Who Were These People?

A few weeks ago I was reading history about the early first ladies of the United States. Now I'm reading the "history of humankind." It's slow reading.  I just finished reading about foragers or humans from the hunter-gather time period. I'll share a little information about these long ago people. Most anthropologists and historians think they had bigger brains than we do. Harari says," the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants." We don't need to find all of our own food, make all of our own tools, and have a detailed understanding of nature and our surroundings.... (48-49)

However, these foragers were hard on their environment. This "first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disaster to befall the animal kingdom....Homo Sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools."   One of the reasons the Galapagos Islands retained their unusual animals is because humans did not arrive there until the 19th century. (72-74)

Above is a picture of the Cave of Hands found in Argentina and painted about 9,000 years ago. Harari says, "It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world--but nobody knows what it means" (57). I found more pictures of the cave here.

Now on to Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution."