Earlier in this unit, you learned that our ancestors took an amazing journey from Africa to Eurasia and eventually to the Americas and they navigated diverse landscapes and just incredible obstacles in order to do that. In this video, we are going to look into some of the specifics of that early human migration and look a little bit closer at where survival and innovation and exploration paved the way for you and I to be sitting here where we are today. So, hello, this is World History and I'm Cara from the Credit Recovery Network.
We have one learning objective for this video. That learning objective is to investigate how different environments influence human migration and how early humans adjusted to their surroundings on their journeys. The first vocabulary word that you should know is evolution, which is the gradual development and change of a species over time.
The second one is ancestry, which is like your family or ethnic descent. And in this context, it's like your ancient family. Diversification is the process of changing or adapting by becoming more diverse and varied. That's what early humans did was they moved throughout the globe. Domestication is when you tame plants or animals for human use.
And a land bridge is a connection of land between two continents or islands that facilitates migration. So. To start, around 70,000 years ago, early humans began migrating out of Africa and into a region that we call Eurasia, which is Europe and Asia.
So the reason that they moved, as you already know, had to do with factors like population growth, climate change, the search for new resources. It was facilitated, again, by land bridges that existed. in periods of like low sea levels that allowed them to cross to new areas.
As they migrated to different regions like Eurasia, they encountered a completely different climate than they had in Africa, which included like arid deserts, temperate forests, just like really different climate, ice, ice. These environmental variations presented a lot of unique challenges. And as a result, physically humans started to change and culturally they started to change too.
For example, in the coldest regions of Europe and Asia, early humans actually adapted physically by increasing their body size, by having shorter limbs, and developing the ability to regulate their body temperature in order to withstand really cold air. They also adapted their hunting and gathering techniques because they had to. So environments like Europe and Asia had big game like mammoths. And so early humans had to develop tools like spears and they had to utilize like new community-based strategies for hunting huge animals. Then around 10,000 or so BCE, there was this transition that took place to agriculture.
Early humans started by domesticating plants and animals that led to the establishment of settled communities and the development of farming practices. This shift actually allowed early human groups. to form settlements and therefore have like larger populations in one place. They're no longer like nomadic hunting and gathering like in small groups. Instead, they could completely change the relationship with the land by staying in place for a longer period of time in much larger groups.
And as they adapted to agriculture in these different environments, they also developed new technology to change their quality of life. So we already talked a little bit about like the spear thrower and the bow and arrow. to aid in hunting and gathering, but then with the agriculture wave coming in, they started developing pottery, which helped to like store seeds and whatnot, weaving techniques, other things to help with food preparation, food storage, and just using their resources in a more efficient way.
So let's talk about going from Asia, Eurasia, Europe and Asia over to America. A lot of historians believe that the migration from Asia to Europe Occurred on a land bridge by the Bering Strait called Barangia and it connected Russia to Alaska. And a lot of historians think this happened between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. Although some recent archaeological evidence makes it seem like it might have happened even sooner, even earlier.
Sorry, even earlier than those dates. The people who made this journey are sometimes called Paleo-Indians and they would have encountered glaciers, but also grasslands, forests, deserts. Again, just like a whole bunch of different climates again.
And so that same theme, they had to adapt their hunting and gathering strategies. They would have relied on like large game hunting, like mammoths and bison and mastodons, as well as gathering wild plants and seeds. By the way, the reason that they would have made this journey is because as they learned early agriculture in Eurasia, sometimes the villages got, or the settlements got like too, too big. And that was like a fight for resources.
And so some early humans would have said, oh, I got to move and find a new place. And then they wound up. all the way in America.
All told, just to sum it all up, the main idea of this whole unit is this idea that early humans spread across the world from Africa. They encountered diverse environments and as such, they developed unique ways of surviving and thriving, first with hunting techniques, new hunting techniques, and then with agricultural settlements. Their ability to adapt physically, culturally, and technologically allowed them to thrive in different regions across the globe.
And so now we will pause right now and we're going to read a reading that will delve into this even further so you can learn more. And then you'll have the opportunity to show what you know by writing a paragraph. Good luck!