, those that are in transitional ways towards artificial production of food are inscribed in the Mesolithic, epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherers, generally nomadic, made relatively advanced tools from small flint or obsidian blades, known as microliths, that were hafted in wooden implements. The Epipaleolithic is best understood when discussing the southern Levant, as the period is well documented due to preservation at the site. Of these animals, it is likely only the equids were migrational
16.
Northern Europe
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Northern Europe is the northern part or region of Europe. However, narrower definitions may also be used based on geographical factors, such as climate. Greenland, geographically a part of North America, is politically a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, while Northern Europe overlaps with most of Northwestern Europe, north-Central Europe, and Northeastern Europe, it does not border Southern Europe. Countries which are central-western, central-central, or central-eastern are generally considered part of neither Northern Europe or Southern Europe. Historically, when Europe was dominated by the Mediterranean region, everything not near this sea was termed Northern Europe, including southern Germany, all of the Low Countries and this meaning is still used today in some contexts, such as in discussions of the Northern Renaissance. In medieval times, the term Thule was used to mean a place in the extreme northern reaches of the continent. The region has a south west extreme of around 50 degrees north, the entire regions climate is mildly affected by the Gulf Stream. From the west climates vary from maritime and maritime subarctic climates, in the north and central climates are generally subarctic or Arctic and to the east climates are mostly subarctic and temperate/continental. With the exception of the United Kingdom and Ireland, Northern European countries are known for harsh winters with temperatures reaching as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius in some parts. Countries in Northern Europe have large, developed economies and some of the highest standards of living in the world and they often score highly on surveys measuring quality of life, such as the Human Development Index
17.
Eurasia
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Eurasia /jʊˈreɪʒə/ is a combined continental landmass of Europe and Asia. The term is a portmanteau of its constituent continents, in geology, Eurasia is often considered as a single rigid megablock. However, the rigidity of Eurasia is debated based on the paleomagnet data, Eurasia covers around 55,000,000 square kilometres, or around 36. 2% of the Earths total land area. The landmass contains around 5.0 billion people, equating to approximately 70% of the human population, humans first settled in Eurasia between 60,000 and 125,000 years ago. Physiographically, Eurasia is a single continent, the concepts of Europe and Asia as distinct continents date back to antiquity and their borders are geologically arbitrary. Eurasia is connected to Africa at the Suez Canal, and Eurasia is sometimes combined with Africa as the largest contiguous landmass on Earth called Afro-Eurasia. Eurasia formed 375 to 325 million years ago with the merging of Siberia, Kazakhstania, and Baltica, chinese cratons collided with Siberias southern coast. Eurasia has been the host of ancient civilizations, including those based in Mesopotamia. In the Axial Age, a belt of civilizations stretched through the Eurasian subtropical zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This belt became the mainstream of world history for two millennia, originally, “Eurasia” is a geographical notion, in this sense, it is simply the biggest continent, the combined landmass of Europe and Asia. However, geopolitically, the word has different meanings, reflecting the specific geopolitical interests of each nation. “Eurasia” is one of the most important geopolitical concepts, as Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, how America manages Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates “Eurasia” would control two of the three most advanced and economically productive regions. About 75 per cent of the people live in “Eurasia”. “Eurasia” accounts for about three-fourths of the known energy resources. ”At the moment one of the most prominent projects of the European Union is the Russia - EU Four Common Spaces Initiative. A political and economic union of former Soviet states named the Eurasian Economic Union was established in 2015, the Russian concept of “Eurasia” corresponded initially more or less to the land area of Imperial Russia in 1914, including parts of Eastern Europe. One of Russias main geopolitical interests lies in ever closer integration with those countries that it considers part of “Eurasia. ”Every two years since 1996 a meeting of most Asian and European countries is organised as the Asia-Europe Meeting. In ancient times, the Greeks classified Europe and Asia as separate lands, where to draw the dividing line between the two regions is still a matter of discussion
18.
Hunter-gatherer
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A hunter-gatherer is a human living in a society in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was humanitys first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history, following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change have been displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement their activity with horticulture and/or keeping animals. In the 1970s, Lewis Binford suggested that humans were obtaining food via scavenging. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in forests and woodlands, which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals for meat, according to this view and this hypothesis does not necessarily contradict the scavenging hypothesis, both subsistence strategies could have been in use – sequentially, alternating or even simultaneously. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago and this specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools such as, fishing nets, hooks, and bone harpoons. The transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture originated and spread in different areas including the Middle East, Asia, Mesoamerica. Forest gardening was also being used as a production system in various parts of the world over this period. Forest gardens originated in prehistoric times along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of monsoon regions, in the gradual process of families improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified, protected and improved, whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Eventually superior introduced species were selected and incorporated into the gardens, many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have continually declined, partly as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Many of them reside in the world, either in arid regions or tropical forests. Areas that were available to hunter-gatherers were—and continue to be—encroached upon by the settlements of agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas. In addition, Jared Diamond has blamed a decline in the availability of wild foods, as the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they expanded into lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers. As a result of the now near-universal human reliance upon agriculture, archaeologists can use evidence such as stone tool use to track hunter-gatherer activities, including mobility. Most hunter-gatherers are nomadic or semi-nomadic and live in temporary settlements, mobile communities typically construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available
19.
Last Glacial Maximum
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The Last Glacial Maximum was the last period in the Earths climate history during the last glacial period when ice sheets were at their greatest extension. Growth of the ice sheets reached their positions in about 24,500 BCE. Vast ice sheets covered much of North America, northern Europe, the ice sheets profoundly affected Earths climate by causing drought, desertification, and a dramatic drop in sea levels. It was followed by the Late Glacial, the formation of an ice sheet or ice cap requires both prolonged cold and precipitation. Hence, despite having temperatures similar to those of glaciated areas in North America and Europe and this difference was because the ice sheets in Europe produced extensive anticyclones above them. These anticyclones generated air masses that were so dry on reaching Siberia and Manchuria that precipitation sufficient for the formation of glaciers could never occur, all over the world, climates at the Last Glacial Maximum were cooler and almost everywhere drier. Even in less affected regions, rainforest cover was greatly diminished, only in Central America and the Chocó region of Colombia did tropical rainforests remain substantially intact – probably due to the extraordinarily heavy rainfall of these regions. Most of the worlds deserts expanded and this also occurred in Afghanistan and Iran, where a major lake formed in the Dasht-e Kavir. In Australia, shifting sand dunes covered half the continent, whilst the Chaco, in northern China – unglaciated despite its cold climate – a mixture of grassland and tundra prevailed, and even here, the northern limit of tree growth was at least 20° farther south than today. During the Last Glacial Maximum, much of the world was cold, dry, and inhospitable, with frequent storms, the dustiness of the atmosphere is a prominent feature in ice cores, dust levels were as much as 20 to 25 times greater than now. This was probably due to a number of factors, reduced vegetation, stronger global winds, the massive sheets of ice locked away water, lowering the sea level, exposing continental shelves, joining land masses together, and creating extensive coastal plains. During the last glacial maximum,21,000 years ago, Northern Europe was largely covered by ice, the southern boundary of the ice sheets passing through Germany and Poland. This ice extended northward to cover Svalbard and Franz Josef Land and northeastward to occupy the Barents Sea, permafrost covered Europe south of the ice sheet down to present-day Szeged in Southern Hungary. Ice covered the whole of Iceland and almost all of the British Isles, britain was no more than a peninsula of Europe, its north capped in ice, and its south a polar desert. There were ice sheets in modern Tibet as well as in Baltistan, in Southeast Asia, many smaller mountain glaciers formed, and permafrost covered Asia as far south as Beijing. Palawan was also part of Sundaland, while the rest of the Philippine Islands formed one large island separated from the continent only by the Sibutu Passage and the Mindoro Strait. In Africa and the Middle East, many mountain glaciers formed. The Persian Gulf averages about 35 metres in depth and the seabed between Abu Dhabi and Qatar is even shallower, being less than 15 metres deep
20.
Neolithic Revolution
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These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants to learn how they grew and developed. This new knowledge led to the domestication of plants and it was the worlds first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution greatly narrowed the diversity of available, with a switch to agriculture which led to a downturn in human nutrition. The Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a set of food-producing techniques. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation which allowed extensive surplus food production, personal land and private property ownership led to an hierarchical society, with an elite Social class, comprising a nobility, polity, and military. The first fully developed manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities, the Levant followed by Mesopotamia are the sites of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. The term Neolithic Revolution was coined in 1923 by V. Gordon Childe to describe the first in a series of revolutions in Middle Eastern history. The beginning of process in different regions has been dated from 10,000 to 8,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent. Recent archaeological research suggests that in regions such as the Southeast Asian peninsula, the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist was not linear. There are several competing theories as to the factors that drove populations to take up agriculture. The most prominent of these are, The Oasis Theory, originally proposed by Raphael Pumpelly in 1908, popularized by V. Gordon Childe in 1928 and summarised in Childes book Man Makes Himself. However, today this theory has little support amongst archaeologists because subsequent climate data suggests that the region was getting wetter rather than drier, the Feasting model by Brian Hayden suggests that agriculture was driven by ostentatious displays of power, such as giving feasts, to exert dominance. This required assembling large quantities of food, which drove agricultural technology, various social and economic factors helped drive the need for food. The evolutionary/intentionality theory, developed by David Rindos and others, views agriculture as an adaptation of plants. Starting with domestication by protection of plants, it led to specialization of location. Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert Bettinger make a case for the development of agriculture coinciding with a stable climate at the beginning of the Holocene. Ronald Wrights book and Massey Lecture Series A Short History of Progress popularized this hypothesis, leonid Grinin argues that whatever plants were cultivated, the independent invention of agriculture always took place in special natural environments. It is supposed that the cultivation of cereals started somewhere in the Near East, andrew Moore suggested that the Neolithic Revolution originated over long periods of development in the Levant, possibly beginning during the Epipaleolithic
21.
Pottery
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Pottery is the craft of making ceramic material into pots or potterywares using mud. Major types of potterywares include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain, the place where such wares are made by a potter is also called a pottery. Early Neolithic pottery have found in places such as Jomon Japan. A clay body can be decorated before or after firing, however, prior to shaping processes. Kneading helps to ensure an even moisture content throughout the body, air trapped within the clay body needs to be removed. This is called de-airing and can be accomplished either by a called a vacuum pug or manually by wedging. Wedging can also produce an even moisture content. Once a clay body has been kneaded and de-aired or wedged, after shaping, it is dried and then fired. Clay ware takes on varying physical characteristics during the making of pottery, at sufficient moisture content, bodies at this stage are in their most plastic form. Leather-hard refers to a body that has been dried partially. At this stage the clay object has approximately 15% moisture content, clay bodies at this stage are very firm and only slightly pliable. Trimming and handle attachment often occurs at the leather-hard state, bone-dry refers to clay bodies when they reach a moisture content at or near 0%. It is now ready to be bisque fired, bisque refers to the clay after the object is shaped to the desired form and fired in the kiln for the first time, known as bisque fired or biscuit fired. This firing changes the body in several ways. Mineral components of the body will undergo chemical changes that will change the colour of the clay. Glaze fired is the stage of some pottery making. A glaze may be applied to the form and the object can be decorated in several ways. After this the object is glazed fired, which causes the material to melt
22.
History of clothing and textiles
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The study of the history of clothing and textiles traces the availability and use of textiles and other materials and the development of technology for the making of clothing over human history. The wearing of clothing is exclusively a characteristic and is a feature of most human societies. Clothing and textiles have been important in history and reflect the materials available to a civilization as well as the technologies that had been mastered. The social significance of the product reflects their culture. Textiles can be felt or spun fibers made into yarn and subsequently netted, looped, knit or woven to make fabrics, scholarship of textile history, especially its earlier stages, is part of material culture studies. The development of textile and clothing manufacture in prehistory has been the subject of a number of studies since the late 20th century. These sources have helped to provide a coherent history of these prehistoric developments, evidence suggests that humans may have begun wearing clothing as far back as 10,000 to 50,000 years ago. These estimates predate the first known human exodus from Africa, although other species who may have worn clothes –. Possible sewing needles have been dated to around 40,000 years ago, the earliest definite examples of needles originate from the Solutrean culture, which existed in France from 19,000 BC to 15,000 BC. The earliest dyed flax fibers have found in a prehistoric cave in the Republic of Georgia. At a slightly later date the Venus figurines were depicted with clothing and those from western Europe were adorned with basket hats or caps, belts worn at the waist, and a strap of cloth that wrapped around the body right above the breast. Eastern European figurines wore belts, hung low on the hips, archaeologists have discovered artifacts from the same period that appear to have been used in the textile arts, net gauges, spindle needles and weaving sticks. The first actual textile, as opposed to skins sewn together, was probably felt, surviving examples of Nålebinding, another early textile method, date from 6500 BC. Our knowledge of ancient textiles and clothing has expanded in the recent past thanks to technological developments. In northern Eurasia peat bogs can also preserve textiles very well, from pre-history through the early middle ages, for most of Europe, the Near East and North Africa, two main types of loom dominate textile production. These are the loom and the two-beam loom. The length of the cloth beam determined the width of the cloth woven upon it, the second loom type is the two-beam loom. Early woven clothing was made of full loom widths draped, tied
23.
Tumulus
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A tumulus is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or kurgans, a cairn, which is a mound of stones built for various purposes, may also originally have been a tumulus. Tumuli are often categorised according to their external apparent shape, in this respect, a long barrow is a long tumulus, usually constructed on top of several burials, such as passage graves. A round barrow is a tumulus, also commonly constructed on top of burials. The internal structure and architecture of both long and round barrows has a range, the categorization only refers to the external apparent shape. The method of inhumation may involve a dolmen, a cist, a mortuary enclosure, examples of barrows include Duggleby Howe and Maeshowe. The funeral of Patroclus is described in book 23 of the Iliad, Patroclus is burned on a pyre, and his bones are collected into a golden urn in two layers of fat. The barrow is built on the location of the pyre, achilles then sponsors funeral games, consisting of a chariot race, boxing, wrestling, running, a duel between two champions to the first blood, discus throwing, archery and spear throwing. Beowulfs body is taken to Hronesness, where it is burned on a funeral pyre, during cremation, the Geats lament the death of their lord, a widows lament being mentioned in particular, singing dirges as they circumambulate the barrow. Afterwards, a mound is built on top of a hill, overlooking the sea, a band of twelve of the best warriors ride around the barrow, singing dirges in praise of their lord. Parallels have also drawn to the account of Attilas burial in Jordanes Getica. Jordanes tells that as Attilas body was lying in state, the best horsemen of the Huns circled it, as in circus games. An Old Irish Life of Columcille reports that every funeral procession halted at a mound called Eala, whereupon the corpse was laid, archaeologists often classify tumuli according to their location, form, and date of construction. Some British types are listed below, Bank barrow Bell barrow Bowl barrow D-shaped barrow - round barrow with a flat edge at one side often defined by stone slabs. Disc barrow Fancy barrow - generic term for any Bronze Age barrows more elaborate than a hemispherical shape. Long barrow Oval barrow - a Neolithic long barrow consisting of an elliptical, platform barrow - The least common of the recognised types of round barrow, consisting of a flat, wide circular mound that may be surrounded by a ditch. They occur widely across southern England with a concentration in East and West Sussex. Pond barrow - a barrow consisting of a circular depression, surrounded by a bank running around the rim of the depression
24.
Three-age system
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The system first appealed to British researchers working in the science of ethnology and adopted it to establish race sequences for Britains past based on cranial types. He later used artifacts and the reports published or sent to him by Danish archaeologists who were doing controlled excavations. His position as curator of the museum gave him enough visibility to become influential on Danish archaeology. A well-known and well-liked figure, he explained his system in person to visitors at the museum, in his poem, Works and Days, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod possibly between 750 and 650 BC, defined five successive Ages of Man,1. Only the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are based on the use of metal, then Zeus the father created the third generation of mortals, the age of bronze. They were terrible and strong, and the action of Ares was theirs. The weapons of these men were bronze, of bronze their houses, there was not yet any black iron. He did not continue the manufacturing metaphor, but mixed his metaphors, Iron was cheaper than bronze, so there must have been a golden and a silver age. He portrays a sequence of metallic ages, but it is a rather than a progression. Each age has less of a moral value than the preceding, of his own age he says, And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of men, but had died before it came, or had been born afterward. The moral metaphor of the ages of metals continued, Lucretius, however, replaced moral degradation with the concept of progress, which he conceived to be like the growth of an individual human being. The concept is evolutionary, For the nature of the world as a whole is altered by age, everything must pass through successive phases. Nothing remains forever what it was, everything is transformed by nature and forced into new paths. The Earth passes through phases, so that it can no longer bear what it could. In Lucretius the Earth is a mother, Venus, to whom the poem is dedicated in the first few lines and she brought forth humankind by spontaneous generation. Having been given birth as a species, humans must grow to maturity by analogy with the individual, the different phases of their collective life are marked by the accumulation of customs to form material civilization, The earliest weapons were hands, nails and teeth. Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire, then men learnt to use tough iron and copper. With copper they tilled the soil, with copper they whipped up the clashing waves of war
25.
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury
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John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury PC FRS, known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900, was a banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath. He was a banker and worked with his family’s company, but also significant contributions in archaeology, ethnography. He helped establish archaeology as a discipline, and was also influential in nineteenth-century debates concerning evolutionary theory. He introduced the first law on the protection of the UKs archaeological and architectural heritage. John Lubbock was born in 1834, the son of Sir John Lubbock, 3rd Baronet, a London banker, the youth was soon a frequent visitor to Down House, and became the closest of Darwin’s younger friends. Their relationship stimulated young Lubbock’s passion for science and evolutionary theory, in 1845, Lubbock began studies at Eton College, and after graduation was employed by his fathers bank, of which he became a partner at the age of twenty-two. In 1865 he succeeded to the baronetcy, in the early 1870s Lubbock became increasingly interested in politics. In 1870, and again in 1874, he was elected as a Liberal Party Member of Parliament for Maidstone and he lost the seat at the election of 1880, but was at once elected member for London University, of which he had been vice-chancellor since 1872. He was successful with numerous enactments in parliament, including the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, when the Liberals split in 1886 on the issue of Irish Home Rule, Lubbock joined the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party in opposition to Irish home rule. A prominent supporter of the Statistical Society, he took a part in criticizing the encroachment of municipal trading. In 1879 Lubbock was elected the first president of the Institute of Bankers, in 1881 he was president of the British Association, and from 1881 to 1886 president of the Linnean Society of London. In March 1883 he founded the Bank Clerks Orphanage, which in 1986 became the Bankers’ Benevolent Fund – a charity for bank employees, past and present, in January 1884 he founded the Proportional Representation Society, later to become the Electoral Reform Society. From 1888 to 1892 he was president of the London Chamber of Commerce, from 1889 to 1890 vice-chairman, in February 1890 he was appointed a privy councillor, and was chairman of the committee of design for the new coinage in 1891. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1900 to 1902, the quotation, We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth, is widely attributed to Lubbock. This variation appears in his book The Pleasures of Life, in addition to his work at his father’s bank, Lubbock took a keen interest in archaeology and evolutionary theory. A collection of Iron Age antiquities Lubbock and Sir John Evans excavated at the site of Hallstatt in Austria is now in the British Museums collection and he spoke in support of the evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley at the famous 1860 Oxford evolution debate. During the 1860s, he published articles in which he used archaeological evidence to support Darwin’s theory. In 1864, he one of the founding members of the elite X Club
26.
John Evans (archaeologist)
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Sir John Evans, KCB, FRS was an English archaeologist and geologist. John Evans was the son of the Rev. Dr A. B, Evans, headmaster of Market Bosworth Grammar School, and was born at Britwell Court, Buckinghamshire. Evans was president from 1885 to 1892 of the Society of Antiquaries and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1864 and for twenty years he was treasurer of the Royal Society. He was appointed High Sheriff of Hertfordshire for 1881, as President of the Society of Antiquaries he was an ex officio trustee of the British Museum, and subsequently he became a permanent trustee. His academic honors included honorary degrees from universities, and he was a corresponding member of the Institut de France. He was created a KCB in 1892, most of his very large personal archaeological collection was given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford by his son Arthur. The Anglo-Saxon jewelled Ixworth Cross and Tostock Buckle are two of the outstanding objects and his library was left to the Bodleian Library. A collection of Iron Age antiquities Evans and Sir John Lubbock excavated at the site of Hallstatt in Austria is now in the British Museums collection and he lived at Britwell on Castle Hill in Berkhamsted where died in 1908. He also wrote papers on archaeological and geological subjects, notably the papers on Flint Implements in the Drift communicated in 1860 and 1862 to Archæologia, Evans was married three times, widowed twice, and had six children. His first wife was Harriet Ann Dickinson, daughter of John Dickinson, owner of the paper business and they had five children, Sir Arthur John Evans, curator of the Ashmolean Museum and excavator of Minoan Crete. Lewis Evans, who continued the business and collected scientific instruments that formed the core of the collection for the Museum of the History of Science. She died on 22 September 1890, then, on 9 July 1892, John married Maria Millington Lathbury and they had a daughter Dame Joan Evans, a distinguished art historian of French and English medieval art. Her partly autobiographical book Time and Chance, The Story of Arthur Evans, works written by or about John Evans at Wikisource
27.
Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet
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Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet, French archeologist and anthropologist, was born at Meylan, Isère. Mortillet was educated at the Jesuit college of Chambéry and at the Paris Conservatoire, becoming in 1847 proprietor of La Revue indépendante, he was implicated in the Revolution of 1848 and sentenced to two years imprisonment. He fled the country and during the fifteen years lived abroad. In 1858 he turned his attention to research, making a special study of the Swiss lake-dwellings. He also issued three works on the evidence for man in North Italy, the third making a then unprecedented association with the Ice Age. He returned to Paris in 1864, and soon afterwards was appointed curator of the museum at St Germain and he became mayor of the town, and in 1885 he was elected deputy for Seine-et-Oise. He had meantime founded a review, Matériaux pour lhistoire positive et philosophique de lhomme and he died at St Germain-en-Laye on 25 September 1898. Mortillet is best known for his clarification and ordering of the archeology of the Paleolithic, later acknowledging the ambiguity in that system as well, he published a new classification in 1869, using type sites and their associated artifacts to distinguish and name periods. His system may have subsequently been refined, but still remains in current use, however, whereas Mortillet believed his classifications were universal stages, with an unilineal evolution. Later thinking regards each culture as a more localised conglomerate, capable of overlapping in time with others, de Mortillet recognised the importance of the mobiliary art discovered by Lartet and Christie, commenting of such bone carvings, “They are not the work of children. They are the childhood of art”, les Nègres et la civilisation égyptienne. Origines de la chasse, de la pêche et de lagriculture, le préhistoire, origine et antiquité de lhomme,1900. Henry Christie This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh
28.
Azilian
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The Azilian is a name given by archaeologists to an industry of the Epipaleolithic in northern Spain and southern France. It probably dates to the period of the Allerød Oscillation around 12,000 years ago, archaeologists think the Azilian represents the tail end of the Magdalenian as the warming climate brought about changes in human behaviour in the area. The effects of melting ice sheets would have diminished the supply and probably impoverished the previously well-fed Magdalenian manufacturers. As a result, Azilian tools and art were cruder and less expansive than their Ice Age predecessors - or simply different, diagnostic artifacts from the culture include Azilian points, crude flat bone harpoons and pebbles with abstract decoration. The latter were first found in the River Arize at the type-site for the culture,145 are known from the Swiss site of Birsmatten-Eremitage. Compared with the late Magdelanian, the number of microliths increases, a culture very similar to the Azilian spread as well into Mediterranean Spain and southern Portugal. Because it lacked bone industry it is named distinctively as Iberian microlaminar microlithism and it was replaced by the so-called geometrical microlithism related to Tardenoisian culture
29.
V. Gordon Childe
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Vere Gordon Childe, better known as V. Gordon Childe, was an Australian archaeologist and philologist who specialized in the study of European prehistory. Here, he embraced the socialist movement and campaigned against the First World War, growing critical of Labor, he authored an analysis of their policies and joined the far-left Industrial Workers of the World. In doing so he introduced the continental European concept of a culture to the British archaeological community. From 1927 through to 1946 he worked as the Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, throughout, he continued to publish prolifically, producing excavation reports, journal articles, and books. With Stuart Piggott and Grahame Clark he co-founded The Prehistoric Society in 1934, remaining committed to his socialist ideals, he embraced Marxism, and used Marxist ideas as an interpretative framework for archaeological data. He also became a sympathiser with the Soviet Union and visited the country on a number of occasions. His beliefs resulted in him being legally barred from entering the United States, upon retirement, he returned to Australias Blue Mountains, there committing suicide. Childe was born on 14 April 1892 in Sydney, New South Wales and he was the only surviving child of the Reverend Stephen Henry and Harriet Eliza Childe, a middle-class couple of English descent. Stephen Childe was a second-generation Anglican priest, ordained into the Church of England in 1867 after gaining a BA from the University of Cambridge, becoming a teacher, in 1871 he married Mary Ellen Latchford, together having five children. They moved to Australia in 1878 and it was here that Mary died, and in 1886 Stephen married Harriet, an Englishwoman from a wealthy background who had moved to Australia as a child. Gordon Childe was raised alongside five half-siblings at his fathers country house. Reverend Childe worked as the minister for St. Thomas Parish, a sickly child, Gordon Childe was educated at home for a number of years, before gaining a private school education in North Sydney. In 1907, he began attending Sydney Church of England Grammar School, gaining his Junior Matriculation in 1909, in July 1910 his mother died, his father soon took Monica Gardiner as his third wife. At university, he became a member of the Debating Society. Also while there, he became a friend of fellow undergraduate Herbert Vere Evatt. Ending his studies in 1913, Childe graduated the year with various honours and prizes. Wishing to continue his education, he gained a £200 Cooper Graduate Scholarship in Classics, allowing him to afford the fees at Queens College. He set sail for Britain aboard the SS Orsova in August 1914, at Queens, Childe was entered for a diploma in classical archaeology followed by a Literae Humaniores degree, although he never completed the former
30.
Shigir Idol
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The Shigir Idol, is the most ancient wooden sculpture in the world, made during the Mesolithic period and was carved around 11,000 years ago. It is displayed in the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore in Yekaterinburg, the idol was discovered on January 24,1894 at a depth of 4 m in the peat bog of Shigir, on the eastern slope of the Middle Urals, approximately 100 km from Yekaterinburg. Investigations in this area had begun 40 years earlier after the discovery of a variety of objects in an open-air gold mine. It was extracted in several parts, professor D. I, lobanov combined the main fragments to reconstitute a sculpture 2.80 m high. In 1914, archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev proposed a variant of this reconstruction by integrating the unused fragments, the reconstruction suggested that the original height of the statue was 5.3 metres. Some of these fragments were later lost, so only Tolmachevs drawings of them remain, professor Zhilin stated The idol was made from the phytoncidic larch, then canned in turf which is an acid anaerobic environment that kills microorganisms and also has a tanning effect. The radiocarbon dating carried out by G. I, zajtseva of the Institute of the History for the Material Culture in Saint-Petersburg, confirmed by the Geological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, gave an age of 9,500 years. A later German analysis gave an age of 11,000 years and it is the most ancient known wooden sculpture of its kind in the world. The Idol is carved from larch, as identified from the annual rings, the tree was at least 159 years old. Stone tools were used for carving the markings, the head reproduces a face with eyes, nose, and mouth. The body is flat and rectangular, horizontal lines at the level of the thorax may represent ribs, and lines broken in chevrons cover the rest of the body. Along with the face at the top, several faces are visible at points along the sculpture. List of stone age art Totem pole Where did the Shigir Idol walk
31.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
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Prehistoric Europe
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Prehistoric Europe is the designation for the period of human presence in Europe before the start of recorded history, beginning in the Lower Paleolithic. As history progresses, considerable regional irregularities of cultural development emerge, the Histories of Herodotus is the oldest known European text that seeks to systematically record traditions, public affairs and notable events. In contrast, the European regions furthest away from the ancient centers of civilisation tended to be the slowest, in Northern and Eastern Europe in particular, writing and systematic recording was only introduced in the context of Christianization, after 1000 CE. The karstic region of the Atapuerca Mountains in Spain represents the currently earliest known and reliably dated location of residence for more than a single generation and a group of individuals. Latin and ancient Greek language continued to be the primary and best way to communicate and express ideas in Liberal arts education, the climatic record of the Paleolithic is characterized by the Pleistocene pattern of cyclic warmer and colder periods, including eight major cycles and numerous shorter episodes. The northern maximum of human occupation fluctuated in response to changing conditions and successful settlement required constant adaption capabilities. Most of Scandinavia, the North European Plain and Russia remained off limits for occupation during the Paleolithic and Mesolithic, associated evidence, such as stone tools, artifacts and settlement localities is more numerous than fossilized remains of the hominin occupants themselves. The simplest pebble tools with a few flakes struck off to create an edge were found in Dmanisi, Georgia and in Spain at sites in the Guadix-Baza basin and near Atapuerca. Both types of sets are attributed to Homo erectus, the earliest and for a very long time the only human in Europe. However, the Acheulean fossil record also links to the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis, Homo heidelbergensis presence is documented since 600,000 BP in numerous sites in Germany, Great Britain and northern France. Palaeoanthropologists generally agree that Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis have immigrated into Europe, debated remain migration routes, again, consensus prevails on this matter, widely debated are origin and evolution patterns. Neanderthal fossil record ranges from Western Europe to the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, Neanderthals are associated with the Mousterian culture, stone tools that first appeared approximately 160.000 years ago. Homo sapiens arrived in Europe around 45,000 and 43,000 years ago via the Levant, generally small and widely dispersed fossil sites suggest, that Neanderthals lived in less numerous and socially more isolated groups than Homo sapiens. Tools and Levallois points are remarkably sophisticated from the outset, yet they have a rate of variability. Artifacts are of nature, symbolic behavioral traits are undocumented before the arrival of modern humans. The Aurignacian culture, introduced by humans is characterized by cut bone or antler points, fine flint blades. The oldest examples and subsequent widespread tradition of prehistoric art originate from the Aurignacian, after more than 100,000 years of uniformity, around 45,000 years BP the Neanderthal fossil record changed abruptly. The Mousterian had quickly become more versatile and was named the Chatelperronian culture, although debated, this fact proved that Neanderthals had to some extent adopted the culture of modern Homo sapiens
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Holocene
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The Holocene is the geological epoch that began after the Pleistocene at approximately 11,700 years before present. The term Recent has often used as an exact synonym of Holocene. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period and its name comes from the Ancient Greek words ὅλος and καινός, meaning entirely recent. It has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS1, given these, a new term, Anthropocene, is specifically proposed and used informally only for the very latest part of modern history involving significant human impact. It is accepted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that the Holocene started approximately 11,700 years ago, the epoch follows the Pleistocene and the last glacial period. The Holocene can be subdivided into five time intervals, or chronozones, based on climatic fluctuations, Preboreal, Boreal, Atlantic, Subboreal and they find a general correspondence across Eurasia and North America, though the method was once thought to be of no interest. The scheme was defined for Northern Europe, but the changes were claimed to occur more widely. The periods of the include a few of the final pre-Holocene oscillations of the last glacial period. Paleontologists have not defined any faunal stages for the Holocene, if subdivision is necessary, periods of human technological development, such as the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age, are usually used. However, the time periods referenced by these terms vary with the emergence of those technologies in different parts of the world, climatically, the Holocene may be divided evenly into the Hypsithermal and Neoglacial periods, the boundary coincides with the start of the Bronze Age in Europe. According to some scholars, a division, the Anthropocene, has now begun. Continental motions due to plate tectonics are less than a kilometre over a span of only 10,000 years, however, ice melt caused world sea levels to rise about 35 m in the early part of the Holocene. The sea level rise and temporary land depression allowed temporary marine incursions into areas that are now far from the sea, Holocene marine fossils are known, for example, from Vermont and Michigan. Other than higher-latitude temporary marine incursions associated with depression, Holocene fossils are found primarily in lakebed, floodplain. Holocene marine deposits along low-latitude coastlines are rare because the rise in sea levels during the period exceeds any likely tectonic uplift of non-glacial origin, post-glacial rebound in the Scandinavia region resulted in the formation of the Baltic Sea. The region continues to rise, still causing weak earthquakes across Northern Europe, the equivalent event in North America was the rebound of Hudson Bay, as it shrank from its larger, immediate post-glacial Tyrrell Sea phase, to near its present boundaries. Climate has been stable over the Holocene. It appears that this was influenced by the glacial ice remaining in the Northern Hemisphere until the later date
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Last glacial period
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The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period, which occurred from c. 110,000 – c. 11,700 years ago. This most recent glacial period is part of a pattern of glacial and interglacial periods known as the Quaternary glaciation. From this point of view, scientists consider this ice age to be merely the latest glaciation event in a larger ice age. During this last glacial period, there were changes between glacier advance and retreat. The Last Glacial Maximum, the extent of glaciation within the last glacial period, was approximately 22,000 years ago. Approximately 13,000 years ago, the Late Glacial Maximum began, around 11,700 years ago marked the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch, which includes the Holocene glacial retreat. From the point of view of archaeology, it falls in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. When the glaciation event started, Homo sapiens were confined to Africa and used tools comparable to those used by Neanderthals in western and central Eurasia, near the end of the event, Homo sapiens spread into Eurasia and Australia. The retreat of the glaciers allowed groups of Asians to migrate to the Americas, glacials, on the other hand, refer to colder phases within an ice age that separate interglacials. Thus, the end of the last glacial period is not the end of the last ice age, the end of the last glacial period was about 11,700 years ago, while the end of the last ice age has not yet come. Over the past few years the glacial-interglacial cycle has been paced by periodic variations in the Earths orbit via Milankovitch cycles which are thus the cause of ice ages. The glaciations that occurred during this period covered many areas, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere. The geochronological Late Pleistocene comprises the late glacial and the immediately preceding penultimate interglacial preiond, the last glaciation centered on the huge ice sheets of North America and Eurasia. Considerable areas in the Alps, the Himalaya and the Andes were ice-covered, Canada was nearly completely covered by ice, as well as the northern part of the United States, both blanketed by the huge Laurentide ice sheet. Alaska remained mostly ice free due to climate conditions. Local glaciations existed in the Rocky Mountains and the Cordilleran ice sheet and as ice fields, the maximum extent of western Siberian glaciation was reached by approximately 16, 000–15,000 BCE and thus later than in Europe. Northeastern Siberia was not covered by an ice sheet. Instead, large, but restricted, icefield complexes covered mountain ranges within northeast Siberia, according to the sediment composition retrieved from deep-sea cores there must even have been times of seasonally open waters
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Maglemosian
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Maglemosian is the name given to a culture of the early Mesolithic period in Northern Europe. In Scandinavia, the culture was succeeded by the Kongemose culture, the name originates from the Danish archeological site Maglemose, situated near Gørlev and Høng on western Zealand, southwest of lake Tissø. Here the first settlement of the culture was excavated in 1900, during the following century a long series of similar settlements were excavated from England to Poland and from Skåne in Sweden to northern France. The Maglemosian people lived in forest and wetland environments, using fishing and hunting tools made from wood, bone and it appears that they had domesticated the dog. Some may have lived settled lives, but most were nomadic, huts made of bark have been preserved, and the tools were made of flint, bone, and horn. A characteristic of the culture are the sharply edged microliths of flintstone, used for spear, another notable feature is the leister, a characteristic type of fishing spear, used for gigging. When the Maglemosian culture reigned, sea levels were lower than now and Europe. The cultural period overlaps the end of the last ice age, when the ice retreated, therefore, there is hope that the emerging discipline of underwater archaeology may reveal interesting finds related to the Maglemosian culture in the future. CBA Research Report 141,2004, s, 23ff Danish-language texts Geoffrey Bibby, Spadens vidnedsbyrd, Wormanium 1980, ISBN 87-8516-071-7 s. 109f Gyldendal og Politikens Danmarkshistorie, Bind 1, I begyndelsen, fra de ældste tider til ca. 86ff Anders Fischer, En håndfuld flint, Skalk nr, 8ff Anders Fischer, Mennesket og havet i ældre stenalder, i, Carin Bunte, Arkeologi och Naturvetenskab, Lund 2005, s. 276ff Kim Aaris-Sørensen, Uroksejagt, Skalk nr, 10ff Ole Grøn, Teltning, Skalk nr. 13f Søren A. Sørensen, Hytte ved sø, Skalk nr, 25ff Peter Vang Petersen, Bjørnejagt, Skalk nr. 3ff Poul og Kristian Krabbe, Vest for Valhal, Skalk nr, 11ff Axel Degn Johansen, Ikke en sky og ikke en vind
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Starr Carr
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Star Carr is a Mesolithic archaeological site in North Yorkshire, England. It is around five miles south of Scarborough and it is generally regarded as the most important and informative Mesolithic site in Great Britain. It is as important to the Mesolithic period as Stonehenge is to the Neolithic period or Scandinavian York is to understanding Viking age Britain, the site was occupied during the early Mesolithic archaeological period, contemporary with the preboreal and boreal climatic periods. Though the ice age had ended and temperatures were close to modern averages, highlights among the finds include, Britain’s oldest structure,21 red deer stag skull-caps that may have been head-dresses and nearly 200 projectile, or harpoon, points made of red deer antler. These organic materials are preserved due to burial in waterlogged peat, normally all that remains on Mesolithic sites are stone tools. Excavation of the began in 1948, a year after artefacts were first noticed by an amateur archaeologist. Star Carr now lies under farmland at the end of the Vale of Pickering. During the Mesolithic the site was near the outflow at the end of a paleolake. At the end of the last ice age a combination of glacial and post-glacial geomorphology caused the area to drain to the west, the basin filled by Lake Flixton was probably created by glacial scarring. The site is preserved due to Lake Flixton in-filling with peat during the course of the Mesolithic, waterlogged peat prevents organic finds from oxidising and has led to some of the best preservation conditions possible. As a result of good conditions archaeologists were able to recover bone, antler. During the period of Mesolithic occupation the area surrounding the lake would have been a mixed forest of birch, aspen and willow. The lake edge and shallows would have full of reeds, water lily and other aquatic plants. These and many plants would have formed the base of a complex food web. Along with the flints that are characteristic of Mesolithic sites, there were a number of objects made of red deer and elk antler, elk bone. The flint found at Star Carr came from nearby beaches, which at time of occupation would have been about 10 to 20 km distant, the two most outstanding categories of finds are the barbed points and antler frontlets. The barbed points are made of the antler of red deer stags and they are between 8 centimetres and 38 centimetres in length and the 195 examples found at Star Carr account for more than 95% of the total number from the British Mesolithic. Many of the points and antler frontlets appear to be deliberately broken
