The earliest people: the Paleolithic

There are scientific, religious and legendary views on how humans appeared; this lesson relies on science, that is, anthropology and archaeology. The earliest people differed from animals by walking upright and being able to make stone tools. Their bones were found in Africa (australopithecus, zinjanthropus), on Java (pithecanthropus), in China (sinanthropus), in Germany (Neanderthal) and in France (Cro-Magnon); these names are old, and scholars today call many of them “Homo erectus” and “Homo sapiens”. They lived by gathering and hunting; this is called an appropriating economy because people took what nature gave. The oldest stone tools in Central Asia (choppers) come from Selungur in the Fergana Valley and Kulbuloq in the Tashkent oasis. In the Teshiktosh cave in the Boysun mountains the buried bones of an 8–9-year-old Neanderthal child were found — a sign of the first religious beliefs. Hunting cave paintings exist at Altamira in Spain, Lascaux in France and Kapova in Bashkortostan.