Paleolithic Lifeways ..........................................................................

Lecture 22

When historians say: “I don’t do the Paleolithic because I do written

evidence,” it’s a bit as if Sherlock Holmes were to say, in the middle of

one of his investigations: “Sorry, chaps, I can’t pursue this case any

further because there are blood stains, and I don’t do blood stains.”

G

enetically, the earliest human beings were more or less identical to
you and me. If the arguments of the previous lecture are correct,
their emotional lives were as rich as ours, they were as intelligent
as humans today, and they communicated as À uently. Yet their lives were,
of course, very different. How did our ancestors live during the 250,000
years or so of the Paleolithic era? Though we have no detailed records about
particular communities of the Paleolithic era, no precise dates, and of course
no names, we have enough evidence to sketch out some very general answers
to these important questions.

In this course, we will divide human history into three main eras: the
Paleolithic, the Agrarian, and the Modern. The Paleolithic era (or “Old
Stone Age”) is the ¿ rst and by far the longest era of human history. The idea
of classifying historical eras by surviving tool types was the brainchild of
19 th-century Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen. In the mid-1860s, English
naturalist John Lubbock further subdivided the Stone Age into an “Old Stone
Age” (the paleo-lithic era), and a “New Stone Age” (the neo-lithic era).
The term “Paleolithic” is often used for the entire period since habilis made
stone tools 2 million years ago. But in this course, we con¿ ne it to the period
from the ¿ rst appearance of Homo sapiens (about 250,000 years ago) to the
earliest appearance of agriculture (about 10,000 years ago). The Paleolithic
era laid the foundations for human history, so it is a shame that historians
often ignore it.

To get a preliminary sense of the distinctive features of the Paleolithic era,
it will help to compare it very broadly with the other two eras: the Agrarian
era (from 10,000 years ago to about 500 years ago) and the Modern era (the
last 500 or so years). The Paleolithic era occupies about 96% of the time that