Instruction 1-2
Hunter-Gatherers | Early Cultures | Summary
| Pre-Test |  |
Post-Test |
| Q&A | World History: Pre-History | Q&A |
In our last Instruction, we mentioned Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon culture. We'll tell you more about them in a minute.
But first we'd like to explore what culture is.Archeologists who specialize in prehistory define culture like this:
"the primary nonbiological means by which people
adapt to their environments."
That is a pretty bare-bones definition. We'd like to expand on it a little.
What is Culture?
Anthropologist William Havilland describes culture as
"the abstract values, beliefs and perceptions that shape a
society's behavior and are reflected in that behavior."
He goes on to say
"cultures are learned, largely through the medium of language,
rather than inherited biologically.
People maintain cultures to deal with the problems or matters
that concern them.
To survive, a culture must satisfy the basic needs of those who
live by its rules.
It must provide for its own continuity.
It must strike a balance between the self-interest of individuals
and the needs of the whole.
And it must have the capacity to change to adapt to new
circumstances."
In other words, culture is everything that makes a society tick. Its knowledge, language, art, religion, morals, law and customs. Even how it gets its food.
Culture is passed down both by language and by example.
Cultures Around the World
As recently as 1900, scientists counted over 1,000 distinct cultures in the world and over 3000 languages. Each is specific to its environment.
The Taureg, for example, live in the Sahara Desert. They have eleven different words for sand. But no word for snow. While the Inuit, who live in the Arctic, have no word for sand -- and seventeen different words for snow.
What Cultures Do
Although cultures are different, most do the same basic things for their members:
They give their members a common picture of the world. Most cultures structure the world with their group at the center. This was as true for Imperial Rome as it is for remote tribes in New Guinea.
They give their members an identity. A culture tells people who they are, where they came from and why they are special.
They organize and give order to their members' experience.
They develop rules for living together.
They divide the world between what is sacred and what is not. In early cultures, it was usually a physical place that was most sacred -- a sacred tree or mountain. In such cultures, people often thought of themselves as kin to nature. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, for example, considered The Sun their father and The Earth their mother.
They offer security.
Although a culture can offer certain kinds of security, it cannot offer security against the ultimate reality -- the biological fact of death. But it can offer ways to deal with it.
So Ghosts Cannot See
Cultures are different but people are the same. We are born. We live and we die. Different cultures handle death differently. Many ancient cultures buried their dead in a curled-up "sleep" position facing the sunrise. This could mean they expected the dead to "awake" to a new life with the new day.
The Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers much as we do today.
The Cro-Magnons buried their dead with elaborate ceremony. They put shells, deer-teeth necklaces, animal-skin clothing and tools in the graves with them. This seems to indicate that they believed in an afterlife in which the dead would need these items. In some Cro-Magnon burial sites, Venus figurines have been found. Anthropologists think these represent a special goddess who helped the dead on their journey. In addition to showing respect for the dead, many burial customs were designed to keep the ghosts of the dead from coming back to haunt the living.
Throughout prehistory -- and history -- most cultures have believed in ghosts and have been afraid of them. So one thing most cultures do is to shut the eyes of the dead. Originally, this was done to keep the ghost from "seeing" where it was so it couldn't find its way back to the world of the living.
Early Achievements/Cave Art
If we think of all early cultures as primitive, we are making a big mistake. Paleolithic art was highly sophisticated and seems to indicate that Stone Age man had an organized society with continuity and shape. In other words they had a culture.
The cave art of Europe is a good example. It was created from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. It sometimes consists of engraved or painted works on open-air rocks. But mostly it is found on the floors, walls and ceilings of caves.
The first discovery was made in the 1860's. The most exciting finds
were made in the 1940's in a series of caves in Lascaux, France.
In all of the paintings, there is only one image of a human being although human hands are shown often.
Most of the paintings are of animals found in the surrounding
countryside: horses, bison, ibex, deer, large cats and mammoths.
The images are fantastic. The colors come from natural pigments -- red, iron oxide (red ochre), black, yellow and brown. The mortars and pestles used to mix these colors have also been found as well as traces of the scaffoldings the artists stood on.
There is no natural light in the caves. So the paintings must have been done with the aid of torches or with stone lamps filled with animal fat. Archeologists think that since the paintings were done inside caves, they were meant to last. Which they did up till today. They are too fragile for visitors to be allowed in to see them. Even scholars.
Other Achievements
Other ancient cultural achievements include monumental architecture, metallurgy, glass making, the wheel and the potters' wheel -- all found in ancient Mesopotamia one of the world's oldest cultures. The word Mesopotamia means "between the rivers." Those rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. The land is today's eastern Syria and northern Iraq.
A highly complex metallurgical factory was also recently discovered in Armenia at a site called Medzamore. 4,500 years ago, Medzamore craftsmen worked with over 200 furnaces to produce an amazing assortment of vases, knives, spear heads, rings and bracelets. They used copper, lead, zinc, iron, gold, tin, manganese and 14 different kinds of bronze. They even used mouth filters and gloves while they worked.
Other ancient cultures with extraordinary artistic achievements include the Maya in South America, the Benin and Zimbabweans in Africa and the Sung Dynasty in China.
Video Instruction
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for
Students, Parents and Teachers
Now let's do Practice Exercise 1-2 (top). Choose printer friendly or online exercises. Printer friendly version requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5. Click HERE to obtain a free copy.
You have now completed this Lesson and are ready to do the Problem and Test Sections.
You may wish to review any or all of the topics before answering the questions that follow.
Good luck.
Next Page: Test (top)