How Humanity Started: History of Lower and Middle Paleolithic in Europe

The start of humanity, of history, of stone age, begins with the Paleolithic. This was the longest period in our history, and saw slow but steady development of human biology, as well as tools and artistic forms. This was the time of the last Ice age of Pleistocene, which contained multiple colder, glacial periods which were separated by warmer, interglacial periods.

It is a common idea that people of stone age lived only in caves, giving the the term cavemen. This, however, is not true. People sought shelter not only in caves, but also in simple-make-shift huts of bone, tusks, wood and hides. While stone was indeed one of the main materials used in the Stone age, wood and other organic materials were also used, but any surviving find is exceptional and hard to discover. Along with antlers, all before-mentioned materials also accounted for their arsenal of tools and weapons.

From the Lower Paleolithic onwards, humans also utilized fire, with which they repulsed predators, prepared food, and used for light and warmth. Fire was the centerpiece of early human societies, enabling survival, but also storytelling and other cultural and social aspects.

Even the earliest peoples seem to have had a sense of symmetry and aesthetics. Along those came the sense of spirituality, religion and art. The discovered symbolic products and art pieces of Lower and Middle Paleolithic are far more basic and fewer in number than those of later anatomically modern humans, but they do exist.

In the early, Lower Paleolithic, Europe was inhabited by Homo heidelbergensis, also called archaic Homo sapiens. It is from this Europe-dwelling branch that the Neanderthals developed from. Meanwhile, the anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) developed from the population of Homo heidelbergensis that remained in Africa. This theory has recently been disputed though, suggesting that the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans was much older.

Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mnK9tpEvz9UgeVWuUh8fPFaoJ3QNLQOYiG7Q2jz1zZI/edit?usp=sharing

I hope you learn something new in this video. If you want to see more history videos, feel free to like and subscribe... you know how YouTube works. 👍

Learn more about the history in the heart of Europe: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj-ONVAJL4HEcG3BnigOO6Zuh0iL28-mU

Edited with Vegas Pro Edit 19

#history #paleolithic #archeology #stoneage #prehistoric ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e44rizwdPGM