World History

Journeys from Past to Present - VOLUME 1: From Human Origins to 1500 CE

Candice Goucher, Linda Walton

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135088217
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

World History: Journeys from Past to Present uses common themes to present an integrated and comprehensive survey of human history from its origins to the present day. By weaving together thematic and regional perspectives in coherent chronological narratives, Goucher and Walton transform the overwhelming sweep of the human past into a truly global story that is relevant to the contemporary issues of our time.

Revised and updated throughout, the second edition of this innovative textbook combines clear chronological progression with thematically focused chapters. In this volume, chapters are divided into three parts as follows:

PART 1. EMERGENCE (Human origins to 500 CE)

PART 2. ORDER (1 CE-1500 CE)

PART 3. CONNECTIONS (500-1600 CE)

The expanded new edition features an impressive full-color design with a host of illustrations, maps and primary source excerpts integrated throughout. Chapter opening timelines supply context for the material ahead, while end of chapter questions and annotated additional resources provide students with the tools for independent study. Each chapter and part boasts introductory and summary essays that guide the reader in comprehending the relevant theme.

In addition, the companion website offers a range of resources including an interactive historical timeline, an indispensable study skills section for students, tips for teaching and learning thematically, and PowerPoint slides, lecture material and discussion questions in a password protected area for instructors. This textbook provides a basic introduction for all students of World History, incorporating thematic perspectives that encourage critical thinking, link to globally relevant contemporary issues, and stimulate further study.

Part I

Emergence

Human origins to 500 CE

Planet Earth from space

Part I Introduction

In the shadow of the history of the universe, its planets, and stars, human history seems both to have occurred in the blink of an eye and to have sustained millennia of unchanging stability. The human story certainly is far briefer than the history of the cosmos. Even our planet, which was formed more than 4 billion years ago, dwarfs the history of humankind in terms of its duration. Regardless of one's perspective – that of the cosmos or that of the human species – the era covered in Part I is conceivably the most significant and dynamic period of world history. During a period of dramatic climatic change on the Earth, our species (Homo sapiens) evolved in Africa and then spread worldwide. The biological evolution of modern humans provided the intellectual and cultural capacity to dominate the planet. However unique humans were, their survival relied on the successful adaptations in the biosphere they shared with other living things. Global migrations spread our ancestors to most parts of the planet, where they began to adapt to and alter their environments. For most of human history, communities were small, foraging and hunting groups. As members of the planet's dominant species, some humans made the fateful decision to adopt agriculture and they began to genetically modify the plants and animals in the world around them.

The beginnings of agriculture during and after the Holocene coincided with a process of settling down, successfully increasing the available food supplies and swelling local populations. Marking the emergence of settled agricultural communities around the world was an unprecedented degree of complexity. Being settled allowed individuals to accumulate the stuff of life, from pottery to metal tools and permanent structures. The human experience constitutes much more than its material realms. During this same era, an internal life emerges, as do systems of communication that facilitate the transmission of traditions. The human experience thus is uniquely comprised of both material and non-material realms of beliefs and ideas. Surely part of the successful human journey has been the transfer of knowledge across generations, spinning a web of past and present dreams and endeavors.

Part I covers most of human history, beginning more than 4 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago. By about 500 CE, city life and complex religious and social orders thrived in most parts of the world. The overarching theme of Part I explores the emergence of the essential components of the human journey, emphasizing both changes and continuities and demonstrating the importance of human migration, relationships between technology and the environment, the impulse towards building community, and the role of ideas and beliefs in understanding our place in the cosmos.

Chapter 1: Human migration: World history in motion explores the emergence of anatomically modern humans with their extraordinary mobility that enabled them to dominate the planet. Human migrations have shaped the genetic and cultural diversity of the human experience. We examine the most significant migration event of world prehistory: the colonization of the planet. Chapter 2: Technology and environment: Transformations in world history examines the physical and material worlds to which human societies have had to adapt as they spread around the world. Changing landscapes have been a feature of the human experience since the beginning. The planet has undergone and continues to undergo significant geological, climatic, and environmental changes. Humans have also induced environmental change as a consequence of their technology. In this chapter, we explore early human ecologies and focus on technological changes related to food and survival strategies. Humans have adapted to nearly every environment on planet Earth, making the human species the most dominant and destructive. The beginnings of agriculture triggered the most significant transformation in the planet's history. The technologies related to water control, food storage, and the beginnings of metallurgy also had a profound impact on the environment and on population dynamics. Chapter 3: Cities and city life in world history looks at the process of settling down into an urban lifestyle, a process still underway. From the earliest cities up to the present, urban life increasingly marked the common experience of being human around the globe. People constructed communities, whether they lived in cities or in relation to cities. The urban experience brought new opportunities and distinctive challenges, from greater cultural interaction and complexity to health and wealth disparities. Finally, Chapter 4: Ideas and power: Goddesses, kings, and sages examines early systems of belief. It presents the earliest city-states as they appeared in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, showing how the growth of organized religions such as Hinduism and Judaism was intertwined with the increasing complexity of social and political orders. It traces the expansion of early city-states into kingdoms and empires and follows the accompanying changes in the nature of religious beliefs and practices.

Exploration of the themes in Part I provides the building blocks for understanding what follows: the human journey from past to present. Emerging from the stories of migration, adaptation, community, and ideas are the patterns of world history. These patterns reveal the increasing complexity and accelerating differences contained in the human experience.

1	Human migration World history in motion

The history of human mobility took a giant leap forward in 1978, when the archaeologist Mary Leakey and her assistant found a remarkable trail of 3.6-million-year-old footprints in the volcanic tuffs at Laetoli, a prehistoric site in Tanzania, East Africa. On a relatively flat surface, early hominins had walked in the freshly littered shower of ash from a nearby volcano, leaving behind their footprints millions of years ago. The subsequent onset of the region's annual rainy season then created a cement of water and ash that preserved the footprints. These early hominins, whose footprints preserved a moment in prehistory, most likely were tree-dwelling creatures. Becoming bipedal and walking upright on two legs freed the hands, led to increased brain size, and provided a distinct advantage for mobility and survival. The earliest evidence for bipedalism now appears to come from the even earlier journey of yet another species of human ancestors, Sahelanthropus, who may have walked through African grasslands and forests millions of years before the hominins at Laetoli.

1.1 Trail of hominid footprints fossilized in volcanic ash. This trail was found by Mary Leakey's expedition at Laetoli, Tanzania in 1976. It dates from 3.6 million years ago and shows that hominids (probably Australopithecus afarensis) had acquired the upright, bipedal, free-striding gait of modern man by this time. The footprints show a well developed arch to the foot and no divergence of the big toe. The prints are from two adults, and possibly a third set belonging to a child who walked in the footsteps of one of the adults. The prints to the far right belong to a hipparion, an extinct three-toed horse.

More than 6 million years separate the earliest evidence of human footsteps and the moment when humans first walked on the moon, leaving an American flag and their footprints behind (see Figure 1.4 at the end of the chapter). What these events share in common is their global reach. The earliest travelers out of Africa are genetically related to every human being who ever walked on this Earth, while the early astronauts recorded their astonishment in first viewing the big, blue planet from space. This book is about that human journey, from the most distant past of our human ancestors to the present. Most narratives of the human past examine change over time, rather than a single-moment event of the past as the Laetoli footprints represent. World history is different in that it seeks a global perspective on the past, one that acknowledges and integrates the historical experiences of all of the world's peoples. Only by examining humanity's shared past is it possible to view today's world in meaningful historical context. Like all historians, world historians create narratives of the past from records of individual and collective experiences, and they interpret the past in response to questions shaped by the world they live in. Viewing change over time requires world historians to distance themselves from the single moment and to view instead the broader patterns and processes that emerge. The processes that led to the point in time when modern human ancestors actually came down from the trees to walk through African savannas permanently triggered routine bipedalism. Walking upright on two feet was a strategy that allowed these human ancestors the distinctive advantage of seeing over the tall grasses that replaced forests during an era of climatic change. This terrestrial locomotion occurred first in Africa and it began the long march of human history.

Introduction to the theme of migration

Today we take for granted the amazing mobility of humans. With ever-increasing speed, humans travel from one side of the globe to the other. Since their origins, human migrations have had important consequences for the planet and all species. While historians rarely have the actual footprints left by humans on the move, they do rely on a staggering variety of historical and scientific evidence to trace the history of human migrations that began long before the development of writing. For example, biology and paleontology study the history of life on Earth. Paleontological research is based on fossil records and focuses only on selected chapters in our biological evolution, such as the major adaptation of bipedalism between about 6 and 4 million years ago or the significant changes in brain capacity between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago. Other important chapters in prehistory, such as the development of omnivorous behavior (consuming both animals and plants) or the emergence of culture (distinct patterns or styles of behavior), are less well documented because such evidence is less tangible and permanent. The history of human migration points to the single place of origin and the many destinations of the human journey. Migration is also one of the main forces that have shaped the genetic commonalities and the cultural diversity of human populations. How did early human migrations out of Africa people the planet? What are the varied sources for studying the patterns and impact of human migrations? How did later migrations shape the human experience? Finally, what are the causes and consequences of a world history continuously in motion? Studying migration in human history allows us to answer these questions within the widest possible lens: the place of humans in the history of the cosmos.

Evolutionary footprints: Human origins in Africa

World historians now situate the emergence of the unique human species within the larger story of cosmic history. Called “Big History,” the timeline of everything from the origins of the solar system about 13 billion years ago (written as 13 BYR) to the more recent appearance of life on the planet Earth about 3.5 BYR, the cosmic perspective reminds us that the human story constitutes a relatively recent and unique moment in time on our planet. Scientists continue to make new discoveries of hominin fossils that are used to understand the human evolutionary group of species needed to reconstruct our origins. In order to trace the evolutionary past, scientists use an empirical approach and rely on physical evidence. Not all archaeologists agree on the details of the human species family tree and each new fossil is debated in terms of where it fits with the existing evidence, but they do agree on the evolutionary pattern of the past. Classification systems are used to develop models for the appearance of the species Homo (humans or their ancestors), an event that has pushed back human origins and human prehistory to more than a million years ago. Since the early discovery of “Lucy” (the famous fossil of the bipedal, but small-brained Australopithecus afarensis) on the Afar plain of Ethiopia, the fossils of many more hominins, or human ancestors, have been uncovered.

The fossil evidence now suggests that at least 12 distinct species, including our own Homo sapiens sapiens, split from a common ancestor with the African ape and walked on the Earth over the course of the past 7 or 8 million years. Some species, such as the Australopithecines, became extinct and others were more successful in making adaptations to the changing environments of the planet. Walking upright preceded the development of brain capacity. Only one species, Homo sapiens sapiens, which was fully evolved by about 100,000 years ago, remains worldwide. These discoveries have caused world historians to reconsider what makes the human experience unique. They have also reminded us how what we know about the past is dependent upon a range of supporting evidence, from oral traditions that describe ancient landscapes to the geology that documents change over thousands or even millions of years.

Another major site of human evolutionary research in East Africa has been the Great Rift Valley, including Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, investigated over two generations by a family of scientists: Louis Leakey (1903–72), Mary Leakey (1913–96, his British wife), their son, Richard, and their daughter-in-law, Meave. In the sand, gravel, and other detrital material deposited by running water in the Olduvai Gorge, the Leakeys discovered stone tools and other evidence from about 2.6 million years ago. The stone tools excavated at Olduvai Gorge by the Leakeys and others provide part of the long chain of evidence ...