From the Stone Age to a Great Civilization on the Nile River

Hi 7B,

Today you can tackle some revision on the Stone Age and then begin a metaphorical journey along the Nile River, observing the civilisation of the ancient Egyptians. 

The “Natufians” were hunter-gatherers whose descendants eventually became the first farmers and herders in the Fertile Crescent. Ultimately a great civilisation developed in that region. The people of that civilisation were called the Sumerians and they are generally credited with inventing the wheel and developing the first alphabet. These were remarkable achievements for people with hardly any wood, whose best material for a writing surface and for building houses was mud.

Photo kindly provided by Mrs McQueen

The ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza without the wheel. In addition, they developed their own system of writing, probably influenced by the Sumerians. The ancient Egyptians usually get the credit, among other things, for domesticating cats, embalming bodies with great skill and living successfully in a land that, except for a thin fertile strip near its river, was basically desert.

It was an improbable place for such a major and successful civilisation, made possible only by the existence of that river, the Nile, and by the talents of the people. Every year the Nile delivered its fertile silt to the inhabitants of the Nile Valley, its floodwaters sweeping down from the Ethiopian mountains in the south to the plains of the north. Every year the Egyptian peasant farmers used that silt and water to crop their land and grow the food that supported the whole population.

Some of my students think it would have been much easier for human beings once they started to farm. My students point out that people would no longer have encountered as much danger from hunting and would have felt more confidence about having food when they needed it. While these are fair points, farming in ancient Egypt was labour-intensive, to say the least. A peasant farmer was also at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This was no easy life. Hunter-gatherers six or seven thousand years before in a fertile area like the Fertile Crescent might well have had more leisure time and fewer people telling them what to do – and no one to tax them as well.

Find out about ancient Egypt at these links, ensuring that you make notes on topics that could help with assignment research:

Mummy Maker Game at the BBC Website

The importance of the Nile – BBC Website

Questions and answers about the Nile – an easy website

A day in the life of various ancient Egyptians – PBS Website

A fascinating account of archaeological evidence on who actually built the Pyramids – PBS website

Below is a little quizlet on ancient Egypt, which will help you to learn many of the words connected with this topic.

That’s all for today’s class. Try to take it all in and be grateful that you are not a student in ancient Egypt, where the young scribes had hundreds of symbols to learn and, by all accounts, quite nasty teachers who believed beatings helped the students learn more than any other method of discipline.

Kind regards, Ms Green

The Mystery of Neanderthals

Ros in jumper

Hi 7B!

The great science fiction author, Isaac Asimov, once wrote a novel about modern humans who transported a young Neanderthal child to the modern world to try to find out what had happened to this extinct race. I read this novel eagerly but, like Asimov and everyone else, I cannot explain with any certainty what could have caused these highly adapted, community-minded people to die out, leaving us as the only species of humans on the planet.

The novel by Asimov was called “Child of Time” and it was originally a short story called “The Ugly Little Boy”. That last title is not very complimentary about how Neanderthals might have looked, but you get the idea.

Scientists have been trying for many years to determine whether modern humans could have interbred with Neanderthals. The Max Planck Institute in Germany found evidence of Neanderthal genes in our genome in 2010. Only recently, however, another group of scientists have cast doubt on the theory that Neanderthals could have interbred with Homo sapiens. You can read information on these topics by clicking on the links below.

An artist's rendition of life on earth 60,000 years ago, showing a Neanderthal family on the frozen tundra of northern Europe - provided by Wikipedia Commons (public domain image)
An artist’s rendition of life on earth 60,000 years ago, showing a Neanderthal family on the frozen tundra of northern Europe – provided by Wikipedia Commons (public domain image)

It seems to me that the Neanderthals were tantalizingly similar to us, yet mysteriously different as well:

♦They didn’t farm, but then neither did we at that time in our past. No one farmed until 10,000 years ago. By then the Neanderthals had been gone for over 20,000 years.

♦They didn’t create rock art (at least to the best of our knowledge).

♦Yet they buried their dead and looked after their old and infirm. There is evidence to show that they were already burying their dead 120,000 years ago.

♦You might even assume that they should have been more likely to survive than we were. For instance, they were better adapted than Homo sapiens to a frozen world. They survived thousands of years of Ice Age. Their bones were far stronger than ours. Our bones are finer, more fragile, much more breakable. They would have won a wrestling contest with us easily.

So why did they, around 35000 years ago, become extinct?

Image from wpclipart.com

Here’s your chance to plumb the depths of this mystery and go back to the time before Homo sapiens were the only human beings on the planet. Have a look at each link below to view some fascinating speculations about Neanderthals:

Of course, many of these ideas are theory rather than fact.

After you have read these sites, write a comment about the Neanderthals. It must be written in correct English. What do you find interesting about them? What information have you gleaned from your reading? What might have made the Neanderthals vulnerable to extinction? Do you have an opinion on whether they interbred with us? Include in your comment any websites you may have located that might educate other students (and your teacher) about these remarkable lost people.

Kind regards,

Ms Green.