Week One: Due August 31

Prologue: From cosmic History to Human History
The History of the Universe 

• The contemplation of cosmic history has prompted profound religious or philosophical questions about the meaning of human life.
• Human consciousness and our awareness of the mystery of the measurable universe render us unique and generate for many people feelings of awe and humility that are almost religious. 

The History of a Planet

• Geologists have learned a lot about the world through: the formation of its rocks and atmosphere, the movement of continents, the tectonic plates, and the constant changes of its landscapes which has all been happening for more than four billion years and will continue to. 
• All life forms on the planet have: evolved in a rapid increase of life forms, often followed by massive die offs, over the past 600 million years. 
• Each life form has struggled with finding resources, food, coping with environmental changes, and dealing with competitors. 
• Everything that we study in our history books has taken place at the very last minute of that cosmic year(agriculture, writing, civilizations, empires, industrialization)
• Other forms of life have felt the impact of human activity, as numerous extinct or threatened species can show. We have affected the atmosphere of the planet with carbon dioxide and other forms of the industrial age have warmed the climate of the planet. 

The History of the Human Species...in a  Single Paragraph

• The history of our species has been divided into three major phases
• Paleolithic Age: hunting and gathering ways of life
• Constructed the first human societies
• Agricultural Revolution: Agricultural
• Domestication of plants and animals became the primary means to sustaining human life and societies
• this changed virtually everything and reshaped human societies and their relationship with the natural order
• Modern Industrial Revolution: Technological change
• Vast increase in productivity, wealth, and human control over nature 
• Created new societies that we call "modern"

Why World History

• Create a global understanding of the human past that highlights broad patterns cutting across particular civilizations and countries
• How do you capture all of that?

Change, Comparison, and Connection: The Three Cs of World History

• In World History nothing stands alone
• Change - in World History it is the big picture that changes
• Large segments of humankind
• Every significant category of people contain endless divisions and conflicts 
• Things change
• Comparison - seeks to identify similarities and differences in the experience of the world people
• Comparison is an effective tool in the struggle against Eurocentrism
• Connections - between the different and distant people
• focusing on cross-cultural connections represents an effort to counteract a habit of thinking about particular people as isolated communities

Part One: First Things First
The Emergence of Humankind

• Hominoid- human like creatures; Homo habilis-make and use simple tools; Homo erectus- first controlled use of fire; Eventually all these earlier hominoid creatures died out, except homo sapiens
• For a long time, all of the small number of homo sapiens lived in Africa, but they too begin to migrate out of Africa onto the Eurasian landmass, then to Australia, and ultimately onto the Western Hemisphere

The Globalization of Humankind

• The phase in human history where initial migrations took place is known as the Paleolithic Era, a food collecting or gathering and hunting way of life. Represents over 95% of the time humans have inhibited the earth.
• Accompanying the global migration (making themselves at home in every environmental niche) were slow changes in the technological tool kits of early mankind.

The Revolution of Farming and Herding

• Many agricultural peoples lived in small settled villages, independent of larger political structures, while drawing their food supply from their own gardens and farms. 

The Turning Point of Civilization

• The most powerful and prominent human communities to emerge from the Agricultural Revolution were those often designated as civilizations.
• People living in state- and city- based societies or civilizations have long constitutes the more powerful and innovative human communities on the planet.

Chapter One: First People
Out of Africa to the Ends of the Earth: First Migration 

• The first 150,000 years or more of human experience was exclusively African story
• Africa, almost certainly, was the place where the "human revolution" occurred, where "culture." defined as learned or invented ways of living, became more important than biology in shaping behaviors. 
• In occupying the planet, members of our species accomplished the remarkable feat of learning to live in virtually every environmental niche on earth

Into Eurasia

• Altered hunting habits - focusing on reindeer or horses
• Developed new technology
• Left a record of their world in cave paintings

Into Australia 

• Involved the use of boats (came from Indonesia) 
• A relatively simple technology, appropriate to hunting gathering economy, sustained Australia's Aboriginal people into modern times. 
• Dreamtime - expressed in endless stories, extended ceremonies, and in the evocative rock art, the Dreamtime recounted the beginning of things.

Into the Americas

• Clovis Point - scattered all over North America, Clovis culture flourished briefly 
• Hunted smaller animals and gathered many wild plants
• Then all trace of the Clovis culture disappeared from the archeological record(About the same time the larger animals, like the mammoth, disappeared)
• Many people retained their gathering and hunting way of life into modern times, while others became farmers, and some later developed cities and large-scale states.

Into the Pacific

• In contrast with all of the other initial migrations, these Pacific voyagers were undertaken by agricultural people who carries both domesticated plants and animals in their canoes. 
• Both men and women made these journeys, suggesting  an intent to colonize

The Ways We Were

• Paleolithic people created a multitude of separate and distinct societies, each with its own history, culture, language, identify, stories, and rituals.

The First Human Societies 

• Paleolithic societies were small - consisting of twenty to fifty people - in which relationships were intensely personal
• Paleolithic bands were seasonally mobile or nomadic, moving frequently and in regular patterns to exploit the resources of wild pants and animals. 
• Relationships between men and women usually were far more equal than in later societies
• There was relative equality between the sexes with no one having the upper hand 
• Both men and women expected a satisfying sexual relationship, and both occasionally took lovers
• Although sometimes romanticized by outsides, the relative equality of  Paleolithic societies id not always ensure a utopia social harmony

Economy and the Environment

• Gathering and hunting people frequently worked fewer hours to meet their material needs than did people in agricultural or industrial societies and so had more leisure time
• life expectancy was low, life in the wild was dangerous, and dependency on the vagaries of nature rendered it insecure as well
• The biological environment inhabited by gathering and hunting peoples was not wholly natural but was shaped in part by their own hands.

The Realm of the Spirit

• Art is subject to many interpretations, and the experience of contemporary gathering and hunting peoples may not reflect distant past.
• Shamans
• Cyclical view of time that drew on the changing moon phases and on the cycles of female fertility 
• Paleolithic - animals, rocks, trees, mountains, and much more were animated by spirit or possessed souls of their own