Human Interactions with Environment in Ancient Egypt Essay

Experience made them able hunters and gatherers, and later made them adept at herding. But, lacking the experience of modern people, they assumed that they were at the center of the universe, which they saw as flat, small and under sky. They were doing the best they could in drawing conclusions about the world around them. Much of the Paleolithic Age occurred during the period in the earth’s history known as the Ice Age. Around this time glaciers advanced and retreated many times. Because the people during the Paleolithic Age were living during such a harsh time they had to get adjusted to their environment so they started to depend on animals for their source of food. Since the paleolithic people were nomads and hunters and gathers, they followed their source of food. In this time their main source of food were the huge animals that traveled together such as mammoths. They used their environment to help them survive. The paleolithic people lived in caves and tents made from animal skin, their cloth were made from animal skin and leaves. It is hard to imagine how Neanderthals or Homo sapiens could have survived without fire during the Ice Age. The first stone tools were probably used as projectiles or to hit with them like with a mace. Later, the primitive humans observed that broken stones had cutting edges that could inflict deeper wounds or cut animals into pieces. Step by step, people learned to hit stone by stone to produce sharpened tools. The stone processing was used until the discovery of the metals by Homo sapiens, after the Neolithic[1]. Stone scrapers were used for removing the skins of the animals. Stone axes were used for wounding or cutting up the prey. They had handles made of wood or deer antlers. Stone drills were used too. During the Upper Paleolithic (40,000 to 10,000 BC), more complex stone tools appeared, like stone lamps that were filled with grease and had a wick made of plant fibers. The silex arrow points were complex, having rods that allowed them to be joined to the shaft via a resin or tendons. Bone harpoons and needles from this period were found in Europe[2] During the neolithic era people were developing ways to communicate, better ways to make weapons, better ways to obtain food and started to develop a religion. The neolithic people discovered a way to obtain a better source of food. They discovered how to farm. They started to grow crops and became farmers. They would usually look for sources of water and build irrigation systems. The great source of food now game them time to settle down and become civilizations. As they settled down they also found a way to domesticate animals. Their diet probably consisted of dairy products such as milk, cheese, meat and a variety of edible grains; wheat, barley, and rice. Because they discovered how to tame the animals they started to develop their technology they made their cloth from wool from the goats. Neolithic people were mostly farmers and herders, but then there were certain people who didn’t want to be a farmer or an animal tamer. These people started to specialize in different jobs, jobs that needed to be done. For example crafts like carpentry, weaving and pottery. Carpentry was needed to make homes and buildings, the weaving was needed for the cloth, and pottery was needed to make bowls or statues or even ornaments, decorative ornaments. They also developed sets of rules to guide ones behavior. With no defined difference between spirit and materiality, they believed that in preserving a corpse they were also helping to preserve the spirit of one who had died. And they believed that they could nourish the spirit of the corpse by putting gifts of food alongside it. They believed that a body went limp at death because the spirit that had been within it had left it for the invisible world of the spirits. They felt no urge to meld these ideas of spirits and materiality into the kind of consistent picture that modern people would demand for credibility. As you can see, both the neolithic and paleolithic ages had major impacts on the way civilizations started. They started everything. What we call technology today they, our ancestors created it. Applied science, even though they didn’t even know science existed they were smart enough to know that they needed to develop new ways to live as time passed on.