Change in the Paleolithic Era .........................................................

LECTURE

Today, we’re at the end of an interglacial that’s already lasted 10,000

years—and that’s something worth thinking about.

O

ne of the reasons why history texts rarely discuss the Paleolithic
era is that things changed so slowly that it is easy to think of this
as an era in which nothing happened. Indeed, Paleolithic peoples
themselves may have seen history as a cyclical pattern of seasonal and life
changes within an essentially unchanging world. This is a view of history that
Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade called the “Myth of the Eternal
Return.” Yet, with the bene¿ t of hindsight and with modern techniques for
tracking and dating long-term changes, we can see that this view is illusory.
At large scales, a lot happened in the Paleolithic era, so the astonishing
adaptability of our species is already evident in the Paleolithic era. Though
change was much slower than today (too slow to be observed by the people
who lived through it), it was much faster than in any pre-human community.

This lecture will describe three main types of long-term change. First,
we discuss the dramatic climatic and environmental changes associated
with the ice ages. Second, we discuss the migrations that took Paleolithic
humans to all parts of the Earth (except for Antarctica and the Paci¿ c).
Third, we describe the increasing impact of our Paleolithic ancestors on the
natural environment.

The study of climate history has advanced rapidly in recent decades, driven
partly by research into global warming. An example is the analysis of ratios
of different oxygen isotopes in bubbles of air from ice cores. These ratios
vary depending on the amounts of ice locked up in glaciers, so they can
indicate changes in global temperatures.

Such techniques have revealed dramatic climatic changes. For 50 million
years, global climates have slowly gotten cooler. This has reduced
evaporation from the oceans and increased aridity. During the Pleistocene
era (the last 2 million years), ice sheets spread in polar regions, generating