The big question for the segment is, how did the people live during the Palaeolithic and how do we know. [MUSIC] Palaeolithic is not only a chronological period, but Palaeolithic is a life way. Paleolithic is the way people, nomads lived in the past. Paleolithic is the quest to the origin of humans and the origin of human kind. So paleolithic, this is very long period is a time on a non-productive economy. Many different species of humans populate earth during this period. The palaeolithic could be divided into three main periods. The first one is Lower Palaeolithic, or the Early Stone Age in Africa, roughly 3 million years ago until 120,000 years ago. Now for the Middle Palaeolithic period, or Middle Stone Age, between 120,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago. The third and last stage of the Palaeolithic is the Upper Palaeolithic or Later Stone Age in Africa, broadly 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. This is a time period during which only modern homo sapiens, modern humans was known to have existed. The climate during the Paleolithic period was very different from the climate today. It consisted of a set of glacial and interglacial periods, in which the climate periodically fluctuated between warm and cold temperatures. The Palaeolithic lifeway is based on nomadism, hunting and gathering. Palaeolithic communities travelling in small nomadic groups, essentially families. Groups could vary from five to ten people, very small, to maybe a maximum of 20, 30 people. They're moving together and occasionally meeting up with neighboring groups, among those they have relatives. Palaeolithic groups may have camps in maybe one place for few weeks and then slowly moved around in seasonal migration that took them along very familiar secretes from territory to territory, from place to place in different seasons. We don't have very good evidence about the structure of the Paleolithic groups. Archaeologists should work with things, object or remains. When we we are excavating an Archaeological site, a paleolithic site, we can identify different specific areas. An area for fire with remains of food around the fire, or and as the one with the remains of stone tools, or kind of workshop for stone tools. A stone tool is any tool made from or partially from stone. And the study of the stone tool is the lithic analytics. Stone has been used to make a wide variety of different tools throughout history and prehistory. The first tools are very simple. Just a pebble, and Paleolithic people removed one part of the pebble to have a very cutting edge, and they used it as a knife. But during the Paleolithic period, mainly the middle Paleolithic period, we see the development of bifacial and axes. Bifacial and axes is a stone worked on the two sides, and with two different cutting edge. I would say biface like this one is like a Swiss Army knife. You can use it for different activities. You can cut, you can scratch, you can make a hole in the skin also. There are different kinds of bifaces for different periods, different type of stone also, or different types of shapes. And each shape can give us different information about the origin of the tool or about the providence of the material or the date of the stone tool. Do not imagine this is something so easy. When you want to create a stone artifact, you need to first imagine what will be the size, what will be the shape of your stone artifact. And this is a very important stage in development of human kind. We do not know a lot about these people because we base all our knowledge on archaeology, and there are things we can't really understand only with archaeologists. For example, what was their religion? What can we say about their thought, about their belief? We have little access of course to the spiritual world of the Paleolithic ancestors. But we have some case paintings, some artistic remains that can give a little bit of access to this spiritual life. Just one example in Africa. A rock outside discovered in upper Egypt, in the south of Egypt a few years ago, 30 kilometer south of the modern city of. A Belgium team has discovered there an unknown rock art locality. So rock art of Qurta, is the name of the site consists mainly of naturalisticly drawn animal figures with among other things, several images of bovines executed in a vigorous naturalistic manner. Archaeological evidence, technique, style suggest the Qurta rock art dates to the Upper Paleolithic period, between 20,000, 10,000 years ago. So, people from this period were nomads. And all the images as recorded in Qurta are images of wild animals, not domesticated animals. But we can see a close relation between the group of people and this animal. Because probably these animals were included in the hunting activities or because these animal have a very religious spiritual importance for the group. The site of tomb site hill is interesting for different topics. First, because groups used the site to collect the rough materials, and to make their tools, stone tools. Because in tomb site hills, we also have few features, few archaeological features like pits for the extraction of the shade. And also because the site of tomb site hill is one of the few places where archaeology's found human remains. The site is very close to the famous Temple of Dendera in the south of Egypt. In tomb site hill, archaeologists found the burial of Shide. This shide was dated 55,000 years old. And this remains is one of the earliest evidence of modern humans in Africa. Another is an example, the site of Nafrakata, also in Egypt. Nafrakata archaeologists found another burial, the burial of an adult, this time they did 35,000 30,000 years old. Now this one is also interesting not because this is one of the oldest human remains in Africa, we've got australopithecus remains or homo erectus remains, but this one is the oldest Early Upper Paleolithic modern human remains from North Africa. This example is also important because just beside the end of this skeleton was a stone and axe, an authoring in the tomb. And this authoring in the tomb is the first evidence of an associate artifact with a human body in a tomb. That means that people, at this stage, were interested in the protection of the bodies in the afterlife. When you protect a body after it's dead, that means that there is a belief In the afterlife. Why do you want to protect your body if your body is useless after the death? In this case, when you protect the body, we can guess that these people had a very complex beliefs in the afterlife and maybe a religion. [MUSIC]
