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How long did humans live before the Paleolithic era?
What was life like in the Paleolithic era?
How long did the Paleolithic era last?
Did the life expectancy of Homo sapiens change during the Paleolithic?
How many people were in a Paleolithic tribe?
When did the Paleolithic Age begin?
Apr 24, 2014 · According to historical mortality levels from the Encyclopaedia of Population (2003), average life expectancy for prehistoric humans was estimated at just 20 – 35 years; in Sweden in the 1750s it was 36 years; it hit 48 years by the 1900s in the USA; and in 2007 in Japan, average life expectancy was 83 years.
Nearly all of our knowledge of Paleolithic people and way of life comes from archaeology and ethnographic comparisons to modern hunter-gatherer cultures such as the !Kung San who live similarly to their Paleolithic predecessors.
- Overview
- Sociocultural evolution
- Small communities
- Division of labor
- What do you think?
Paleolithic literally means “Old Stone [Age],” but the Paleolithic era more generally refers to a time in human history when foraging, hunting, and fishing were the primary means of obtaining food.
Paleolithic literally means “Old Stone [Age],” but the Paleolithic era more generally refers to a time in human history when foraging, hunting, and fishing were the primary means of obtaining food. Humans had yet to experiment with domesticating animals and growing plants. Since hunter-gatherers could not rely on agricultural methods to produce food intentionally, their diets were dependent on the fluctuations of natural ecosystems. They had to worry about whether overfishing a lake would deplete a crucial food source or whether a drought would wither up important plants. In order to ensure enough food production for their communities, they worked to manipulate those systems in certain ways, such as rotational hunting and gathering.
This was the case for much of human history; it was not until about 11,000 years ago that these hunter-gatherer systems began to transform. As humans began migrating and adapting to new environments, they began developing tools and methods that equipped them to make the best of their respective environmental constraints.
The study of early humans often focuses on biological evolution and natural selection. However, it is also equally important to focus on sociocultural evolution, or the ways in which early human societies created culture. Paleolithic humans were not simply cavemen who were concerned only with conquering their next meal. Archaeological evidence shows that the Neanderthals in Europe and Southwest Asia had a system of religious beliefs and performed rituals such as funerals. A burial site in Shanidar Cave in modern-day northeastern Iraq suggests that a Neanderthal’s family covered his body with flowers, which indicates a belief in something beyond death and a deep sense of spirituality. They also constructed shelter and tools.
Cultures evolved and developed in specific environmental contexts, enabling their communities to not only survive but to flourish in unique and dynamic ways. But what exactly is culture? Culture is a broad term which encompasses the full range of learned human behavior patterns, behaviors which are often linked to survival.
Homo sapiens has not changed much anatomically over the last 120,000 years, but it has undergone a massive cultural evolution. Accordingly, cultural creativity rather than physical transformation became the central way humans coped with the demands of nature.
Nevertheless cultural evolution cannot be divorced from biological evolution, as the evolution of a more highly developed and advanced human brain, more highly attuned to social structures, enabled cultural growth. In fact, the very large size of a human brain itself necessitated certain cultural adaptations: many scientists have theorized that more difficult births, due to larger skulls, longer gestation periods, and longer periods of infant dependency, required more advanced social organization and communication, which played a big role in the cultural evolution of humans.
Eventually, with the expansion of the human population, the density of human groups also increased. This often resulted in conflict and competition over the best land and resources, but it also necessitated cooperation. Due to the constraints of available natural resources, these early communities were not very large, but they included enough members to facilitate some degree of division of labor, security, and exogamous reproduction patterns, which means marrying or reproducing outside of one’s group.
Anthropologists were able to draw these conclusions about Paleolithic people by extrapolating from the experiences of modern hunter-gatherer communities, such as the Khoisan of the African Kalahari Desert. Based on the experiences of modern hunter-gatherer societies, who typically have around 500 members, and based on theoretical mathematical models of group process, Paleolithic bands of people were likely around twenty-five members each, and typically about twenty bands constituted a tribe.
Before the advent of agriculture, Paleolithic humans had little control of the environment, so they focused on staking out territory and negotiating relationships with nearby communities. Eventually, groups created small, temporary settlements, often near bodies of water. These settlements allowed for division of labor, and labor was often divided along gender lines, with women doing much of the gathering, cooking, and child-rearing and men doing much of the hunting, though this was certainly not the case across all Paleolithic societies. For example, some archaeological evidence suggests that Middle Paleolithic cultures in Eurasia split work fairly equally between men and women.
However, it is important to note that gender dynamics in Paleolithic times were likely drastically different from our own, and as such, the division of labor between men and women does not necessarily indicate differences in equality or power. There are competing theories about whether hunting or gathering contributed more to group nutrition, but both seemed to have played an important role.
In what ways does the culture of Paleolithic people resemble modern human cultures ?
Archaeologists often extrapolate the behaviors of ancient hunter-gatherers by studying modern hunter-gatherer groups. Do you think this is a valid approach? Is it useful to learn about modern hunter-gatherer groups in order to understand early societies?
Sep 27, 2019 · In the Paleolithic period (roughly 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 B.C.), early humans lived in caves or simple huts or tepees and were hunters and gatherers.
- Lesley Kennedy
Apr 21, 2023 · The overall life expectancy of humans today is 73.2 years — 75.6 years for females and 70.8 years for males. This has increased a lot in just a few decades, due in part to advances in medicine. The data shows that in 1950, the average life expectancy was 47 years.
- Joshua Rapp Learn
May 22, 2024 · Paleolithic Period, ancient cultural stage of human development marked by the use of rudimentary chipped stone tools. Traditionally, it has been considered to have begun with the Pleistocene Epoch 2.58 million years ago; however, tool discoveries made in 2015 suggest that it may have begun 3.3 million years ago.
Dec 17, 2013 · Even blood donation has become a Paleo fad among the most dogmatic of 21st-century cavemen, based on the notion that our ancestors were often wounded, making blood loss a way of life. But new research reveals flaws in the logic behind these trends.
