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Name:Date:HumanitiesHomeroom:
What does it mean to be a human? Part II
Do Now: Yesterday we discussed ways in which humans evolved physically. Today we are going to explore social changes. Below sketch an image of what you think early humans’ homes looked like. Then explain why you believe this.
Sketch: Explanation:
Objectives: SWBAT complete stems using but/because/so to determine the most important invention of early humans.
ELA Social StudiesWhat am I learning?
Why is it important?
How does it connect to my own life?
Chalk Talk ExpectationsTask: Expectations:
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Call Ms. Collins before 8:00pm (508) 612-
8639
Two-Minute VideoTask: As you watch the video, answer the following question: What were some things the early humans did to survive?
Expectations:
Ancient ToolsStone tools and other artifacts offer evidence about how early humans made things, how they lived, interacted with their surroundings, and evolved over time.
Spanning the past 2.6 million years, many thousands of archeological sites have been excavated, studied, and dated. These sites often consist of the accumulated debris from making and using stone tools. Because stone tools are less susceptible to destruction than bones, stone artifacts typically offer the best evidence of where and when early humans lived, their geographic dispersal, and their ability to survive in a variety of habitats. But since multiple hominin species often existed at the same time, it can be difficult to determine which species made the tools at any given site.
Most important is that stone tools provide evidence about the technologies, dexterity, particular kinds of mental skills, and innovations that were within the grasp of early human toolmakers.
Early Stone Age ToolsThe earliest stone toolmaking developed by at least 2.6 million years ago. The Early Stone Age began with the most basic stone implements made by early humans. These Oldowan toolkits include hammerstones, stone cores, and sharp stone flakes. By about 1.76 million years ago, early humans began to make Acheulean handaxes and other large cutting tools. Explore some examples of Early Stone Age tools.
Middle Stone Age ToolsBy 200,000 years ago, the pace of innovation in stone technology began to accelerate. Middle Stone Age toolkits included points, which could be hafted on to shafts to make spears; stone awls, which could have been used to perforate hides; and scrapers that were useful in preparing hide, wood, and other materials. Explore some examples of Middle Stone Age tools.
Later Stone Age ToolsDuring the Later Stone Age, the pace of innovations rose. People experimented with diverse raw materials (bone, ivory, and antler, as well as stone), the level of craftsmanship increased, and different groups sought their own distinct cultural identity and adopted their own ways of making things. Explore some examples of Later Stone Age tools.
Tools were an important invention, but __________________________________________________________
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Tools were an important invention because ______________________________________________________
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Tools were an important invention, so __________________________________________________________
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Guided Practice: SocializationHearths & SheltersThe earliest hearths are at least 790,000 years old, and some researchers think cooking may reach back more than 1.5 million years. Control of fire provided a new tool with several uses—including cooking, which led to a fundamental change in the early human diet. Cooking released nutrients in foods and made them easier to digest. It also rid some plants of poisons.
Over time, early humans began to gather at hearths and shelters to eat and socialize. As brains became larger and more complex, growing up took longer—requiring more parental care and the protective environment of a home. Expanding social networks led, eventually, to the complex social lives of modern humans.
During this time period, early humans gathered around campfires that they made and controlled -- perhaps to socialize, to find comfort and warmth, to share food and information, and to find safety from predators. Scientists found this debris from stone toolmaking that had been scorched by fire at the site of Gesher Benot-Ya’aqov, Israel. Close by were concentrations of burned seeds and wood, marking the location of early hearths.
This ancient shelter, reconstructed here, provided protection for an early human family or social group. Scientists found post holes and other evidence of multiple shelters at this site. Some shelters were as long as 14.9 m (49 ft)
Group SurvivalSharing food, caring for infants, and building social networks helped our ancestors meet the daily challenges of their environments. Over time, early humans began to gather at hearths and shelters to eat and socialize. As brains became larger and more complex, growing up took longer—requiring more parental care and the protective environment of a home. Expanding social networks led, eventually, to the complex social lives of modern humans.
Sharing resourcesSome groups of early humans began collecting tools and food from a variety of places and bringing them to favored resting and eating spots. Sharing vital resources with other members of the group led to stronger social bonds and enhanced the group’s chances of survival.
Humans learned to socialize, but _______________________________________________________________
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Humans learned to socialize because ____________________________________________________________
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Humans learned to socialize, so ________________________________________________________________
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More Guided Practice: Cooking, Hunting, and FishingControl of fire provided a new tool with several uses—including cooking, which led to a fundamental change in the early human diet. Cooking released nutrients in foods and made them easier to digest. It also rid some plants of poisons.
By at least 500,000 years ago, early humans were making wooden spears and using them to kill large animals. Spear-throwers provided leverage for hurling spears and darts greater distances with more speed and accuracy and with less chance of injury from prey. Stone or bone points, attached to spears or darts, enabled humans to exploit fast-moving prey like birds and large, dangerous prey like mammoths.
Hunting large animals was a risky business. Long spears like this one were thrust into an animal, enabling our ancestors to hunt from a somewhat safer distance than was possible with earlier weapons. Three wooden spears like the 400,000-year-old one illustrated here were found at Schöningen, Germany, along with stone tools and the butchered remains of more than 10 horses.
More than 70,000 years ago, humans in Central Africa used some of the earliest barbed points to spear huge prehistoric catfish weighing as much as 68 kg (150 lbs.), enough to feed 80 people for two days. Later, humans used harpoons to hunt large, fast marine mammals.
Longs spears were beneficial to early humans, but _____________________________________________________
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Longs spears were beneficial to early humans because ____________________________________________________
Longs spears were beneficial to early humans, so ______________________________________________________
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Even more Guided Practice: Benefits and Costs of Eating MeatBenefits: - Meat is a concentrated source of calories, protein, fat, and nutrients.- Unlike many plants, most meat does not naturally contain toxic chemicals; so it was a relatively safe food for early humans.- Meat is more quickly digested than plants and does not require large guts, saving energy for the brain and other organs.
Costs:- Hunting and scavenging large animals is risky and less predictable than gathering plants.- Dangerous animals competed with early humans to obtain meat.- Meat spoils quickly and can contain tapeworms and other parasites.
Meat was important to early humans, but ________________________________________________________
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Meat was important to early humans because _____________________________________________________
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Meat was important to early humans, so _________________________________________________________
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Independent Practice: Humans Express ThemselvesFrom pigments to printing presses, symbols changed the way humans lived and provided new ways to cope with an unpredictable world. Modern humans used color, words, and sound to produce artifacts. The ability to plan, record information, and communicate helped humans survive as climates fluctuated strongly. Ultimately, words and symbols led to language and the richness of modern human life. However, we still do not understanding everything about early human expression. Communicating with Color - By 350,000 years agoWith ocher and manganese, our ancestors marked objects and possibly their own skin. Colors were symbols by which they identified themselves and their group. Humans may have first used ocher either as an adhesive or a pigment, and later to make artistic drawings and paintings.
By this time, early humans had developed all the major representational techniques including painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, ceramics, and stenciling. Working on stone, ivory, antler, and occasionally clay, they created imaginative and highly complex works of art. They also created jewelry.
Symbols and colors were important, but _________________________________________________________________
Symbols and colors were important because ______________________________________________________________
Symbols and colors were important, so
Communication Scientists are not sure exactly when humans started talking. Spoken language does not fossilize, and there are few clues about when our ancestors began to use complex language to communicate. However, making and using some of objects, which date back 350,000 years, involved complex behaviors that probably required language.
Benefits & Costs of Talking Spoken language is essential to modern human cultures. We use language to communicate in a complex, ever changing world. As our bodies evolved for speech, the voice box dropped lower in the throat. The area above the vocal chords lengthened, enabling us to make a wide variety of sounds.
When the voice box dropped to make speech possible, it became impossible to swallow and breathe at the same time. Food could get stuck in the larynx and cause choking. Because human babies do not have a lowered voice box, they can breathe while nursing like other mammal infants.
Writing By around 8,000 years ago, humans were using symbols to represent words and concepts. True forms of writing developed over the next few thousand years.●Cylinder seals were rolled across wet clay tablets to produce raised designs.●Cuneiform symbols stood for concepts and later for sounds or syllables.
Spoken language developed, but ______________________________________________________________________
Spoken language developed because ____________________________________________________________________
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Spoken language developed, so ________________________________________________________________________
Exit Slip: Directions: Based on the evidence provided, what is the most important early human invention? What 3 pieces of evidence do you have to support your claim?
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Silent Sustained Reading:Directions: After reading your independent reading book, complete the following kernels:
Advanced Practice:Directions: Read the following using your strategies. Then complete the but/because/so frame. If you finish, create your own kernel for the story!
Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found
Bu Jamie ShreeveScience editor, National Geographic Magazine
October 1, 2009 Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbyeScientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.
The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.
Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi's key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.
Announced at joint press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus bones will be published in a collection of papers tomorrow in a special edition of the journal Science, along with an avalanche of supporting materials published online.
"This find is far more important than Lucy," said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. "It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between." (Related: "Oldest Homo Sapiens Fossils Found, Experts Say" [June 11, 2003].)
Ardi Surrounded by FamilyThe Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia's harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.
Older hominid fossils have been uncovered, including a skull from Chad at least six million years old and some more fragmentary, slightly younger remains from Kenya and nearby in the Middle Awash.
While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi's partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.
"All of a sudden you've got fingers and toes and arms and legs and heads and teeth," said Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directed the work with Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist and
former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"That allows you to do something you can't do with isolated specimens," White said. "It allows you to do biology."
Ardi's Weird Way of MovingThe biggest surprise about Ardipithecus's biology is its bizarre means of moving about.
All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi's feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.
Her big toe, for instance, splays out from her foot like an ape's, the better to grasp tree limbs. Unlike a chimpanzee foot, however, Ardipithecus's contains a special small bone inside a tendon, passed down from more primitive ancestors, that keeps the divergent toe more rigid. Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.
According to the researchers, the pelvis shows a similar mosaic of traits. The large flaring bones of the upper pelvis were positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp. But the lower pelvis was built like an ape's, to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.
Even in the trees, Ardi was nothing like a modern ape, the researchers say.
Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.
While these behaviors require very rigid wrist bones, for instance, the wrists and finger joints of Ardipithecus were highly flexible. As a result Ardi would have walked on her palms as she moved about in the trees—more like some primitive fossil apes than like chimps and gorillas.
"What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about," said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi's bones below the neck. "It changes everything."
Anthropologists discovered Ardi, but ___________________________________________________________
Anthropologists discovered Ardi because ________________________________________________________
Anthropologists discovered Ardi, so ____________________________________________________________
My Own:
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Name:Date:HumanitiesHomeroom:
Homework: Old-Time Operations & But/Because/So
Directions: Read the following using your strategies.
Old-Time OperationsAncient people drilled teeth and skulls to stay healthy.
If you think going to the dentist is scary now, imagine what it must have been like 9,000 years ago!
Archaeologists (scientists who study the remains of ancient human cultures) dug up bones that old from a graveyard in Pakistan. They found 11 teeth with holes drilled into them, even though ancient people didn’t have metal tools. Instead, Stone Age dentists used stone drills to make holes in the teeth.
The scientists who found the teeth think the holes were drilled to remove decay (rotten parts). They say that the patients may have had fillings in the holes and that the fillings probably fell out when the teeth were buried.
Shocking Surgeries This discovery is the oldest proof of dentistry in ancient civilizations. But people have practiced many kinds of medicine for thousands of years.
The oldest-known surgery is trepanation. The operation involves drilling a hole into a person’s skull! It’s not always clear why this operation was performed, but it may have helped some people survive accidents. When a person hurts his or her head, the skull sometimes fills up with fluid. Drilling a hole allows the fluid to drain so the brain can heal.
Egyptians are famous for mummifying dead bodies, but they performed operations on living patients too. Scientists discovered the mummy of a woman who had lost a toe when she was alive. She had a wooden toe sewn to her foot, and scientists believe she used it for years before she died.
Ancient Indians also performed surgery. They completed the first known nose job thousands of years ago. At the time, criminals were punished by having their noses cut off. Luckily for them, doctors designed a way to make new noses—from the skin of the people’s foreheads!
Today people have more tricks and tools than ever to keep them alive. Doctors have been practicing their work for thousands of years.
Early humans performed surgery, but ___________________________________________________________
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Early humans performed surgery because ________________________________________________________
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Early humans performed surgery, so ____________________________________________________________
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