Transcript for:
Chapter 2

all right hello there students Welcome to our first um content lecture of the semester um of course you already listen to lecture one we're talk a little bit about the way the class works and sort of the shape of the class and our goals in the course and introduce myself as well um in this lecture we're going to get into real history and uh this is a really funny class I think history 101 is very funny because it starts at the beginning of time and it ends in the year 1500 or so uh and uh what's really funny about that is that for most of time there's not really any human history or history notice our lecture today is titled when does history begin with history in square coats right because I mean technically everything has a history right I'm sitting on a couch that couch has a history right it was made in some Factory from you know wood chopped down in some forest and cloth made in some other Factory and you know so everything technically has a history but when we think of history as an academic discipline which is what we're doing in our course right this is an academic history course history as an academic discipline really begins with mostly writing um historians have begun to push back against that and started to study pre-literate that societies that didn't have writing right to start studying pre-literate societies more in the last I don't know 2 30 years or so but by and large as an academic discipline history begins with writing and writing began about 5,000 maybe 5,500 years ago right sometime around 3,200 BCE or thereabouts so what this lecture does then is it goes from the beginning of time until about 3200 BCE right so in other words we cover almost the ENT entire history of the universe in this one lecture right and then in the rest of the semester we'll cover about 4700 years more of History right um and by the end of the semester we'll only be covering you know 20 or 30 years at a time in a lecture uh and then if you were to continue taking history right so while teaching at jctc I'm also teaching at bman University and at Beller I'm teaching a 20th century history class right so in a given lecture I might only cover two years right so this is a really in other words this is a very unusual lecture uh it only happens in this context right as the first lecture in history 101 right where we're covering literally millions of years um that's a bit of a misnomer what you and I would consider humans right really only Emer only uh developed only became a distinct biological species about 130,000 years ago right so if you want to consider history to be the exploits of homo sapiens which is what you and I are it's our biological genus and species right of homo sapiens and Homo sapiens have only been around for 130,000 years nevertheless we're going to cover again like 126,000 or 125,000 or so of those years in this one lecture right so this is a unique lecture in a lot of ways it's a lot of fun U we talk a lot of we talk about a lot of big broad Trends we look at patterns of human development and what I think is really fascinating and very useful for you um about studying pre-literate humans which is essentially what this lecture is right this is a history of pre-literate humans um is you'll notice a lot of similarities right now in so many ways your life is utterly utterly different right from someone from a human who lived 20,000 years ago but in a lot of ways we have the same human urges that we did then right um and uh I think it's really cool right you can learn a lot about what it means to be Human by studying humans who live 15 or 20,000 years ago uh and that's really cool so that's what we're going to do here uh quick note on some terminology for the semester right our title is called when does history begin I've already explained what the word history means in the context of our course early humans and the rise of civilization civilization is a word I have void using um there's nothing wrong with the word civilization really but the way that it has typically been used in academic settings by historians and anthropologists is um it's not quite racist but it's pretty close to racist right it's almost racist right um because basically what we say right the distinction in Civilization what makes a civilization is a society where people have writing right and if you're not civilized you're a barbarian right so using the word civilization the way the historians have traditionally used the word civilization divides the world into two groups right civilized people and uncivilized people right people with writing and people without writing and for various reasons historians have stopped doing that we sto doing that distinction we don't like that distinction that distinction doesn't make a lot of sense again it is also quite racist in many ways right um the idea of we are civilized and those people over there are barbarians has been used to justify colonialism imperialism genocide mass murder right it's presently being used to justify genocide right in Gaza right where the Israelis are civilized and the the gazin are barbarians right and so we don't use this distinction anymore so I'm not going to call what we study uh in our class civilizations I'm going to call them societies right and this is really only a issue in the first say six or seven lectures right because after six or seven lectures we start talking about countries right but um in these in the ancient era we're talking about societies and again I don't want to use the word civilization and uh this is important not just for like political correctness reasons right it's important in a lot of ways right if I tell you that the Greeks are civilized and the Aztecs were barbarians you're going to make certain assumptions about the Greeks and certain assumptions about the Aztecs and those assumptions are probably going to be wrong right in fact the azc had an extraordinarily complex society right their politics were deeply complicated their economy was massive one of the largest most complicated economies uh in the whole Medieval World right uh way way way more complex economically than the Greeks could ever pretend to be right they had a deep deep cultural sophistication right they didn't have Socrates right like the Greeks because you know Socrates requires writing though notably Socrates himself didn't write anything down right but Plato wrote down socrates's ideas right so the Aztecs didn't leave a written record of their philosophical and cultural ideas right but they had them right and so when we call one society civilized and another Society Barbarian we are necessarily you and I just because of the way language Works we're going to make incorrect assumptions about those two societies right in most ways I would say the Aztecs were way more complicated than the Greeks even though the Greeks had writing and the Aztecs did not right that's just the way it works so I just wanted to note that straight up front because when you take history 101 and your textbook will do this too your textbook actually has a good discussion on this topic right but traditionally we use the word civilization and uh we don't do that anymore because again it does have racist connotations and also it leads both professor and students to make incorrect assumptions all right so let's get into it then let's look at the first 6,950 th000 years of human history human and square quotes right um because what you and I aregu we are Homo sapiens so biological terms our genus is homo and our species is sapiens um all humans are Homo sapiens but when we're talking about deep history like history millions of years ago we're not actually talking about Homo sapiens we're talking about Homo something else right so the same genus but different species and uh so those are humanoid is probably the best way to talk about it right the first humanoid so meaning an an animal that was biologically distinct from say a gorilla or a chimpanzee or an orangutang right something that was biologically distinct from a great ape but wasn't quite yet what you and I would think of as a human right there were hundreds of different humanoid species that existed in various parts of Africa mostly right uh first humanoids and also the first humans meaning the first Homo sapiens both emerged in Africa right the African Savannah is the um Cradle of human biology right it's where all humanoids originated uh at first and again also are Homo sapians which is what you and I are humans ourselves we also emerged on the African Savannah uh if you study biology it makes a lot of sense that that would be the case right and the first humanoids emerged about seven million years ago um we're not going to talk about them at all right we as historians we don't consider this part of our discipline right historians don't really study humanoids that's the work of anth olist right particularly what we would call physical Anthropologist um the most famous physical Anthropologist are archaeologist right so archaeologist study humanoids um the humanoids began leaving Africa only about two million years ago and they went into Europe and Asia right Africa actually borders Europe and Asia you can walk from Africa to Asia you can walk from Asia to Europe if you're willing to swim the dardel which people do swim the dard nails or if you have a boat and the dard nails are only about um a half a mile wide it's a little piece of water that separates Asia from Europe um in the modern day country of Turkey right so humanoids began leaving Africa only two million years ago right so another words if you wanted to study humanoid history the first five million years of humanoid history is just humanoids bouncing around Africa uh mostly trying to stay alive um and again I'm talking about these humanoids like you don't know anything you've heard of some of these you've probably heard of homo erectus right um in school or on TV shows also neanderthals right neanderthals uh were one of the more um biologically uh sophisticated humanoids right neander tals are almost Homo sapiens right they're almost human so again modern humans what you and I would consider a person uh the only humanoids that currently exist on the earth as far as we know right uh Homo sapiens right that have our appearance and our brain size we developed about 130,000 years ago right as I already said and as I already said we did that on the African Savannah and what is basically today Tanzania or uh Uganda maybe Kenya right that sort of area of West Central Africa or sorry East Central Africa um and we begin um there's not really um I'm trying to think of a polite way to say we begin taking over right we begin destroying the other humanoids right they were competition for scarce resources and we are biologically Superior in just about every way to the other humanoids right we are particularly much smarter our brain size is what makes us so complicated right and not just smarter right our brain size allows us to have a much greater um level of sort of coordination hand eye coordination right dexterity right we are much better at using tools some of the other humanoids might have been physically stronger or physically bigger they usually weren't by the way we were usually the largest also right uh and uh we essentially you know crack skulls right we kicked ass and took names in Africa and then we left Africa as humans only about 50,000 years ago and began moving around the world um for most of our course up until mid we're only going to focus on Europe Africa and Asia right and then after midterm we'll have a whole week where we talk about the Americas right humans come to the Americas about 22,000 years ago right so it doesn't take us long to spread and again we as we spread We Begin killing all the other humanoids and we wipe them all out like there's not again there's not really a polite or nice way to say that right we just we murdered all of our near cousins right it'd be like if the chimpanzees went to war and wiped out all the gorillas right that's essentially what we did to the other humanoids and so this is kind of History right um again it's not really this is hard to study I don't know I personally don't know a single professional historian who studies any of this we would consider this mostly the realm of anthropology and archaeology when historians begin studying humans is around this time though right around 50,000 years ago when we were actually homo sapiens and we begin spreading throughout the world and we begin using tools right and for the ancient era the pre-writing era in particular uh historians consider um we talk about humans uh based on what material they made their tools from right and there are three broad ages there's the lithic age the Bronze Age and the Iron Age uh we'll barely touch the Iron Age today the Iron Age is fairly recent we'll talk about the Iron Age more in a couple weeks these first couple weeks we're mostly going to talk about the Bronze Age this is the only lecture we'll talk about the lithic age the lithic age is the age in which human tools were made from Stone right the Bronze Age obviously human tools made from bronze the Iron Age obviously human tools made from Iron right and uh by the time we get bronze we have writing right so bronze and writing sort of come at the same time um so that's where we'll build up to today so the lithic age we divide the lithic age into two eras right uh the old lithic age and the new lithic age right so the old lithic age we call the Paleo lithic right and then the new we call the Neolithic so let's talk about the Paleolithic Age again this period began when humanoids invented tool making about three million years ago right tools are mostly the reserve of humans right but other animals do occasionally use tools right I've seen um Birds use sticks to make a straw to suck ants out of holes they carved in trees right um otters use rocks to crack open shells right those are tools right humanoids also had tools they invented tools about three million years ago and again they used Stone and this kicked off the Paleolithic Age but early humanoids again didn't have our large Brain they didn't have our intelligence they didn't have our level of coordination and dexterity so they weren't very good tools they didn't make good tools really um and so really the Golden Age of tool making begins with humans about a 100 thousand years ago right actual Homo Sapien humans uh in the Paleolithic Age all humans were exclusively hunter gatherers right in other words the way that all humans got their food in the Paleolithic Age was by finding it right they found it by killing it catching it or harvesting it from the wild right and when we think of Hunter gathers I'm going to ask you I'm going to pause for five seconds want you to picture a hunter gather and what they do on a daily basis right 5 seconds starting now you're probably picturing um a guy with shaggy hair with a spear or a bow running around on mountains or Prairie hunting right when we think of Hunter gathers we typically focus on the hunting I don't know why um probably because hunting seems cool or it seems decidedly human or it's rugged it's masculine or something weird right that we focus on the hunting we weren't good Hunters okay we weren't good Hunters until we had better tools right by 5,000 BCE or 7,000 BCE right we had pretty decent tools right okay Spears uh rudimentary bows and arrows um and we were okay Hunters but we were still using exclusively stone tools right I just want you to imagine making an axe from Stone all the work that goes in to making an axe from Stone sharpening it finding a handle attaching the handle somehow right and then now imagine trying to kill an animal with that axe right you have to be close enough you have to be able to hit them hard enough the Ed The Edge is not sharp right so we weren't very good Hunters right because we didn't have good tools we're not naturally good Fighters right most people aren't very deadly with just our bare hands and bare feet right now sure if you're like Bruce Lee or you know Jon Jones or you know somebody right Floyd Mayweather yeah that maybe you could like punch something to death right but in general humans weren't good Hunters so most of our calories came from Gathering uh uh particularly if you include fishing as Gathering right we were pretty good fishermen we were extremely good at Gathering shellfish right for a large part of early human history we basically subsisted on shellfish right gathered at low tide and we lived along the ocean in southern Africa and that was all humans did for you know like tens of thousands of years uh we were really good at Gathering berries and roots and wild vegetables right that was mostly what we did we did also hunt uh the best way that we could find to kill animals usually was to get in large groups of like a hundred people and uh create a stampede and try to run animals off of a cliff we're also pretty good at Scavenging right after a lion or a wolf had made a kill we were pretty good at running the lion or wolf off of the kill and stealing it from them right so that's where most of our meat came from right we did make lots of inventions inventions in the Paleolithic Age that we still use today uh things like handles right you probably don't think of a handle as an invention but definitely is right that's a lever you probably learned in like fourth grade about simple machines right levers uh we also invented archery fire Spears religion art several other things Spears is a really cool one um again I want you to imagine yourself as a hunter you're holding a spear your spear has a wooden shaft and a stone tip that you made yourself can you throw that spear hard enough to kill a deer can you throw it accurately enough to kill a deer can you get close enough to a deer that it would even matter right the answer to all those is probably no right so we weren't very good Hunters when we hunted with Spears until we invented a a device called an at Ladle ATL ATL is how you spell it at lle at lles are really cool uh you can see one on display at Locust Grove right here in Louisville if you want that they found on site um they work a lot like those tennis ball launchers that people use for dogs you know you've probably seen them they're usually blue and they can throw a tennis ball extra far right so Nat L was essentially a spear thrower that allowed early humans to throw a spear much farther much faster and much more accurately and it's much better Hunters of course archery is way you know bow and arrow is way better than spear uh for both accuracy and force but again just imagine how strong you have to be to take a spear and hunt with it right people still do hunt with Spears by the way right um Inuit people say in uh in Alaska right they're still allowed to go out and Hunt um seals and whales with Spears that they make themselves uh it's amazing that we can do that right fire is a really important invention as well um for multiple reasons right fire basically does three things it provides light in Dark Places that's cool it provides warmth in cold places very handy right and it Cooks food and all three of these were extremely useful to humans right they remain useful to humans I imagine if you're eating meat today you'll probably cook it right uh right when you cook meat you cook all the toxins out of it right early humans used to just eat their meat raw right even if they scavenged it off of a lion kill right even if they found a dead carcass that had been dead for 10 days they would still pick it up and eat it raw right and as you might imagine that caused them lots of disease lots of stomach issues and a lot of them died quickly and painfully of bacterial infections right they didn't understand germ Theory they didn't know that bacteria existed but they did intuitively understand that if you cooked your meat on a fire it was safer it also tasted better again fire also expanded the areas where humans can live right we didn't leave Africa right Africa very warm right we didn't make it to Europe until about 40,000 years ago well what was the holdup Europe is cold right we needed fire right so fire very useful I think more interesting for our purposes here is religion and art right Paleolithic humans who had no writing who sometimes weren't even right they're were humanoid right they still made religion and they still made art it tells us a lot about what it means to be human right humans inherently want to ask fundamental questions right what is the meaning of life what is the nature of reality what is the origin of the universe right in the Paleolithic Age they're probably more concerned about you know why does the Sun come up what are the stars what the heck is that Moon thing whoa is that an earthquake what the heck is an earthquake why is it raining right those are religious questions in the Paleolithic Age right again you and I might answer these with science right presumably you understand the science of rain or the science of Sunrise or the science of earthquakes right but we still have fundamental questions today again like what is the meaning of life or what is the nature of reality that sort of thing are we living in assimilation right um those are fundamental questions those are answered by religion right that's where religion comes from that's the spark of religion right asking the fundamental questions again humans seem to have always done that it's a fundamental part of what it means to be human is to ask those fundamental questions art right Paleolithic humans and we'll look at some Paleolithic art here in a moment Paleolithic humans made art I think that's really cool right they wanted to express themselves they wanted to leave permanent record of their existence they wanted to leave a literal mark on the world and so I think it's really again I don't want to say the word interesting interesting is a boring word I I think it's um extremely useful and utterly fascinating for you and I to ponder Paleolithic humans and understand that they had the same concerns you and I right they had economic concerns you and I have economic concerns right their economic concerns was gathering enough food to live till tomorrow right yours and I might be slightly different right getting to work on time or you know not pissing off the boss or you know oh shoot my car needs repaired you know need an extra hundred bucks right we we have economic concerns P the humans had those but they also were asking fundamental questions and they also had a desire to to express themselves right so though our lives are fundamentally different wa unbelievably different from Paleolithic humans lives right they never sat on a couch right they didn't have the internet they didn't read books right they didn't get lectured about history presumably at least not very well they still had the same concerns as us the Paleolithic Age ended and ended here should probably be in Square coats 12,000 years ago um the Paleolithic Age ended at different times in different parts of the world the first place that the Paleolithic aged ended is what is often called the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia we'll lecture much more on Mesopotamia in this in the next lecture um but um that's where the Paleolithic Age ended first mes Amia is essentially modern day Iraq right in the Middle East uh The Tigress and Euphrates rivers um and then slowly the Paleolithic Age would end in different parts of the world again over the next several thousand years right it ends 12,000 years ago in uh Mesopotamia in Egypt and modern day Turkey modern day Greece it ended about 9,000 or you know 10,000 years ago China about 10,000 years years ago um in what is today Indonesia it ended about 8,000 years ago in various parts of Africa uh it still hasn't ended right people are still hunter gatherers exclusively right but in most of Africa it ended about seven or 8 thousand years ago in the americaas the Paleolithic Age ended about 7,000 years ago right so don't get too caught up on that the idea that the Paleolithic Age ended 12,000 years ago right because it really depends on where you are standing right in Louisville the p P othic age ended more like 6,500 years ago or maybe even 6,000 years ago and what ends the Paleolithic Age is agriculture right when humans invent farming we shift from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic right we're still in the lithic age so our tools are still made of stone but the shift from pale paleo to Neolithic is a shift in how we obtain our calories right we begin obtaining our calories through Agriculture and farming instead of hunting and Gathering and we don't want to be [Music] um I'm trying to F I want to phrase this in a way that's not confusing I don't want you to get lost in details but the details are also interesting and important because we don't want to simplify human history right I want you to get the full complexity of human history without being confused this is not a sharp distinction right it's not like one day a guy woke up and said ah I shall plant my rice rather than hunting and Gathering right it's a slow transition right people didn't just immediately switch from one to the other right it took sometimes over a thousand years right so in other words for a thousand years maybe people were farming and hunting and gathering at the same time right um we can see a really uh local and recent example of this if you look at the uh Native Americans who lived in the Ohio River Valley when the first Europeans and Africans got here right the first European and African settlers came to Kentucky in about 1760 right and what they found in Kentucky were native peoples who were both farmers and Hunter gathers right the shauni people for instance farmed they farmed corn mostly they also grew a lot of pumpkins and beans right winter squash that's pumpkins and they call it the three sisters crops people still do three sisters planting I do three sisters planting right corn beans winter squash or pumpkins but the shauni also hunted and they also fished right and if they didn't hunt they wouldn't have had enough food and if they hadn't farmed they wouldn't have had enough food right they needed to do both and so for a lot of human history people continued hunting and Gathering but they also farmed right and they did both sort of seasonally right what the shaune did was the men would leave The Village on you know several monthlong hunting trips right they might leave the village and go hunt for three months and then come back and the women would stay in the village and farm right the W the women and the teenagers and you know people over the age of 60 or something right they would stay and do the farming um and other parts of the world um they might um you might see hunting Gathering mixed of farming in such a way as like um uh a village and say Sudan right they might plant a crop like sorghum right sorghum is a seral grain like wheat right they'll they'll plant their sorghum and then they leave the village right and they just let the Sorghum grow and they leave the village for seven months and then they come back and harvest the Sorghum right and uh so this is the sort of patterns you get right so it's not a hard and fast separation it's not like there's hunters and gathers and there are farmers right and never never the combination right there's almost always the combination right most people need most societies around the world needed to do both right there were very few societies that could get by just on farming now coincidentally the societies that could get by just on farming are the ones that will invent writing and so they are the ones the historians focus on because again for historians academic historians like myself history really begins with writing more on that at the end of this lecture right um and so it's really the societies that are really really good at farming right who can farm so sufficiently that they don't need to be hunters and gatherers those are the ones they get the large cities the complex trade networks organized religion um strong government and go on to create writing so those are the ones that historians typically study right so in other words as a historian it's tempting to teach this history as if humans invented farming and then we abandoned hunting and Gathering and voila right civilization that's again not really the case that's only the case in a couple of distinct areas of the world right Mesopotamia Egypt China certain areas of India certain areas of Greece but when humans invent farming which again we invented farming about 12,000 years ago in Mesopotamia when domesticated wheat that's when the Paleolithic Age ends before we talk about the Neolithic Age let's look at some cool Paleolithic artifacts right the first Paleolithic artifact I want to show you is the old Devi hand ax uh this did not have a handle this is the oldest human tool ever found it's called the old duvi hand ax because it was found in the old duvi gorge in Tanzania by a British archaeologist in 1931 when Tanzania was a British Colony it's on display at the British museum you can go see it I've gone to see it you can also do a virtual tour of the British museum online it's really cool the oldo hand axe it's about the size of my palm if I stretch my fingers out right so you can imagine a palm behind it it's about the same size as a palm again it would have been a hand axe so there'd be no handle and they didn't really use it for chopping um think about it if you're holding this in your hand and you're trying to chop wood you hit the wood the wood hits back right and smashes your finger right you would break your fingers before you broke the wood right the oldo hand axe was probably used exclusively to scrape skin off of animal meat right and again this is the oldest known human artifact again not invented by actual humans but by humanoids because it was created 1.2 million years ago right a million more than a million years before humans existed look at some art right this is the V the Venus of DOL vichi all right this is the oldest known piece of human ceramic art it's very small it's only about 4 Ines tall it's about 30,000 years old it was found uh in an area of uh the what is today the Czech Republic uh near the village of beol basically like like in a Gorge like a deep ravine in the forest and that Ravine is called do vestan that's how it gets name uh it's extremely fragile so it's usually kept in a safe deposit box in the Czech National Museum but it is occasionally on display I have not seen this one in person I have never been to Prague and again even if I were to go to Prague it would probably not be on display right very few humans ever get to see this artifact right because it's very fragile um but there it is the oldest piece of human ceramic art again 30,000 years ago we were making ceramic art and again might seem like all who gives a [ __ ] think about it it's really cool this is again 25,000 years before we have writing this is 20,000 years before we have agriculture here we are we understand how to make clay objects right we understand how to fire clay how to glaze it how to preserve it right we have a desire to do that we want to express ourselves right there's something fun Fally human about artistic expression you can learn that just by knowing that the DOL the Venus of do vichi exists and the most P famous um Paleolithic art is of course the cave paintings there are cave paintings all over the world the most famous cave paintings are certainly the cave paintings at Las skull right in France uh this is the largest cave Gallery in the world uh they date back to about 17 ,000 years ago um the oldest figures right the the newest ones date back only about 4,000 years right um there more than 6,000 or almost sorry almost 6,000 figures in the Cave the Cave was discovered on accident in France in 1940 a Shepherd boy had lost a lamb and uh went looking for it the shepherd boy tripped in a hole thought maybe the lamb had fallen in the hole he began digging in the hole realized it wasn't a hole it was a cave right found the cave paintings the lamb was not there he did find the lamb later it's a happy story right but the cave paintings at let go right they've become very famous uh almost all of the images are of animals right it makes sense these are people who uh you they used animals to as their sustance right as their food so most of the paintings are things like bears and deer and wolves uh some people did paint their hand right what they would do is they'd hold their hand on the wall and they would put paint in their mouth and literally blow it around their hand to make an image of their hand on the wall right really sort of again just a there's something eerily human about it again I can't imagine what it would be like to be a Paleolithic human but I can imagine the urge to express myself I to want to leave a mark also it's really cool that they did that because we can see what size their hands were right sometimes their hands are way bigger than ours sometimes their hands are way smaller the NS by the way um again the cave paintings at Lasco are the most famous and when most people in the US uh think of cave paintings they probably think of Europe right most of the famous cave paintings are Spain and France but there are cave paintings all over the world some of my favorite cave paintings are these this is the Koso Rock Arc rock art district it's not technically a cave it's on a Cliffside in the desert in California right these are us American cave paintings uh it might look like they're just scraped into the Rock but they're paint it's just faded uh you can go visit Lasco it's hard to do they don't let that many people in at a time right you can go here you can't visit these guys uh this Koso rock art district has survived uh hundreds maybe even thousands of nuclear explosions um it is on the nuclear test site in California right um pretty cool right it's sort of a it's the perfect um metaphor of human society right here are the Paleolithic humans right 10,000 years ago painting animals on the wall and then here we are dropping atomic bombs on top of them right how far have we come as a species right how far have we not progressed as a species right uh pretty cool again the Paleolithic Age is already mentioned it didn't end at the same time everywhere in the Americas the Paleolithic Age lasted much longer again in this area you could say the Paleolithic Age lasted until basically Europeans arrived depending on how much you want to stretch the definition but again the the cave paintings the rock art right a fundamental human urge right let's talk about the Neolithic Age so the Neolithic age is the age of human agriculture uh where we still use stone tools it begins around 10,000 BCE in Mesopotamia right and then the idea of domesticating wild grain spreads from Mesopotamia and other parts of the world people start domesticating their own uh vegetables right so farming always began as vegetable farming uh and then animals would be domesticated a little later right the first crop domesticated was almost certainly wheat barley shortly after right so wheat barley um and then from there uh you begin getting other crops in other parts of the world right so wheat and barley in Mesopotamia um Millet and rice in China Millet in northern China Rice in Southern China bananas in either New Guinea or one of the islands of Indonesia we're not really sure right but bananas um pumpkins first domesticated uh actually in this area right pretty close to here basically was mostly today Arkansas I would say it's kind of controversial uh maze or corn um domesticated in southern Mexico and the modern state of Waka Mexico um potatoes and quinoa in what is today Peru right sorghum in probably West Africa we're not really sure uh also cow peas in West Africa and then other peas and beans would quickly follow around the world as well um the Neolithic Age last until about 3500 BCE when humans invent Metallurgy right uh in other words when we begin making our tools from metal uh animal farming becomes widespread around 6,500 BC again that's 8500 years ago um we're going to bracket cats and dogs for a moment the first animal we domesticate our goat then sheep uh quickly after sheep cattle and then finally pigs and this would have been most of the animals we domesticated and farmed um eventually horses and water buffalo would join uh say over the next 3,000 years but goats first um let's talk about horses or let's talk about dogs and cats um when dogs were domesticated is actually extremely controversial and very few um Scholars historians and anthropologists very few are experts on the field but those who are experts disagree with each other and they disagree with each other viciously so some think that we domesticated dogs like 20,000 years ago and some we domesticated dogs like 5,000 years ago I am not an expert on the history I have no idea I know dogs are very handy right I also think that we domesticated dogs prior to uh 15,000 years ago because I think we brought them with us when we came to the Americas right so I tend to think that we domesticated dogs way before we domesticated any of this other stuff we domesticated dogs before we were even Farmers that's just my opinion again I am not an expert dogs again very useful for hunting dogs very useful for pulling heavy objects right so if you're a hunter gatherer and you're dragging your belongings with you everywhere you need an animal to help you pull them dogs help right dogs can pull sleds basically um so it's unknown when dogs were domesticated cats is another story entirely we still haven't domesticated cats as I told you in the previous lecture I have two cats so that's a cat person's joke right my cats aren't domesticated they just live in my house and eat my food occasionally they let me touch them right but uh basically they're not domesticated even yet no in all seriousness we probably domesticated cats around the same time they were domesticating goats sheep and cattle um the biggest change and we're going to talk about more in in more detail I think on the next slide uh about all of the changes wrought by agriculture right but agriculture creates many many changes uh the biggest and most important change is fixed settlements people begin staying in one place think about it you're a hunter gather you cannot stay in one place right you need to be uh in the Forest when the berries are ripe in August and then you need to be in the Hills when the digging roots are ripe in October and then you got to get somewhere warm for winter right where there's still food maybe near the ocean so you can gather shellfish you're constantly moving around right hunter gatherer peoples Paleolithic humans in general are transient they're moving they're mobile right they're always on the Move Farmers can't do that right Farmers don't right if I plant 100 acres of Wheat and that is my food that's my number one source of food for the year I can't leave I have to tend my wheat I can't risk anything happening to it have to make sure weeds don't overtake it I have to make sure it doesn't get too dry have to be here when it's ready to harvest I have to go through all the hard work of processing the Harvest after I've harvested it I need to have somewhere safe and secure to store the Harvest after I've harvested it or I wasted all that work right and so I need to stay in one place right once you add animals it gets even more complicated and once you got chickens and turkey and goats and sheep and cows and pigs I can't go anywhere right even today Farmers don't really travel right when I lived in Ireland I lived in a Dairy farming region most of the people around me had milk cows if you have milk cows you can't go anywhere you got to milk every day right so fixed settlements humans began staying in one place this has enormous implications it leads to the things like the flourishing of pottery institutionalized religion again not the religion itself is New Right Paleolithic humans had religion they asked fundamental questions right but in fixed settlements where we get institutionalized religion right or you go Worship in a building right with a set spiritual leader right institutional religion arises in the Neolithic Age so does government we'll talk about this in more detail but just go ahead and start thinking about it right why does fixed settlement lead to this sort of stuff right why does farming lead to this sort of stuff and while you're think about that let's look at some of the farming centers around the world again pumpkins corn potatoes and quinoa sorum somewhere in there wheat and barley rice Millet bananas right peas and beans here and then spreading right watermelons also native to Africa actually I'm wrong bananas are native to Africa but this is not bananas I don't know what that is so again the Neolithic age is the Golden Age of human Pottery we did Pottery prior to the Neolithic age right Paleolithic humans had Pottery but Pottery is not that useful to a hunter gather again think about being a hunter gather you can't stay in one place for very long you know no more than say four or five months and usually much less right hund gathers often would stay in one place for a night again think about it if you lived in the Paleolithic version of Kentucky you might have to walk from louville to Nashville right and say 12 days right for food so you just you're just you know staying one night as you walk again sometimes like for winter they usually stay in same place for four or five months right but not always so they're constantly moving around they don't accumulate a lot of possessions they don't have draft animals right they haven't domesticated any animals except maybe dogs so all the things they own they have to carry with them right they usually have what's called a travois right it's a French word t r a v o i s a travois travois is basically like a stretcher right and so like it's got two handles it's like a wheelbarrow without wheels right so it's like a a leather usually like like a leather almost hammock on like a triangular wooden frame with two handles and you drag it across the ground so they'd fill their possessions and drag it again maybe they had dogs dogs would drag it so you wouldn't have a lot of possessions you have to carry everything with you so they did have Pottery but they didn't have a lot of pottery right they also didn't have the need for pottery because what's pottery's most useful function storage pay lith people didn't need to store stuff right or not that much stuff right Neolithic people now they need Pottery right first of all they have a fixed settlement they live in a house they live in a given area right maybe not a house like you and I think of maybe it's like a canvas tent right but they have a set house this is where I'm going to live right for Generations my family is going to live here they begin accumulating possessions they fill it with stuff right a Paleolithic person doesn't need a huge storage earn because a huge storage JN weighs 200 pounds and they don't want to drag that [ __ ] with them everywhere they go a Neolithic person has a use for a storage JN right and a place to keep it they don't have to drag it everywhere they're not going anywhere anywhere right they're staying in one spot right it's also in the Neolithic period that we invent Furniture again you don't need a chair if you're a Paleolithic person you have to drag a chair with you everywhere you go but if you're a Neolithic person hey table and chairs that sounds great and so they invent Pottery right they also need to store things in a way that pale people do not again if I'm a wheat farmer I harvest my wheat guess what if my wheat Harvest is ruined after I harvested right if my I grind it into flow maybe if my flower gets wet I'm screwed I starve so I need a cool dry Place away from bugs away from water away from temperature extremes to store my wheat right pottery and so Pottery the Neolithic Age then is the Golden Age of pottery again not all the poy Pottery is useful right here's a piece of art this is from Syria uh from uh a village in Syria called Tel feeria uh you will learn throughout the semester that I am not very good at pronouncing Arabic words I took some Arabic in college and I try but I'm not very good at it till fakira in Northern Syria near the now unfortunately famous city of Aleppo right it was made about 9,500 years ago last I checked it was on display at the University of Chicago right again this is a very sophisticated Pottery it's much big bigger than the Venus of do dovichi but again Neolithic peoples make lots and lots and lots and lots of pottery you think about it like water you would want to have water stored in or near your house right and you wouldn't want to have to go gather it every single time you needed water right so you'd want Pottery to store your water right so maybe in the morning you go drag a bunch of water out of a well or a river and bring it back to your house and then you want to just keep it there so when you need to wash or cook or you know whatever you would do with water it's there on hand and so Pottery becomes very important in the Neolithic period And there are many side effects of humans adopting Agriculture and settling down some are positive some are negative some are neutral right or some you your opinion of them would vary depending on one's politics right uh one obviously negative effect settling down is that Warfare becomes much more common Paleolithic people did not have wars they probably very rarely fought um archaeologists when they dig up bones of humans they can tell if that person died violently or not you can look at someone's skeleton and tell that they were hit by an axe on their arm or you know in modern times were shot in the ribs or something right uh violence leaves marks on our bones and Paleolithic people very very very rarely have bones that are weapon traumatized right they very very rarely have indications that they died in violence Neolithic people that is not true right in Neolithic people we see lots and lots of weapon traumatized bones right people fought and died in war this makes a lot of sense about agriculture for many reasons right um another piece of evidence that we know Neolithic people had uh lots of warfare is that we see evidence that they made defensive fortifications right people lived in fixed settlements and they built walls or trenches around them usually from dirt but sometimes from Stone this is not something you would do willy-nilly again think about how difficult it would be I live in a subdivision right it's fairly large it's like I don't know eight square miles right think of the amount of Labor we would need to do to build a 12 foot tall dirt wall and a on and then an8 foot deep dirt ditch around our eight square mile subdivision it'd be a ton of work right even with modern digging equipment now imagine doing that with stone shovels right Stone digging tools right it's years of work right so you don't make fortifications if you don't need fortifications this is expensive and grueling labor right so neolith people built fortifications they were fighting Wars newless people have weapon traumatized bones they were fighting Wars now I'm going to stop talking and give you 10 seconds I want you to figure out I want you to think about why would creating agriculture give us more Warfare okay well there are several reasons number one the population is bigger one of the trisms about human history one of the things I really want you to get from this class every class every history class I teach this is one of the things I want students to get from the class when food production increases when it gets more predictable when we grow more food the population always goes up always hunting and Gathering was not that predictable and population was extremely small and so one reason Paleolithic humans did not not fight a lot of Wars is that there just weren't a lot of people around there's plenty of resources to go around right now occasionally there might have been small fights over like again winter shellfish gathering places right but in general bands of Hunter gathers right people would be in bands of a couple hundred people usually right they didn't see each other right so you didn't fight anybody because there was no one to fight um when we start farming it's a much more predictable source of food and the population increases as the population increases it's just you know there's just more people around and it just makes War Warfare more likely right a world with 10 million people is more likely to have wars than a world than a world with two million people right because you just have five times more people um another reason is that farming um is fickle right it takes a ton of work and sometimes through no fault of your own your crops fail right so it takes a ton of work and then maybe it just didn't rain that year your weak crop failed what are you going to do you have two choices you can starve to death or you can try to go find food well how do you find food you're not going to be a very good Hunter gather imagine it you right now let's just pretend you right now said hey all the grocery stores are closed you have to just go find your food I just put you out in the Kentucky forest and say voila here's a spear here's a bow and arrow hell here's a pistol go feed yourself we're all going to starve right that's not because there's not sufficient food there is enough food in the Kentucky forest right to feed thousands and thousands and thousands of people edible plants fish shellfish insects other animals deer squirrels right there's plenty of food just you and I would be terrible at finding it but we don't know what plants we can eat we're not good Hunters we're not good shellfish gatherers right you and now gonna starve because it's a skill right so if I'm a wheat farmer I have the same skill issue if my wheat crop fails it's not like I can just decide okay well this year I'll be a hunter cther no I'm screwed I only have one choice to go find someone else who's a wheat farmer and take their food or I'm going to starve right so crop failure leads to more Warfare it's easier to go steal someone else's wheat than to be a hunter gather and I'm not going to starve right desperate people starving people they might be willing to go to war related to this agriculture is really easy to pillage to steal right so maybe I don't want to be a farmer right farming is hard right particularly farming in the Neolithic era are you K be right with a stone shovel right growing barley and grease hell no right that's a lot of work I mean you're talking like backbreaking labor 10 12 hours a day eight months a year or more and that's just for the crop that's not counting the animals and then I have to make my tools I have to Shar my tools I have to make my Pottery right all I have to process the food right if I'm milking I have to make cheese if I'm growing olives I have to press the oil if I'm growing wheat or barley I have to grind the the FL the seeds into flour like it's so much work to be a farmer you know it' be a lot easier to let someone else do the farming and just be a professional killer right so you farm and I'm going to sit up in some hideout in the mountains and I'm going to watch you and the day after you grind all your wheat and you're putting all your ground flour into your big story journ and you're taking a big sigh of relief because your eight months of back breaking labor are finally done and you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of the Harvest me and my my band of 12 other Killers we're going to break into your house slit your throat and steal your wheat so I get to eat and I didn't do any work right my only work was killing right so this also creates more Warfare right agriculture gives us something to fight for right again also agricultural people as I already talked about with Pottery right they begin accumulating possessions Paleolithic people don't have anything to steal they don't have fancy furniture they don't have fancy jewelry they don't have Trinkets and art and stuff that they carry around with them right but if I build a house I'm going to fill it full of cool [ __ ] right so Neolithic people have cool stuff to steal there's wealth accumulated right so there's all kinds of reasons then that Warfare becomes more common again the fickle nature of Agriculture the increase in population the accumulation of wealth and again just the fact that some people just want to be Raiders and pillagers who get their food by killing other people who did all the work rather than doing the work themselves there's lots of reasons then that Warfare might become more common um another major side effect of developing agriculture is that trade becomes a major part of daily life Paleolithic people definitely conducted trade but again they had to carry all of their possessions with them so they didn't do a lot of trade they did trade just not a whole lot of trade and when they would trade was usually a big elaborate annual Gatherings that were also usually cultural or religious festivals right uh basically like uh a Paleolithic Marty gr right so they would all bring [ __ ] to one big area at one specific time of year and they would trade back and forth and they basically have like a huge party and consume all the stuff there so they would have to carry it again with them right Neolithic people don't trade that way right Neolithic people trade as a way to accumulate wealth and possessions um so again just being sedentary right being said in one spot again having a house I can fill full of stuffff I have a natural inclination then to fill my house right so trade becomes part of daily life um another reason trade becomes part of daily life is that we get cut off from resources so imagine again I'm going to give you a really juvenile example but just it works it's silly but it makes sense imagine you're a hunter gatherer right and you spend half the year at the ocean and half the year in the mountains so over the course of a year you get all the ocean goods and all the mountain Goods right you get metal and Timber uh fresh fish and berries and deer from the mountains right and then you get ocean fish and shellfish and shells and sand and salt from the ocean now you become a farmer you farm in the mountains you still need that stuff from the ocean you still have a use for sand and shells and salt well how you going to get it if you live in the mountains and you can't leave trade right so trade begins be whereas before people could just get all their goods by walking from one area to another one biome one habitat one geographical anomaly to another right once we begin settling we have to trade for the stuff that's over there again if I live in Kentucky I still need stuff that comes from Mexico I can't walk to Mexico anymore because I have cattle how do I get stuff from Mexico I trade for it right so trade becomes part of daily life right as it's probably apparent right from what I've already discussed um another side effect of settling down is the rise of social stratification right rich and poor wealth inequality Haves and Have Nots some people are better at farming some people aren't right some people accumulate a lot of wealth and some people are just barely getting by right every farming society that historians have studied has had social stratification with a couple of exceptions right obvious signs of social stratification not true of Paleolithic humans right now Paleolithic humans there sometimes like um authority figures right there might be a some people who have more power or more clout right more political power in a band of Hunter gathers but in terms of economics they're equals like they share stuff and there's that really um gaps of uh class right um an ancillary part of this right that you're probably not thinking enough hopefully because you live in the 21st century and we've mostly done away with it slavery becomes a major Human Institution only in the Neolithic era right you can't enslave a Paleolithic person right they'll just leave Neolithic people you can enslave them because they're tied to the land they're not going to run away because they'll starve because they don't know how to find or hunt their own food right they have to get their food from wheat so slavery right slaves become type of wealth that certain people accumulate slavery really becomes part of human history in the Neolithic Age you this also gives us something like government and institutional religion right priest didn't farm right people farmed for priest because priest had a different job right communing with the gods right government right the king doesn't Farm someone feeds the the king's got other jobs right like seeing to the shared defense as I've already mentioned right farming brings a higher population brings better tools right we just get better at making tools because we have more time for it we're not moving around constantly so also how we eventually develop bronze making right the Bronze Age so idea that we have more time and more need and so we engineer better ways of making better tools as we get better tools we also are able to clear more land to farm and we begin changing the Earth right the Earth was mostly Forest and you can't really Farm very well in Forest so we begin clearing Forest to farm again some of these changes are positive right trade seems pretty positive some of these are negative Warfare seems pretty negative some it's up to you to decide right some people think social stratification is good right some people think it's bad right some people think H who gives a [ __ ] right so some of these are positive changes some are negative and how do you decide they're positive or negative well that goes back to that fundamental questions thing right religion morals philosophy all right so the Neolithic Age ends when we begin creating bronze um before we begin creating bronze we tried working just with copper um so the barrier here with metal is that you don't mine metal so I don't know how many of you know anything about mining you mine ore o r e or an ore is rock and metal mixed together right so if I want to Alum mine aluminum there's no aluminum just sitting in the ground I can't dig a hole and just find like a big ream of aluminum right aluminum is intertwined in rock it's called boxy right and so after so I don't mind aluminum i m boxy and then once I have my boxy I have to smelt it I basically put the rock in a giant oven and I get the oven so hot that the aluminum melts and drips out of the Rock and separates itself and then I get raw aluminum and then I can work with aluminum right so the big barrier then to humans making tools from metal was creating smelters that's what that's how you uh get the ore that's how you get the the metal out of the ore making smelters hot enough to melt the metal right and the first metal that we were able to do this with was copper so we began copper smelting in Eastern Europe all the metals arise in Eastern Europe for some reason right about 7 7500 years ago and we enter What's called the chalcolithic era the chalcolithic area is not very important copper sucks as a tool I don't know if you know anything about copper right copper is what we use to make like plumbing and wiring from it's really bendable so it's great if I want to make a refrigerator and I want to like coil wire in the back of the refrigerator and be able to plug it into a wall so the refrigerator works it's sucks for making a tool right you make an axe out of copper you hit the tree and the tree breaks your axe right copper wasn't very useful uh they used it mostly to make arrow heads uh it was somewhat useful for that what they found was that if you added an alloy to copper copper got way stronger and when you mix an alloy to Copper we call it bronze the most common alloy to add is tin because tin was very cheap and easy to find it's usually near the surface right you don't have to dig very far down to find Tin Tin is very plentiful in most of the world uh even today even though we've taken away most of the tin there's still a lot of tin around particularly in Indonesia and Australia um and so we would take tin ore and copper ore and we would smelt them put these giant rocks in these giant ovens and we' melt the tin and copper out and mix them together and if you mix them together you can make bronze bronze is a very hard metal it's easy to sharpen you could get really sharp strong stable edges and made great tools and again think about all that goes into this process right you have to have the knowledge uh you have to have a smelter which is made from like clay bricks right so you need a lot of clay to make these huge clay brick ovens that we call smelters uh you have to have the tools to go mining the knowledge to go mining you have to know where to dig right where can I find Copper where can I find tin you have to haul out a bunch of ore and again they're making this ore from stone tools right so using a stone tool to carve Stone out of a mine right and then you put it in a smelter right the smelter needs to be heated so you have to fell a bunch of trees and chop up the wood right to build a huge fire to get the smelter hot enough and at that point all you have is raw bronze and raw tin you have to make another fire and another Forge you have to have a skilled Craftsman usually a black Smith right and that person combines the bronze or the copper and the tin and they make bronze and they have to take the bronze and they have to shape it into a usable blade and you have to attach that blade to a handle so that you can actually chop wood with an axe or a handle so you have a you know a sword or whatever it is you need right so to make bronze right this is a huge leap forward in human technological ability right and it's not something you could do with like five people right it takes a like a whole society you need a large population center right you can't have Bronze in other words without farming because farming allows a large group of people to live in one area right and then that large group of people can work together to make bronze right so you probably also need something like Authority right some kind of social structure right someone needs to be in charge maybe not right I mean I typically am quite optimistic about human nature so I think we could probably figure out a way to cooperate without Authority but maybe not right so all that goes into making bronze and bronze is far superior to Stone as a tool it's a way Sharper Edge right you want to chop down a tree with a bronze axe rather than a stone axe you don't have to swing it as hard you don't have to hit the tree as many times you don't have to sharpen the blade as many times right imagine chopping down a tree with a stone ax how often how many swings are you going to get before have to sharpen the blade again and again and again and again right bronze holds the edge longer right and again The Edge is sharper so it's easier to it's a better tool and it's also a better weapon this means it's a major technological advantage so I want you to think for a moment What's the implication of society a having bronze and their neighbor Society B not having bronze what's the next hundred years going to look like right Society a bronze tools Society B next door stone tools I'll stop talking well Society a is going to take over right they're going to be better Farmers because they have better tools they're going to be able to cultivate more land right they'll have more acreage under seed right they'll have more wheat more barley more bananas whatever it is they're growing they'll have more of that than the stone Society because working with bronze tools is more efficient than working with stone tools if you have more food you're going to have more people right so Society a is going to have more people than Society B Society a have more people they're have more people doing things that aren't farming right their farmers are better think about this way you and I don't Farm most of our food right I imagine I mean I I farm very very little of my food I grow a couple tomatoes and peppers right maybe you're a good Gardener right but you still get most of your food from the grocery and you have a different job right you do something else for your job right I teach history classes and someone else feeds me right some other farmer is so good at farming that he or she produces enough food that there's food left over for me to eat right so in other words Farmers Feed non-farmers so Society a by having better farming will have more people in their society whose job isn't farming their job is doing anything else they're Craftsmen they're blacksmiths they make barrels they make carts they tame es they train at Warfare they build temples they invent religions they govern right Society a has more people doing that sort of thing than Society B so Society a is more advanced than every way right they have more Merchants they have more Craftsmen they have more Goods they have more wealth right and then if they decide to and they go to war against Society B they'll also win right why would they win well they have better weapons and they have more people right and they probably have better soldiers because again their farming is so good that their people can take out time from farming to go train at Warfare right so they can train soldiers whereas Society B can't right Society be is just trying to survive with their terrible Stone weapons right in societ a with bronze weapons again they're better bronze tools they're better right so bronze defeats Stone over and over and over again right so there are several several repercussions of bronze just like we talking about agriculture right what are some of the consequences of bronze I'll try to make this a little quicker this lecture is a little longer than I was hoping already right bronze allows easier and therefore bigger military conquest right so bronze increases the amount of War because War becomes easier and more profitable again your army if you're in a stone Society you guys can make 200 Stone ax and come to war with me I can very easily make a thousand bronze swords I win my Society has bronze tools our farming is better I have more people you can put an Army in the field of 500 people I can put an Army in the field of 1500 people I win right military conquest is easier and therefore it happens more often it's a trism I don't how many of you saw the film Oppenheimer that's the that's the uh the ultimate um takeaway from the film right that's the lesson of the movie opheim he doesn't like nuclear weapons because if we have nuclear weapons we'll probably use them right if you give a society better weapons they will typically use them right for war right so bronze allows easier and therefore bigger military conquest bronze created more concentrated centers of wealth I kind of already alluded to this one in the previous one right if your farmers are better then you need fewer people farming to feed more people again that's really abstract but just think about it for a moment right in the US the number of people who are farmers whose job is growing food to feed everyone else the number of people who are farmers has gone down for a hundred years straight the number of people who live in the US has gone up for a hundred years straight what that means is is our farmers are getting really good at feeding people right it takes fewer Farmers to feed more people so what does that mean for the rest of us society that means we can con that means that most people in the US can use our working hours our intellectual ability our physical strength and energy to do something other than feed ourselves right we can invent rocket ships and uh write books and make films and you just whatever it is we want to do right again most of the wealth in us today comes from like guys in New York City you know moving algorithms around a computer to you know change decimal points on investments or whatever right but regardless right if fewer people are farming in a society because their farming is better more people can use their energy to do other things and those other things typically create wealth ideas inventions art right again barrels and carts and philosophy and schools right couldn't have schools if everyone had to be a farmer all the time right no kids would have time to go to school no teachers would have time to be teachers right so we get more concentrated centers of wealth with bronze because again fewer farmers can feed more people every acre you till produces more wheat think about that way right if you have a city and all the food from that city has to come from 10,000 acres then if you can squeeze more wheat per acre you get more people right so cities get bigger and they also get more wealth better tools more food more food more people large cities because of bronze right you can have a much larger City with bronze tools than with stone tools because again City people don't have the space to grow their own food right people who live in cities typically need to be fed by people who don't live in cities it's not always true right when you get to the Aztec you'll see there are exceptions right again the Aztec rule right but in general City people are fed by not City people so you need good farming to have cities so we really only get large cities established in the Bronze Age right the first time there's a city of 10,000 people it's a Bronze Age City it's it's a city that uses bronze tools this leads to the invention of writing and the invention of law more on that in a moment better tool also means more trade right because there's more wealth I have more things to trade because there's more things that I can have because again I can spend less time farming and therefore there's more trade right this also leads to more wealth right more trade and more wealth also leads to more Conquest again if Society a can trade more they get wealthier I might want to go invade them and take all their wealth because they have more wealth to take right we'll see this again and again by the way in our class right these are historical sort of truisms these are general principles that hold true throughout human history talk about this when we get to the Vikings right this is why the Vikings start raiding because Europe comes up with better farming they get more people they get large cities around the year 900 and the Lans go oh let's go raid and pillage and take all their wealth happens again and again uh humans or horses were also domesticated in the Bronze Age and so they just make all this stuff they put all this stuff on steroids it exacerbates all these other Trends right horses make Conquest even bigger and easier they allow for even more wealth to be concentrated they allow for even better tools and more food right you can bring goods from farther away right so a city that used to have to rely on 10,000 acres if you have horses to pull carts maybe that City can now get their food from 50,000 Acres so you get even more people in that city right so horses just make all these things bigger and better now let's talk about writing how does bronze give us writing because it does right that happen almost simultaneously we get bronze and like 300 years later we get writing right away right I'll talk about this more in the next lecture right writing serves three social functions recordkeeping passing information from generation to generation and entertainment it's that first one that causes bronze to give us writing right writing serves as recordkeeping recordkeeping is needed right it's needed because of bronze so again I don't want to go into too much detail because I do this more in the next lecture but just I want you to get some detail here I want you to understand how bronze gives us writing we have a Bronze Age city right so we have lots of farmers in the countryside using horses and carts again the carts are made by people in the city right so we have people in the city whose job is not farming their job is making carts right and so we sort of get this self we get this like ever growing Circle right what people call a virtuous cycle right so the more people City the more people your city can have because the more people in your city the more people who can have jobs that aren't farming right and the more efficient your farmers get at feeding those who aren't farming right so in other words a Bronze Age city so we have farmers in the countryside the near Countryside right right up against the gates of the city if you want right so picture of w city right they're farming right against the walls and farther out right as we get horses and carts those farmers are using bronze tools which make them efficient Farmers which allow them to feed the people in the city which allow more people to go into the city the people in the city are not farming they're spending their free time their working time doing other things other than farming so they're making art and barrels and carts and pottery and who knows what else right um tools and weapons and people begin accumulating wealth right so they begin getting couches and carpets and tapestries and uh pretty ornaments and you know fancy you know tables with crazy carving and you know gold inlaid into it and silver jewelry people getting more and more wealth and more and more people are living in city right every day more people right the population keeps going eventually the need to keep records arises right there are several reasons why you might need records right if I'm a merchant merch I need to keep a record of my sales right Merchants still do this right you go to Kroger right now buy a salad for lunch Kroger will give you a receipt they'll also scan your item over a bar like the barcode on your item over a digital scanner which inputs it into the computer which sends a message to Kroger headquarters tell them how many salads they are selling in Louisville today so that Kroger Corporate Headquarters knows how many salads they need to have in stock at a given Kroger on a given day Merchants need records right so same is true in the Bronze Age if I'm a beer Merchant I need to know how much beer I sell on a Wednesday versus a Friday how much beer do I sell in that District of the City versus this District of the city because I want to be an efficient beer seller I need to keep track right another reason recordkeeping is needed as the city gets bigger and bigger again as a city is smaller maybe the merchant can keep all that information in his or her head right they're really smart maybe right but as the city gets bigger and bigger right as the city gets more and more Anonymous think about your day your daily life in lville right it's very Anonymous right when you're in public space you probably don't know most of the people you encounter right I'm about to go for a bicycle ride after I finish record this lecture i' be in the park I'm going to pass hundreds of people in the park on my bike I'm not going to know any of them I might know one of them right they're strangers right the bigger the city the more often you're encountering strangers so I don't know if I can trust other people I might want to keep records for that reason if I'm the merchant right I need know who's paid for the beer right if I'm delivering barrels of beer to taverns if I know all the tavern Keepers maybe I don't need records I I can trust them if I don't know all the tavern Keepers I need to keep records I don't want strangers to exploit me there's lots of reasons as as a merchant you might want records it's also true of government right as a city gets bigger and bigger the people get more and more the people in charge might need to keep records right because these big cities they're building things they're building the walls they're building the streets that takes a lot of Labor how does the government build walls right how's a Bronze Age government build walls around the city it forces the people to give labor as taxes right so instead of giving a coin to the government you have to go build walls right or alternatively maybe you owe the government a coin at the end of every year and the only way to get that coin is to hire yourself out to build the walls around the city right so in other words the government is only able to build big public works like walls or temples right or government buildings by forcing people to do work or pay taxes or both well the government needs to be able to keep records to know who has paid their taxes who has done their work because you're going to get liars and cheaters and shers and thieves right so you need to know who actually paid their taxes right so recordkeeping again this will have its own repercussions we'll talk about more later in the next lecture see how this works in Egypt sometimes it backfires but I need to know who's done the work if I want to rais an army right how do you raise an army does anyone know it's complicated right so uh basically the government would have an official so in England it was called The King's Reeve right that's so that's the English term for it the king's re Reeve but you know every society has this the version of this job and the King's Reeve would be tasked with raising an army and so the Kings Reeve would go into a village and presumably he might know everyone in the village and so he knows that that household over there has three boys they can give up a son to come fight that household over there only has one son I'm not going to ask them to fight right and so he goes and he knocks doors and raises an army that's not very efficient and again in a city of strangers it's not going to work and that's you're not going to raise an Army in louville that way there's no one in louville who knows everyone in louville right you couldn't put together a thousand people in Louisville who knew all the other people in Louisville right so you need record keeping I need know how many people live on this block because I might need to raise an army how many people on this block are be are men between the ages of 16 and 40 who can fight what are their jobs because if their jobs are really important I don't want them to be in the Army if they're like a they're like the best blacki Smith in town I don't want that guy dying in war right just like today we don't send surgeons and neuros physicist to war right those aren't the people who went on the front lines right so recordkeeping arises to handle the demands of a huge population and that gives us writing so writing begins as recordkeeping it's a it's a administrative technology it's a technology of the powerful a tool of the power powerful to stay in power how do you control a large population writing and I want to be careful here writing only arises in a couple places and again we can overestimate the effect of all this stuff right just like we talked about the Paleolithic Age it ends at different times at different times in different parts of the world bronze doesn't always have this much effect because some societies again bronze takes a lot so let's go back to our Point here right consider all that required to make bronze some Society can only make a little bit of bronze so the effects are smaller here some societies don't have access to horses right the Americas there's no horses in the Americas there are no horses in Europe for quite a long time no horses in Africa right parts of Africa today you still can't have horses they have the ZET Z fly they'll kill a horse immediately so these cussions are uneven right they're not not every single Society follows this exact trajectory right again the ones that invented writing follow this trajectory and the ones that invented writing are the ones the historians emphasize because for historians again history and quotes begins with writing and the reason for that is that writing gives us our best historical evidence so I'm going to look at two other we look at two artifacts of the lithic age right Neolithic artifacts and uh I'm going to show you how writing would make our understanding way better and it'll explain to you why history why historians prefer writing and why historians say that history begins with writing so the first Paleolithic or sorry Neolithic artifact we're going to look at is this here on the right this is called PA nebron dolman P neon dolman is a stone monument in County CLA West Ireland uh it was built about 6,000 years ago it's enormous I used to live in County Clair West Ireland this was 15 minutes from my house okay it's really cool to visit it's uh the top Stone here is about 13 feet by 10 feet right it weighs thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds it's seven feet high so this was constructed and again we can look at when these Stones were laid archaeologists can date that these stones relid about 6,000 years ago and so this can tell us a lot right I can use the tools of archaeology and find out a lot here but the people who built paon Dolen did not have writing and so there's a lot of things I can't know all right so questions we might want to ask right if you're a historian or an archaeologist and you're investigating this thing and the people who made it you have lots of questions first you might ask what is it right okay it's a couple rocks stacked up why and we can analyze it it serves as a calendar right it's a raid to the Sun so that the sun will rise and basically shoot a shaft of light through the middle here on uh the first day of fall right the fall equinox so it's a calendar it's really useful to know when the fall equinox is right that's about September 21st right that's Harvest time so if I'm a farming Society hey this is why I need to harvest right if I'm a wheat growing Society this is why I need to plant my wheat so it's really good to know but you can make a calendar much easier than this so it's probably not just a calendar but it is a calendar what what else is it that's hard to say right what was it used for well how would we know you're probably thinking hey archaeologist maybe they dug they did they dug all around it right they found the remains of 33 people and some items right so skeletons of 33 people ha it was a tomb was it did the people who build it were they the same people who buried the people there Maybe not maybe the people who built it didn't use it as a tomb the people who built it after they built it like 50 years later maybe they all died off new people moved in and said [ __ ] let's make this a tomb so we can't prove that people who built it built it as a tomb but we can prove it was used as a tomb so cool okay it was a tomb we call it a portal tomb because there's a portal right it's like a doorway between these two big Stones there are portal tombs all over West Ireland so it probably is a portal tomb right because we can look in the the general geographical context we can look in the area around it and see that there are other examples less Grand right this is the biggest one but there are other examples of these big rocks stacked on top of each other arrayed to uh arus calendars with bones underneath so they're probably all portal tombs cool that doesn't there's still a lot of questions that doesn't answer who's buried there can't answer that were they kings were they thieves were they murderers were the people who died of some plague were they the priest were they orphans right if your parents died and you were orphaned we you know you get buried here were they people who completed some kind of trial right again think of some of the weird trials we do in our society about the Olympics that just ended right we give Awards to people who can you know run 400 meters faster than anyone else I mean I think it's cool I love sports it's not a critique but it's really weird who gives a [ __ ] oh great you run 400 meters faster than that guy well maybe they had some kind of weird Olympics like trial in their society and the people who were best at it when they died their reward was they got to be buried here so in other words we don't know who's buried there it could be the best people the worst people right this is where they married this is where they buried the rapist right maybe it was uh people who didn't live in their Village who tried to come into their Village and steal their cattle right who knows who's bared here it's 33 random people were they buried here on uh purpose all right or were the bones sort of snuck there in other words did the people buried here were they buried here by the whole society or were there people who were buried here who like so again if it's important to be buried here maybe it's some kind of special privilege to be buried here right you can imagine you're a mother your son dies he didn't earn the privilege to be buried there but you want his bones to be there because it's a privilege and so in the middle of the night you like sneak over and you bury his bones there right we don't know anything about any of that right all of these things could be true we have to make assumptions and we have to admit that there's a lot of stuff a lot of really cool stuff that we can't know right if we had writing we could right what writing allows us to do is answer how and why questions how were people buried here why were people buried here why were these people these 33 people buried here not those 33 people right how was it determined who got to be buried here how is it determined to build it in this one spot I don't know if you can tell it's on a bit of a grassy spot above the stone right so West Ireland has this really strange uh curs landscape talk about this more in the bonus lecture on castles for your essay right we go all over West Ireland for that lecture it's a cool lecture anyway so it's built on a little a little Mound but it's not on the high point right this hill here is higher right how did they decide to build it here right why is it built here that's another why question that writing in theory could answer that archaeology cannot right so in other words again just because people are Buri doesn't mean it was built as a tombe right so archaeologist can tell archaeology can tell us a lot of really cool stuff it can tell us who what where when often right when 6,000 years ago where County Clair Ireland what a huge Stone seven feet high on other Stones a raid for the fall equinox archaist tell us all that that's really cool but just losta it can't tell us right so for historians it's those how and why questions that really matter to us right second example right um ston right stonehinge is probably the most famous Neolithic uh Relic in the world today right built on Salsbury plane and Southwestern England right it's a just a huge sort of Campus of enormous Stones stacked on top of one another in concentric circles right it is awesome it's incredible that it was built and it asks lots of questions right there's lots of mysteries about Stonehenge right we know approximately how it was built we know where the stone came from right the stone came from what is today Wales about 300 miles from the Salisbury plane uh it was carved from a quy up a mountain and then they use gravity and sort of log rollers right the basically picture a huge Stone and they put it on Cut logs so the logs were kind of like rollers like Wheels right like a conveyor belt almost right and they rolled it down this huge mountain in Wales and they splashed it into a river where they put on rafts right so they they made rafts and they would send the stone down the river or down the hill onto the river onto a raft they would tie it to the raft and they would steer the raft down this River to a point very near the Salsberry plane and then they would drag the stones off of the rafts and drag them up the hill onto the Salisbury plane and then using um some some kind of a you know basic uh pulley or crane system they would Hoist the Rocks up and stand them up that's how stonehinge was built but man that asks as many questions as it answers why are they getting a stone from whales there was it was easier to get it from other places right there were places nearby right why did they build on the Salsbury plane why didn't they build closer to the river why didn't they build closer to their mountain and whales if that stone mattered if that specific Stone mattered why not build closer to the mountain and whales why build it all the way over in the Salsbury plane who did the work I said slaves said poor people was it everybody was it a write a passage that like every teenager had to go do two years building stonehinge it took over a thousand years by the way build stone hinge why do all this work what was it for what was the purpose now again like Paul NE Bron dolman stonehinge is a calendar cool they can tell you when the first day of winter is which is very you handy to know but you could build a calendar a lot easier you could build a calendar that wouldn't take thousands of years that wouldn't take over a thousand years to build you could build a calendar in a week with a couple small stones no big deal why did they build it we don't know why did they pick that stone we don't know why did they pick the Salisbury plane we don't know again there's a lot of stuff we can know we can know when it was built right archaeologists can tell us that you know took more than a thousand years to build you can tell when the stones were laid they can tell us it was built about 6,000 years ago like PA NE BR dolman right it's obvious to anybody that it required an immense amount of Labor and therefore extensive organization to be able to build it right you had to have a quy several hundred miles away you had to had raft Builders you had to have loggers cutting down all those trees to make the rafts and the rollers you had to have rope makers and hemp Growers to you know provide materials for the makers right to tie the thing up you had to have people who could build and use a pulley and crane right so it clearly took hundreds of workers and again all kinds of organization but again doesn't tell us a lot again demonstrates that they had scientific knowledge because they aligned it with the sunset on the winter solsis right we also know um from analyzing the bones that the Builders of Stonehenge right the society that built this were not from England right they were from what is today Greece and Turkey and they migrated to England right we also know they were farming peoples and that they probably brought farming with them right in other words people who built stonehinge were probably the first people who ever farmed in England we don't know why they moved we don't know why they moved to England again we have no idea why they built stonehinge and again why they picked the certain elements that they picked why build it on the Salsbury plane why align it with the winter solstice why pick that kind that specific Stone from that specific quy on that specific Mount all of that is a mystery to us if we had writing all that could be answered right they might have written down why they would do it but they don't that's why for historians history begins with writing right writing allows us to ask and answer how and why questions and those are the ones the historians care about right we're not really concerned with who what where when questions those are boring questions those are really easy to answer right for your essay assignment go back and read the description notably it tells you what's the first step of a research paper come up with a research question what's a a good research question what's a good research question it starts with the word how or the word why why did they build stonehinge that's a really good research question it make a terrible paper because you we don't know so you wouldn't be able to write that paper right you just have to you know make up the answer right but how and why questions are the questions the historians care about and writing is needed to answer most of your how and why questions all right the Bronze Age will eventually give way to the Iron Age um Iron takes longer than copper to for humans to come up with right copper and Tin melt at 19900 degrees in other words I have my copper ore again that's a stone with copper in it and I need to melt the copper out my smelter needs to get to 1,00 degrees fhe and my copper will drip out 10 is a little lower I think it's 1,700 iron it needs to be hotter right it needs to be 2800 degrees to melt iron out of iron ore so it took us longer to come up with iron working because we needed to be better at building smelters right basically we needed a technological advancement in smelters before we could start working with iron because iron needed to be 2800 degrees Fahrenheit but as soon as we get iron we only use iron iron is so much better than bronze right iron is as much better than bronze as bronze is better than Stone remember all the advantages that bronze had over Stone iron has those advantages over bronze right it makes a way better Edge we still use iron tools today right iron makes great edges iron is durable it's light it's plentiful right there's a lot more iron than there is copper copper and Tin right it's also less complicated to make because you don't have to mix two things together right to make bronze you have to mix copper and an alloy again usually 10 that's more complicated right iron you just need iron again it's harder it's sharper it's cheaper it's easier right when you mine iron iron is closer to the surface you don't have to dig as deep to mine iron as you do for tin and copper right iron is way better and iron rocks the world the same that bronze did right remember we had Society a with bronze and Society B with stone and Society a wins in every way the same is true here Society a has iron Society B has bronze Society a wins in every way more farming more food more people more people who don't have to spend their time farming so they've more ideas more technology more inventions more art more wealth and if they go to war they have more weapons and they have more soldiers to wield them iron is lighter so they also start making iron armor right iron is cheaper so they start making iron armor right so you get armored Warriors right so iron in every way is superior and rocks the world uh we will elude to in a couple lectures the Bronze Age collapse um the first writing societies developed in the Western Mediterranean right Greece Egypt Mesopotamia they're all on the western side of the Mediterranean Sea the Bronze Age collapse hit hits the Western Mediterranean right um bronze working and iron working both developed in what is today Serbia which is just North of Greece and so basically what happened in the Bronze Age collapse was iron working had just been developed in Serbia and basically a hundred-year drought hits the the whole Northern Hemisphere right they felt it in Greece they also felt it in China and so desperately hungry people were trying to find food they had iron weapons so desperately hungry people in sort of Southern Eastern Europe pour into Greece and they overwhelm the bronze armies of Greece right the bronze societies of Greece couldn't handle these iron armies coming from the rest of Europe that were desperately hungry and so the Greeks flee as refugees they have some iron weapons with them now they go to Turkey right looking for food and shelter they fight the peoples of turkey who have only bronze weapons right then again more refugees they flood into Mesopotamia right they fight more refugees they flood into Egypt so basically the Bronze Age collapse is like this cascading wave of warfare drought desperately starving people creating refugees who move from one region to another and eventually wipe out all the great Bronze Age societies so when we study the Bronze Age societies which we're going to do in the next Le the next couple lectures the ones around the Mediterranean they get wiped out right by Iron right the Iron Age ushers in an age of massive sort of Fire and Blood in the Western Mediterranean for like 300 years of instability right so from about 1200 BCE to about 900 bcee the Eastern Med or the Western Mediterranean is plunged into again just migration Refugee drought and warfare related crises that Wipe Out the civilizations and all new civilizations will arise um often with dire effects like in Greece they even lost writing for 300 years before they redeveloped it and an entirely different alphabet an entirely different writing right so the Bronze Age collaps just I just mention it here so you can see that iron has the same effects that bronze had right so of course what did bronze give us bigger cities more sophisticated government you know uh better Craftsman iron will do that too right so the Iron Age cities are even bigger the Iron Age governments are even more sophis icated the age Technologies are even better right and on and on right and sort of the the progress of human uh societies as we move forward right until today we have you know rocket ships and nuclear weapons and the internet right hopefully that makes some sense um this is an abstract lecture right we didn't focus on any specific Society this is the only abstract lecture the whole semester right so if this lecture is a little confusing um hopefully the different sty of all the other lectures for the whole semester we'll fix that right so every lecture after this one we focus on one or two specific societies and look at things there so the next two lectures the last one this week and the next the first one next week both focus on the Bronze Age right in Mesopotamia Egypt India and China all right so hopefully enjoyed this lecture and I'll see you next time all right goodbye