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In this video, I'm going to use words like eras, periods,
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and ages to refer to segments of time in the human
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or in the pre-human past.
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And what I want to clarify right from the get-go--
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because frankly, this is something
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that's confused me in the past-- is that archaeologists will
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refer to eras, periods, and ages in the human past
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and they're usually referring to periods of tens of thousands
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of years, or thousands of years.
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But these are different eras, periods, and ages than the ones
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that geologists would refer to when they're
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talking about geological time.
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In geological time, era means several hundred millions
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of years.
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Periods and ages mean millions of years.
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When an archaeologist, when we're
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studying the human past, this is just talking--
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they're just generally talking about long segments
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of human time, but not in the millions of years,
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usually in the thousands or the ten thousands of years.
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So what I want to do with that out of the way
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is talk about what has happened in the distant human past,
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or the distant pre-human past, and also
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touch on some of the classifications
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for these segments of time-- because they actually tell us
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what were the interesting developments that happened
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to humanity over the 200,000 years
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that Homo sapiens have been on this planet,
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or that we believe that Homo sapiens have
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been on this planet.
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So the longest period of time in human past,
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or the category of human time-- and there
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are different ways you can categorize
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it-- is the Paleolithic Era right over here.
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And what really makes that period of time--
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so this begins even in prehistory or pre-human
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history, so before Homo sapiens even
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existed-- you have the beginning of the Paleolithic Era
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that really began with the development of stone tools.
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And as we learned in the video on human evolution,
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there were pre Homo sapiens species
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that were using stone tools.
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And so the Paleolithic Era, it's really
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kind of signified by one, the stone tools, but even more--
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that either the pre-humans-- or once
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you go about 200,000 years ago-- the humans show up.
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It's kind of distinguished by humans
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being hunter-gatherers, which essentially means to survive,
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we used to walk around a lot.
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If we couldn't see something obvious to hunt, maybe
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a woolly mammoth or something, if we didn't see something
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obvious to hunt, we would look around
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for snails, or mushrooms, or whatever else.
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And that's how we would survive.
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That's how we would live.
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And because we were constantly adapting to our environment
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based on the seasons, we were maybe following animals
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as they migrated, hunter-gatherers
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were fundamentally nomadic, which means that they never
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settled in one place for a long time.
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They were always ready to pick up-- probably their tents--
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and follow the herd, or follow whatever animals they were
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hunting, or follow the season, so they
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could go to warmer climates, maybe,
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where they're more likely to find something on the ground
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to eat, maybe, during the winter.
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Or who knows.
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So the Paleolithic Era is really distinguished by that.
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It's a huge swath of time in human history.
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And it doesn't come to an end until you
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get to the advent of farming.
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So the Paleolithic Era, I mean, we're literally
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talking about over two million years ago
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was when it starts-- before Homo sapiens even
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existed as a species.
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And it goes all the way to the advent of farming,
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that we believe first came about around 11,000
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to 7,000 years ago.
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And this abbreviation right here, this BP,
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this does not stand for British Petroleum.
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It stands for Before Present, or before the present time.
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So one more acronym to have in your tool
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kit when you see things.
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And obviously, if we're 11,000 years before the present,
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that's the same thing as 9,000 years Before Christ,
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or Before the Common Era.
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Because Christ was, we believe, born 2,000 years ago.
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Now, it may or may not be obvious to you,
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but the advent of agriculture is a super big deal, arguably
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the biggest deal in the development
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of human civilization, or in all of human history.
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And you might say, hey, you know,
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what's the big deal about agriculture?
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These characters over here look pretty happy.
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They're able to walk around a lot.
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They're able to hunt.
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What's the big deal of all of a sudden people
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plowing fields, and domesticating cattle,
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and having chickens to lay eggs, and whatever else?
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And the big deal about that-- besides the fact that it would
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change people's diet-- is that for the first time,
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it allowed them to not be nomadic.
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It allowed them to-- and you could have probably
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had some hunters who were somewhat settled, maybe living
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near the ocean.
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Maybe they did some fishing, and all the rest.
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But for the most part, with the development of agriculture,
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it forced people to stay in one place.
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So you have the Paleolithic Era all the way to the advent
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of agriculture, which was about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago.
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And besides the fact that it changed people's diet,
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it allowed them to settle.
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So agriculture allowed human beings
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to settle down in one area.
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And it wasn't just that they were settling in one area,
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but because they were able to control their environment, they
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were able to increase the density of things,
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of crops that humans could consume,
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and animals that humans could consume-- and lower
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the density of crops that humans can't consume,
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and animals that they can't consume,
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or that they don't want around, like pests of some type.
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What it allowed them to do is also
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settle in more dense environments.
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You can imagine when you just have people walking around,
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you need a lot of land to support
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even the calorie requirements of one human being.
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But all of a sudden, if you are able to develop agriculture,
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you're able to domesticate animals.
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All of a sudden you could have-- in the same amount of land,
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you could have more calories being generated.
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And because you have more calories being generated
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in a smaller amount of land, people can settle.
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And they can settle in a denser environment.
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And so agriculture was really this necessary requirement
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for people to develop civilization,
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or to develop villages and cities.
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And maybe also giving them the free time
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to start thinking about hey, maybe we
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want to think about how we can record what we know,
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how we can develop even more technologies.
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And so just to give us a sense of the categorization
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that an archaeologist would use for these different periods
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of time-- I told you we start with the Paleolithic
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Era, with the advent of stone tools,
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pre-humans-- most of human time on this planet.
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And then about 11,000 years ago, the development of agriculture.
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And it developed independently at different places
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around the world, which is by itself
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an interesting phenomenon.
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And people think that it might just be that be the climate
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might have warmed up a little bit,
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so that people-- maybe naturally there
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were some human edible crops that
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existed in a little bit of a denser environment,
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and humans learned to optimize that slowly,
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and they did that independently.
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But it's an interesting question of why
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did it develop just then after 180,000, 190,000 years,
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why did agriculture all of a sudden happen?
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But just to get the terminology--
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the Paleolithic Era is that period before agriculture.
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And then once agriculture starts developing,
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we are now in the Neolithic Era.
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And some archaeologists will describe a transition period
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between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic Era
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called the Mesolithic.
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And just so you know what these words mean-- because they
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actually make sense when you know what they mean,
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paleo means old and lithic means stone, or of stone.
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So they're really talking about the Old Stone Age.
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Neolithic, as you could imagine, means new stone.
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So it's kind of the New Stone Age.
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And meso means middle.
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So it is the Middle Stone Age.
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So another way of thinking about this whole period
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from when people were hunter-gatherers
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all the way to about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago
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when they developed agriculture-- this whole period
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is called the Stone Age.
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And the Stone Age is this biggest age.
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And there's just different ways of describing it,
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because if you just call it the Stone Age
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you're really making importance out of the actual tools
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that people could shape.
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They weren't able to use metal at this point.
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When you refer to Paleolithic and Neolithic,
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you're maybe referring a little bit more--
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and there's other ways to think about it--
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but you're referring a little bit more
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to the lifestyles of the human beings--
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Paleolithic being hunter-gatherers,
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Neolithic having actually settled, having actually
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started to develop primitive villages, and even cities.
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And then of course Mesolithic is in between.
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And just for a pop culture reference,
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you might have heard of the Paleolithic diet
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that some people are going on now.
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And those are people who try to live like hunter-gatherers.
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Their belief is that most of human evolution
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occurred while we were hunter-gatherers,
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and so that's what our bodies are most accustomed to.
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So they like to eat meat.
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And they like to eat a lot of nuts.
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And I even met, I had a coworker once
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who used to only eat raw meat.
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And I don't know if that is even justified,
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or that's even somehow validated by the archaeological record.
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These people probably did cook their meat.
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Now, at the end of the Stone Age,
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we would have, I would say, the number two most significant
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development in human history.
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And now we're talking about 3,000 BC,
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which is about 5,000 years ago.
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And this is the development of writing.
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So we were hunter-gatherers about 9,000 to 10,000,
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11,000 years ago.
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People started developing agriculture.
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It allows them to settle in more dense environments.
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It also gives them a little bit more free time,
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because they don't have to hunt and gather all the time.
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And then you go and once again, we'll probably discover things
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as we go forward in time that maybe these dates need
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to be pushed back, or whatever else,
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or we discover new civilizations, or who knows.
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But our best sense is you have these villages.
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You have these civilizations developing.
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And by about 5,000 years ago-- so this would be 5,000
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before the present, or 3,000 BC-- Before Christ-- you
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have people saying, hey, why don't we
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start trying to write down what we know so that when I tell
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someone orally, it doesn't actually lose information
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there?
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And then so our descendants can slowly
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collect all of the knowledge we have,
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and maybe accelerate-- I don't know if they did it explicitly
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thinking of these, but let's just write down what we know.
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And so at about that period of time,
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you have-- as far as we can tell-- the first development
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of a pictogram-based system of writing.
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And the earliest system of writing we know
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is cuneiform, which is from the Sumerian civilization, which
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is now in present-day Iraq.
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And what's the really big deal about this
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is that this is, on some level, the beginning
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of recorded history.
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We could talk about the word history.
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You could say that history is all of the past,