A History of World Societies, Concise, Combined Volume

The ancient world’s story spans the globe and spans vast periods of time. It’s a little-known story about the enormous diversity of human experience, from ice age societies with lifestyles so different from ours to residents of Greece and Rome that we recognise from history books. Members of our species have settled every corner of the globe and organised their lives in myriad different ways in the 2 million years since we became human.

All we have to do to learn about the current world is look about, travel, read, or watch a film about what we can’t see. But we can’t go back in time and see what life was like thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. We won’t be able to hear an ancient Roman or see a Stone Age hunter in Siberia.

We must rely on researchers to piece together a picture of former life from many pieces of data. Many of the components are missing. Many people compare it to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, but it’s a puzzle that’s missing the majority of the pieces and, worse, has no picture on the box.

ENVIRONMENTAL DATA AND GEOGRAPHY 

Finally, scholars look at information about the ancient environment, such as pollen and seeds that reflect ancient vegetation and climate, animal bones to see what animals people hunted and herded, geological cores to study volcanic eruptions, and lines scraped into rocks that show glacier advances and retreats, which show when the climate warmed and cooled. Researchers analyse how the numbers of different species changed through time to track changes in the environment around a location because little creatures like snails are extremely sensitive to changes in climate.

Understanding the environment and climate in which ancient people lived allows researchers to better understand why settlements were built in specific locations, how agriculture and stock herding evolved, what major events in Earth’s history influenced human activity, and many other important aspects of ancient life. Although people could react to changes in the environment and temperature in a variety of ways, understanding the earth’s history during the last two million years is critical for understanding the diversity of ancient lifestyles.

EARLY HUMANS AND ICE AGE SOCIETY 

Archaic people spread to Asia and Europe after developing from their hominin predecessors two or more a million years ago in Africa. They lived in itinerant foraging bands on all three continents. Palaeoanthropologists disagree whether they used stone hand axes and flakes to hunt or scavenge the bodies of dead animals. The ice age climate had a significant impact on their dispersal and colonisation in Eurasia.

Hearths at sites like Gesher Benot Ya’acov in Israel, which are about 780,000 years old, reveal that they discovered the ability to make fire between one million and 500,000 years ago. Sounds were also organised into language by early people. Anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago and moved to Europe and Asia.

SPREAD AND ADOPTION OF AGRICULTURE 

The usage of certain particularly prolific wild plants like as wheat, barley, rice, and maize was one of the principal repercussions of settling down. Human harvesting repeatedly domesticated these plants, allowing people to nurture them to yield vast amounts of edible food. Domestication occurred at several dates and locations, such as circa 11,000 years ago in the Near East, 9,000 years ago in China, and 10,000 to 6,000 years ago in Central America.

People in portions of the Near East and Asia shifted their relationships with animals, especially cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, from hunting to herding. Animals were turned into livestock, which supplied a steady supply of meat, as well as milk, wool, and power to move carts and ploughs. Agriculture eventually moved from its core locations to become the principal source of food for most people in the world.

THE MIDDLE EAST 

Mesopotamians were farmers and herders who lived in the rich plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in prehistoric times. Their clothes were plain, with no jewellery or other personal items. Trade with foreigners along the rivers and seacoasts permitted the import of stone and metal, materials not present in the region, and the gathering of money and belongings that signified high rank when the first towns were built in Sumer (ca. 3000 BCE), in southern Mesopotamia.

While a centralised government gave rise to an elite encircling the kings and priesthood, social differences arose. Wearing more ornate, ceremonial attire with needlework, fringe, and tassels at the neck and bottom hem, and coloured with bright colours made from minerals and oil, demonstrated high status. Men of high status wore swords, seals, and staffs as emblems of their authority, and precious stones were occasionally woven into their clothes.

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC 

 In ancient China, jewellery was used to represent a person’s social rank; the more expensive and ornate the jewellery, the wealthier the wearer. The majority of people wore earrings and amulets, which were charms made of gold, silver, and stones such as jade, bone, or clay to fend against evil. Gold or silver headdresses were worn by women. On their hats, men wore gold or silver pins. The majority of ancient Chinese burials contain jewellery belonging to the deceased.

Women concentrated on painting their faces, hands, and feet since they wore long robes that concealed their bodies’ shapes. Women put a lot of effort into their makeup. They whitened their faces with powder, applied crimson pigment to their cheeks and lips, gold makeup to their foreheads, and drew dots on their cheekbones. People in China were fascinated by eyebrows. They believed that natural brows should be reserved for men. Women shaved or plucked their brows and reshaped them into a more attractive form.

Conclusion

However, as the world got more populated, roaming bands of hunter-gatherers found it increasingly difficult to travel around at will. Hunter-gatherers frequently found themselves in competition for food, resulting in conflict. Food supplies in an area might quickly become depleted as the population grew. Furthermore, hunting and gathering food were exceedingly risky activities. Early peoples relied on what they could find when they could find it, but variables like drought, monsoon rains, and temperature extremes caused food sources to fluctuate throughout time. Additionally, early hunter-gatherers lacked the ability to store and preserve food. Famine and starvation were frequently the result.