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Making Us Human

Bone Flute

Music is ubiquitous in all societies today, yet it is often seen as a "luxury" by writers on human evolution and not as important as spoken language.  Unlike those writers, we shall explore the functions music can play in societies today, and use such insights to evaluate the musical instruments that begin to appear in the archaeological record from 40,000 years ago. Continue reading →

Female Figurine

Euphemistically termed "Venus" figurines by coy 19th-century male authors, sculptures of women are prominent in the Eurasian archaeological record between 40,000 and 13,000 years ago.  We shall focus particularly on the famous figurine from Willendorf (Austria), and set her into her wider social context. Continue reading →

Handaxe

The most distinctive stone tools in deep-human-history are the handaxes. The oldest are almost two million years old from East Africa. They are exceptional because of their symmetry and their consistency in design. Handaxes are found from Britain to South Africa and from West Africa to India. They persisted for over a million and a half years at a time when the brains of our ancestors were expanding rapidly. They served a multitude of tasks in a multitude of environments. Continue reading →

Fire

The control of fire transformed the lives of our ancestors. Fire extended the length of the day making it possible to use the night-time for social activity; fire kept predators at bay; fire played a vital role in cooking food which allowed human evolution to take the pathway of larger brains which needed quality foods. However, the evidence for fire is elusive and deciding if it was truly controlled or the result of a lightning strike often difficult for archaeologists to determine. Continue reading →

The human body

Before any of the wonderful things where made or even thought about there was the human body. This had to evolve. Brains got larger, limbs changed so we became upright walkers and endurance runners, fingers shortened once they were no longer needed for climbing trees and opposable thumbs made precise grasping possible. The fine breathing needed for speech had to evolve as well as the cognitive changes that could frame sentences. Continue reading →

Introduction to module

Human history needs to be told through things. Texts help but they only reach back into the shallows of our past. In this module we go further to investigate deep human history through the wonderful things left behind. Our aim is to unite the entire span of our evolutionary history by investigating forty wonderful things described for you by experts. The story starts two and a half million years ago with the first stone tools. Continue reading →