Preliterate societies, with no written history, passed on information from one generation to another through oral communication. Anthropologists working with them had the difficult task of documenting their material and non-material culture. Archaeologists working on long-disappeared cultures unearthed the origins of culture by developing the skills to read or hear stories from fossils, and from the broken evidence of material culture left behind. Their research places the dawn of culture at about one million years BC, naming it the Eolithic stage—meaning the dawn of the Stone Age. This gave rise to the Palaeolithic Stage or the Old Stone Age with the arrival of the Abbevillian and Mousterian cultures, which constituted the Lower Palaeolithic Stage. The Middle Palaeolithic Stage corresponds with the arrival of the Neanderthal man, who invented the Acheulean-Levalloisian culture. These submerged into the Mousterian-Levalloisian, and ultimately into the Magdalenian in the final stages of the Old Stone Age. The next stage of evolution is marked by the New Stone Age or the Neolithic Age, with further refinements of the stone tools used by man for hunting and food-making. Figure 4.2 shows the chronology of the Palaeolithic Age reconstructed by archaeologists. The evidence of these cultures is mostly Euro-centric, and scattered. However, stages are determined in terms of refinements in tool-making and the geological strata in which they were found.
Figure 4.2 The Dawn of Culture: The Palaeolithic Age
Source: Hoebel, 1958: 79
Needless to say, these are the cultural developments associated with the origin of man, and are thus not society-specific developments which occurred later with the accumulation of knowledge and formation of larger groups and dispersion of man in different ecological zones. What we refer to here are civilizational developments.
As evolution progressed and as the stock of knowledge increased with experience in handling tools, further refinements occurred in tool-making. From stone tools made from the core or flints, our ancestors started making finer tools such as harpoons and staghorns with eye, and even painted pebbles. The Neolithic stage saw man becoming an architect. He started building houses and settlements for relatively permanent stay. Vessels were built of ceramics for storage and even pottery was invented. At the burial grounds, they built dolmens7 and stonehenges and menhirs. These are the visible products of early Man’s actions. Archaeological discoveries of these sites help us learn about some aspects of the culture our ancestors lived. The stones and the tools carry the untold story of Mankind’s development.
Palaeolithic man in the middle
Palaeolithic tool 4,00,000 years
Venus of Willendorf:Palaeolithic age
Wild horse on the walls of Lascaux Caves: Upper Palaeolithic
Wild horse on the walls of Lascaux Caves: Upper Palaeolithic
However, all this discussion about our past and about the origin of culture is at a much higher level—it concerns humanity as a whole. It tells us how humans are different from other animals. It narrates the stages of development—and evolutionists have debated their unilinearity or multilinearity. Scholars have also tried to explain the simultaneous occurrence of similar artefacts in terms of either direct contact or stimulus diffusion.
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