1. The study of history normally deals in decades or (sometimes) centuries. Environmental history, in contrast, takes a much longer view, often covering hundreds of thousands and even millions of years. With this in mind, answer the following two questions:
(a) In your opinion, what practical problems do such huge timescales present to the study of the human past?
(b) To help put such vast lengths of time in perspective, I suggested that if the entire history of Homo sapiens (c. 200,000 years) was equal to a book 1000 pages in length, then the lifetime of a 25-year-old human would take up just the last four lines of the last page. Provide your own analogy to vividly demonstrate the relationship between the lifetime of a single individual and the existence of the entire species.
2. If ‘history' is the account of the human past based on available written documents, then by definition ‘prehistory' is the recreation of the human past before any written documents existed. In your opinion, what problems does this pose for the historian attempting to write the 97.5 per cent of human history that occurred before such sources existed, and to what extent is it even possible to write an accurate prehistory of humanity?
3. As a separate species we descend from a long line of primates, an order of mammal that can be traced back 65 million years to the last days of the dinosaurs.
(a) What key features have we inherited from those distant ancestors?
(b) How might those features have helped us adjust and adapt as a species to changes in the environment over the past 200,000 years or so?
4. For the vast majority of our existence as a species - as much as 99 per cent according to environmental historian Clive Ponting - we have survived by hunting and gathering in a nomadic lifestyle. Only in the past 10,000 years or so have we become dependent on agriculture for our food and lived in settled communities of more than a few dozen individuals. From your own experience and observations of the world and ourselves, what is there about the contemporary human condition that reflects our deep origins as a mobile, foraging creature that depended on a keen knowledge of the environment?
5-Think back to the two films we saw this week on the lifeways of our prehistoric ancestors (Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons). Then read, carefully, Fagan's account of a hunter-gatherer society in Stone Age Europe. Pay special attention to his discussion of evidence and sources on pp. 204-06.
As we discussed in class, the biggest probem in studying prehistoric civilizations is that they, by definition, leave no written evidence for us to look at. Instead, we have to use artifacts, art, implements, bones etc. Broadly speaking, there are THREE kinds of conclusions we can draw: (1) conclusions based solidly on the physical evidence we have; (2) conclusions we can fairly draw from that evidence, even if we can cannot be 100% certain; and (3) conclusions based on our imaginative recreation of likely or possible scenarios, events or habits, etc.
Based on your reading of Fagan, identify ONE example of each of these THREE types of conclusion he draws in his chapter. Finally, identify ONE aspect of Stone Age life that you would like to know more about, but for which we do not or cannot have any evidence.