World Hisory(middle school)
Unit 1: The First Humans Prehistory-3500 BCE
What was life like 10,000 or a 100,000 years ago? How Have people and cities changed over time? These are some of the questions history tries to answer.
HISTORIANS are the scholars who study our past, using written records and historic art to find the answers. They read letters, look at written laws, and study religious documents and community records.
What if there are NO written records of a culture? How can we study * PREHITORY(history before written records), the time before writing was invented?
The study of prehistory relies on *ARCHAEOLOGY(the study of human history and prehistory through things people made, used, and left behind) and two groups of people:
Archaeologists are scientists who study objects made by humans, called ARTIFACTS, to better understand human activity. Artifacts can be tools, instruments, or anything made by humans in past civilizations.
Anthropologists are scientists who also study artifacts but are more interested in the cultural aspects of human society:
* what people in a particular culture wore
* what they ate
* how they learned and created the customs they followed
* how they developed languages
All the things happening now--the presidents of today, the global issues, climate change, cultural change, the sort of lives WE lead--will be considered part of history someday. Maybe someone will study our "artifacts" and culture. But before that happens, let's go back to the beginning--to the very first humans.