Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World by Yuval Noah Harari

Author:Yuval Noah Harari [Harari, Yuval Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tundra Book Group
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

A WORLD OF

STONE?

So, almost all the evidence we have from the Stone Age is made of stone…and that’s why we call it the Stone Age. But this is actually a very misleading name. When people hear the words “Stone Age,” they imagine that everything back then was made of stone: they think that people had stone beds, stone hats, and stone shoes. The truth is that most things were made of wood, straw, animal hide, and feathers. But these things disappeared long ago, and all that’s left is the stones. This is why it’s so difficult to know for sure how our ancestors lived in the Stone Age.

Fortunately, there is one other way that we can find out about how our ancestors lived: by watching living people. There are a few places in the world where people still live a little like our ancestors did. If we visit them, we can learn a lot.

In general, people can be divided into three groups: people who grow their food, people who buy their food, and people who hunt and gather their food. The people who grow their food are farmers. They might grow wheat to make bread, and plant apple trees so they can eat apples. Perhaps they keep chickens and eat their eggs, and sometimes they eat the chickens too.

Most people today don’t grow their food—they buy it. When they’re hungry, they go to the market and buy bread and apples and eggs. Or they take out their smartphone and order pizza.

Our Stone Age ancestors didn’t grow their food or buy it: they hunted and gathered. This is what all animals do. Giraffes don’t plant trees, and lions don’t buy giraffe steaks at the supermarket. Giraffes feed on trees that naturally grow in the savannah, and lions hunt giraffes. Similarly, our ancestors gathered wild plants and hunted wild animals. This is why our ancestors are often called hunter-gatherers—or just gatherers—because they gathered their food from the wild.

Today, there are a few groups of people around the world who still hunt and gather their food. They don’t live in houses and cities, and they don’t work in factories or offices. They mostly live in remote jungles and deserts. Scientists can visit these people and see how they live, and by studying their lifestyle, the scientists can try to learn how our ancestors lived many thousands of years ago.

Of course, being a gatherer today isn’t the same as in the Stone Age. Even gatherers who live in the most remote deserts and jungles are part of the modern world. If you see a gatherer child spreading her arms wide, running in circles, and making a noise like an airplane engine, that doesn’t mean people in the Stone Age had airplanes. It only means that modern-day gatherers must have seen airplanes flying across the sky. All the same, observing modern gatherers does give us a few more clues about what life was like in the Stone Age.

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