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UNIT 6—EARLY HUMANS

This Word document contains ALL of the readings from the unit. All readings include multiple copies at different Lexile levels. You are free to repurpose these materials as needed for your classroom. Please do remember to properly cite Big History as the source. If you modify the text, it will change the lexile level. As always, only print what you need.

LUCY AND THE LEAKEYS.....................................................................2JANE GOODALL.................................................................................17COLLECTIVE LEARNING (PART 1)........................................................27FORAGING........................................................................................35PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN..........................................................48

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UNIT 6— EARLY HUMANS TEXT READER 1

Lucy and the LeakeysUp until the mid-twentieth century, it was believed that humans evolved in Europe, or Asia, a mere 60,000 years ago. But the groundbreaking work of Mary and Louis Leakey changed all that.

Lucy and the Leakeys (1210L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown

Until the 1950s, European scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved in Europe, or possibly in Asia, about 60,000 years ago. Since then, excavation of fossil bones in East Africa, pioneered by Mary and Louis Leakey, has revealed that Homo sapiens may have emerged in Africa much earlier.

Human originsMost scientists agree that the human species emerged somewhere in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This understanding is based on fossilized bones and skulls that have been uncovered in East Africa and dated accurately by radiometric dating. These bones and skulls range from 25,000 to 4.4 million years old and show many different stages of human and primate evolution. These fossils have been uncovered by paleoarchaeologists — scientists who study the material remains of the entire human evolutionary line.

Based on the fossil evidence, paleoarchaeologists currently tell the following story: For 99.9 percent of our history, from the time of the first living cell, the human ancestral line was the same as that of chimpanzees. Then, about 5 to 7 million years ago, a new line split off from the chimpanzee line, and a new group appeared in open savanna rather than in rain forest jungle. The old group in the rain forest continued to evolve, and two of its species remain in existence: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.

The new group in the savanna evolved over the millennia into several species (how many is not entirely clear, but at least 18 different ones), until only one was left: Homo sapiens. All the species before us back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees are now collectively called “hominines.” (They used to be called “hominids.”)

Try visualizing it like this. Imagine your mother holding hands with her mother, who is holding hands with her mother, and keep going back in time for 5 million years. The final clasping hand would belong to an unknown kind of an ape whose descendants evolved into chimpanzees, bonobos, and, ultimately, your mother. If we count each generation as averaging 14 years, there would be about 360,000 hand-holders in the hominine line. (Thanks to Richard Dawkins, a contemporary English biologist, for this metaphor.)

Paleoarchaeologists debate what names to put on the bones they find. They have to decide which ones ought to be considered a separate species. No central authority determines this,


so paleoarchaeologists discuss it and try to reach a consensus. They more or less agree on three main categories of species before_ Homo sapiens_; these are Australopithecus (2 to 4 million years ago), Homo habilis (1.8 to 2.5 million years ago), and Homo erectus (2 to 4 million years ago). Clearly, some of these species must have overlapped during hominine evolution.

What scientists now know took many years to figure out. The first early human fossil bones were found in Europe — Neanderthals in Germany in 1857 and Cro-Magnon in France in 1868. Java Man was found in Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1894. Most paleoarchaeologists in the 1920s and ’30s felt certain that Homo sapiens must have evolved in Europe, or possibly Asia, since a group of fossils known as Peking Man was found in China in 1923–1927. Africa, widely known then as the “Dark Continent,” was not considered a possibility largely due to racist thinking.

The Leakeys look to AfricaWhen did anyone start looking in Africa for hominine fossils? One German professor found a Homo sapiens skeleton in 1913 in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and a professor in South Africa found a child’s skull there in 1924. But archaeologists denied that these bones were significant. The first to make credible finds were an English couple, Louis and Mary Leakey.

Louis Leakey was born and grew up in Kenya, in a tiny mission village near Nairobi, now the capital of Kenya but then a small village on the railroad to Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile River. Louis’s parents were missionaries from England. They hired English tutors for their children, but mostly Louis spent his childhood hunting and trapping with the local Kikuyu boys. Louis spoke Kikuyu as a native language and went through initiation rites with his Kikuyu peers. At the age of 13, Louis built his own house, as was Kikuyu custom. He also found some relics that he recognized as ancient hand axes, even though they were made of obsidian rather than flint, like the ones in Europe were. World War I prevented Louis from being sent to boarding school in England; he was 16 before he traveled to London to prepare for entrance to Cambridge University to become an archaeologist.

Mary Nicol grew up in England, but her father was an artist who took his family traveling for nine months out of each year, mostly in southern France, where he painted pictures that he sold in London. He loved Stone Age history and showed Mary many archaeological sites in France. She was only 13 when he died, and her mother sent her to strict Catholic schools in London, where Mary rebelled and was temporarily expelled several times. At 17, she took charge of her own education, learning to fly a glider and to draw, and attending lectures in archaeology.

Mary and Louis met in London in 1933 when she was 20 and he 30. Louis was married at the time — with one small child and another on the way — but he and Mary nevertheless began an affair, and in 1935 she joined him in Tanzania during one of his expeditions. They married the following year once his divorce was complete, though Louis’s actions cost him his research fellowship at Cambridge University.

Louis chose the Oldowan Gorge, now called Olduvai Gorge, as his main area of research. It lies about 200 miles southwest of Nairobi, in present-day Tanzania. Olduvai Gorge took


shape when a river cut through the sediment that had formed over 2 million years at the bottom of a huge ancient lake. About 20,000 years ago, an earthquake drained the lake; after that, the river cut a deep gorge through the sediment of the old lake bed. The river sliced mostly through the shoreline of the lake, revealing the remains of people and other animals that had once gathered there. Almost 2 million years of history are exposed in the 25-mile-long main gorge and in a side gorge 15 miles long, a “layer cake of evolution,” as Virginia Morell, a biographer of the Leakeys, calls it.

Olduvai Gorge lies in the Great Rift Valley, a massive geological fault in the African plate. The fault line runs from the Red Sea southward through Ethiopia and Tanzania, down to the mouth of the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Eventually this crack in the plate will deepen so much that the eastern piece of Africa will break off and move away. Mountains and volcanoes frame the edge of the Great Rift Valley. The volcanic eruptions produce ash, which easily buries and fossilizes bones, making this ideal territory for finding fossils. After being buried under layers of soil for millions of years, the fossils are moved upward as the Earth continues to shift.

Life in the fieldLife was an adventure for Louis and Mary at Olduvai and other sites in the Great Rift Valley. They lived in tents or mud huts with dirt floors and kerosene lamps. Often they had no fresh vegetables or fruit, living on fresh fish, canned food, rice and corn meal, and coffee and tea. (They both smoked cigarettes heavily.) Sometimes Louis shot a gazelle for its meat. Prides of lions prowled their camps at night. Keeping the cars and trucks running in the wilderness proved a monumental task. On occasion, the only water available came from watering holes where rhinoceroses wallowed; the soup, coffee, and tea would taste of rhino urine. African servants cooked and served their meals and washed their clothes.

Their reward came in living outdoors amid some of the most beautiful scenery in the world — gorgeous volcanic mountains with the Serengeti Plain spread out before them, hosting flamingos, rhinos, giraffes, lions, leopards, antelope, and zebra. The couple worked early and late in the day to avoid the hottest sun, in sand that radiated heat. They used a dental pick and an artist’s brush to reveal, ever so slowly, the hidden fossils of long ago, buoyed by the excitement of finding clues to how humans came to be.

Louis and Mary found many ancient tools and fossils of extinct animals, but finding human fossils proved more difficult. In 1948, Mary found a primate skull that they thought might be the “missing link” connecting apes and humans, but it turned out not to be. In 1959, Mary discovered a skull that dated at 1.75 million years old, a find that made the Leakeys famous and led to funding from National Geographic. In 1960, Louis found the hand and foot bones of a 12-year-old, whom he named Homo habilis, thus classifying this species of hominine. Until the 1950s, fossil hunting was filled with confusion because no one had a way to date the bones except by estimating the age of the rocks in which they were found. Every expedition had to have a geologist to study the layers of rock, but even those scientists were just approximating the age.


Things changed that decade with the advent of radiometric dating, which allowed fossil ages to be identified much more accurately. Carbon-14 atoms would not work for dates that go as far back as early hominines; instead, potassium found in the volcanic ash was used in a potassium-argon radiometric-dating technique.

Louis Leakey was convinced that humans had evolved from the apes, which he realized were fast losing their territory in Africa. They had never been studied in the wild, only in captivity. Since knowing more about them would provide insights into hominine behavior, Leakey took the initiative to raise funds for people chosen by him to study apes in their own habitat before it was too late. He looked for young women who could do this work. In 1960, he helped a young Jane Goodall begin her study of chimpanzees in the wild; later, Dian Fossey studied gorillas and Biruté Mary Galdikas studied orangutans.

Finding LucyMeanwhile, others had begun searching for fossil bones in Africa. After Louis Leakey died of a heart attack in 1972, Mary Leakey continued working at Olduvai Gorge; however, the next spectacular find occurred in the Ethiopian part of the Great Rift Valley, at Afar. In 1974, Donald Johanson, an archaeologist from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, found parts of a skeleton there that dated back 3.2 million years — the oldest hominine bones yet discovered. Johanson nicknamed the skeleton “Lucy,” because that night, as he and the others in camp celebrated their discovery, they listened repeatedly to the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Lucy was assumed to be female because the bones were of a small hominine, roughly 3and a half feet tall. Only about 20 percent of a full skeleton was found, and most of the skull was missing. Fragments suggest it was small, while the foot, leg, and pelvis bones showed that Lucy walked upright. This was important evidence that, in the human line, bipedalism came earlier than brain growth, which previously had been supposed to come first.

The Leakey legacyMary and Louis Leakey raised three sons, who lived with them in the field — Jonathan, Richard, and Philip. These sons stayed in Kenya as grown men, and Richard carried on his parents’ work on human origins, making his first major find in 1972. After discovering another significant skull, he went on to build up the National Museum of Kenya and to run the Kenya Wildlife Service, focusing on saving elephants.

After Louis’s death in 1972, Mary became a leading scientist in her own right. She initiated a camp at Laetoli, 35 miles from Olduvai, where the soil dated to 3.59 to 3.77 million years old. There, in 1976, she found an astonishing set of hominine footprints preserved in volcanic ash, more evidence that hominins of that time walked upright.

Mary Leakey received honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, Yale, and Chicago. She lived at Olduvai long enough to see leopards and rhinos dwindle to near extinction. In 1983, she ended her fieldwork and moved to Nairobi, where she died in 1996 at age 84. Her granddaughter Louise Leakey, daughter of Richard and Meave Leakey,


carries on the Leakey tradition, working in the scorching sun to piece together the story of human origins in Africa.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Louis and Mary Leakey, there’s overwhelming evidence to back that story. Confirmed by recent genetic testing, it is clear that Homo sapiens originated in Africa — much longer ago than previously thought — after separating from the chimpanzee line 5 to 7 million years earlier. The Leakeys spent their lives digging in the earth and tirelessly raising funds in the search for human origins. At a time when few others could entertain the thought, Louis demonstrated that our species had its beginnings on the African continent.

Lucy and the Leakeys (1070L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown, adapted by Newsela

Until the 1950s, European scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved in Europe, or possibly in Asia, about 60,000 years ago. Since then, the excavation of fossil bones in East Africa, pioneered by Mary and Louis Leakey, has revealed that Homo sapiens may have emerged in Africa much earlier.

Human origins

Most scientists agree that the human species emerged somewhere in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This understanding is based on fossilized bones and skulls that have been uncovered in East Africa and dated accurately by radiometric dating. These bones and skulls range from 25,000 to 4.4 million years old, and show many different stages of human and primate evolution. These fossils have been uncovered by paleoarchaeologists — scientists who study the material remains of the entire human evolutionary line.

Based on the fossil evidence, paleoarchaeologists currently tell the following story: For 99.9 percent of our history, from the time of the first living cell, the human ancestral line was the same as that of chimpanzees. Then, about 5 to 7 million years ago, a new line split off from the chimpanzee line. The new group appeared in open savanna rather than in rain forest jungle. The old group in the rain forest continued to evolve, and two of its species remain in existence: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.

The new group in the savanna evolved over the millennia into several species. It's unclear how many, but at least 18 different ones. Finally, only one was left: Homo sapiens. All the species before us back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees are now collectively called “hominines.” (They used to be called “hominids.”)

Try visualizing it like this. Imagine your mother holding hands with her mother. She, in turn, is holding hands with her mother. Keep going back in time for 5 million years. The final clasping hand would belong to an unknown kind of ape whose descendants evolved into chimpanzees, bonobos, and, ultimately, your mother. If we count each generation as averaging 14 years, there would be about 360,000 hand-holders in the hominine line. We can thank Richard Dawkins, a contemporary English biologist, for this metaphor.


Paleoarchaeologists debate what names to put on the bones they find. They have to decide which ones ought to be considered a separate species. No central authority determines this. So paleoarchaeologists discuss among themselves and try to reach a consensus. They more or less agree on three main categories of species before Homo sapiens; these are Australopithecus (2 to 4 million years ago), Homo habilis (1.8 to 2.5 million years ago), and Homo erectus (2 to 4 million years ago). Clearly, some of these species must have overlapped during hominine evolution.

What scientists know took many years to figure out. The first early human fossil bones were found in Europe — Neanderthals in Germany in 1857 and Cro-Magnon in France in 1868. Java Man was found in Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1894. Most paleoarchaeologists in the 1920s and ’30s felt certain that Homo sapiens must have evolved in Europe, or possibly Asia, since a group of fossils known as Peking Man was found in China in 1923–1927. Africa, widely known then as the “Dark Continent,” was not considered a possibility, largely due to racist thinking.

The Leakeys look to AfricaWhen did anyone start looking in Africa for hominine fossils? One German professor found a Homo sapiens skeleton in 1913 in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). A professor in South Africa found a child’s skull there in 1924. But archaeologists denied that these bones were significant. The first to make credible finds were an English couple, Louis and Mary Leakey.

Louis Leakey was born and grew up in Kenya, in a tiny mission village near Nairobi, now the capital of Kenya. Louis’s parents were missionaries from England. Louis spent much of his childhood hunting and trapping with the local Kikuyu boys. He spoke Kikuyu as a native language and went through initiation rites with his Kikuyu peers. At the age of 13, Louis built his own house, as was Kikuyu custom. He also found some relics that he recognized as ancient hand axes. At 16, he traveled to London to enter Cambridge University and become an archaeologist.

Mary Nicol grew up in England, but her father was an artist who took his family traveling each year, mostly in southern France. He loved Stone Age history and showed Mary archaeological sites in France. She was only 13 when he died, and her mother sent her to strict Catholic schools in London. Mary rebelled and was expelled several times. At 17, she took charge of her own education, learning to fly a glider and to draw, and attending lectures in archaeology.

Mary and Louis met in London in 1933 when she was 20 and he 30. Louis was married at the time — with one small child and another on the way — but he and Mary nevertheless began an affair. In 1935, she joined him in Tanzania during one of his expeditions. They married the following year once his divorce was complete. Louis’s actions cost him his research fellowship at Cambridge University.

Louis chose the Oldowan Gorge, now called Olduvai Gorge, as his main area of research. It lies about 200 miles southwest of Nairobi, in present-day Tanzania. Olduvai Gorge took shape when a river cut through the sediment that had formed over 2 million years at the bottom of a huge ancient lake. About 20,000 years ago, an earthquake drained the lake;


after that, the river cut a deep gorge through the sediment of the old lake bed. The river sliced mostly through the shoreline of the lake, revealing the remains of people and other animals that had once gathered there. Almost 2 million years of history are exposed in the 25-mile-long main gorge and in a side gorge 15 miles long.

Olduvai Gorge lies in the Great Rift Valley, a massive geological fault in the African plate. The fault line runs from the Red Sea southward through Ethiopia and Tanzania, down to the mouth of the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Eventually this crack in the plate will deepen so much that the eastern piece of Africa will break off and move away. Mountains and volcanoes frame the edge of the Great Rift Valley. The volcanic eruptions produce ash, which easily buries and fossilizes bones, making this ideal territory for finding fossils. After being buried under layers of soil for millions of years, the fossils are moved upward as the Earth continues to shift.

Life in the fieldLife was an adventure for Louis and Mary in the Great Rift Valley. They lived in tents or mud huts with dirt floors and kerosene lamps. Often they had no fresh vegetables or fruit, living on fresh fish, canned food, rice and corn meal, and coffee and tea. Sometimes Louis shot a gazelle for its meat. Lions prowled their camps at night. On occasion, the only water available came from watering holes where rhinoceroses wallowed; the soup, coffee, and tea would taste of rhino urine. African servants cooked and served their meals and washed their clothes.

Their reward came in living outdoors amid some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Gorgeous volcanic mountains with the Serengeti Plain spread out before them, hosting flamingos, rhinos, giraffes, lions, leopards, antelope, and zebra. The couple worked early and late in the day to avoid the hottest sun. They used a dental pick and an artist’s brush to reveal, ever so slowly, the hidden fossils of long ago.

Louis and Mary found many ancient tools and fossils of extinct animals. But finding human fossils proved more difficult. In 1948, Mary found a primate skull that they thought might be the “missing link” connecting apes and humans, but it turned out not to be. In 1959, Mary discovered a skull that dated at 1.75 million years old. The find made the Leakeys famous and led to funding from National Geographic. In 1960, Louis found the hand and foot bones of a 12-year-old, whom he named Homo habilis, thus classifying this species of hominine.

Until the 1950s, fossil hunting was filled with confusion because no one had a way to date the bones. Geologists could only make an estimate based on the age of the rocks in which they were found.

Things changed that decade with the arrival of radiometric dating. Now fossil ages could be identified much more accurately. Carbon-14 atoms would not work for dates that go as far back as early hominins; instead, potassium found in the volcanic ash was used in a potassium-argon radiometric-dating technique.

Louis Leakey was convinced that humans had evolved from the apes, which he realized were fast losing their territory in Africa. They had never been studied in the wild, only in captivity. Since knowing more about them would provide insights into hominine behavior,


Leakey took the initiative to raise money for people chosen by him to study apes in their own habitat before it was too late. He looked for young women who could do this work. In 1960, he helped a young Jane Goodall begin her study of chimpanzees in the wild. Later, he raised money for Dian Fossey to study gorillas and Biruté Mary Galdikas to study orangutans.

Finding LucyMeanwhile, others had begun searching for fossil bones in Africa. After Louis Leakey died of a heart attack in 1972, Mary Leakey continued working at Olduvai Gorge; however, the next spectacular find occurred in the Ethiopian part of the Great Rift Valley, at Afar. In 1974, Donald Johanson, an archaeologist, found parts of a skeleton there that dated back 3.2 million years. They were the oldest hominine bones yet discovered. Johanson nicknamed the skeleton “Lucy.”

Lucy was assumed to be female because the bones were of a small hominine, roughly 3 and a half feet tall. Only about 20 percent of a full skeleton was found, and most of the skull was missing. Importantly, the foot, leg, and pelvis bones showed that Lucy walked upright. This was evidence that, in the human line, bipedalism came earlier than brain growth, which previously had been supposed to come first.

The Leakey legacyMary and Louis Leakey raised three sons, who lived with them in the field. Their son Richard went on to run the Kenya Wildlife Service, focusing on saving elephants.

After Louis’s death in 1972, Mary became a leading scientist in her own right. She initiated a camp at Laetoli, 35 miles from Olduvai, where the soil dated to 3.59 to 3.77 million years old. There, in 1976, she found an astonishing set of hominine footprints preserved in volcanic ash, more evidence that hominins of that time walked upright.

Mary Leakey lived at Olduvai long enough to see leopards and rhinos dwindle to near extinction. In 1983, she ended her fieldwork and moved to Nairobi, where she died in 1996 at age 84.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Louis and Mary Leakey, there’s overwhelming evidence that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. Confirmed by recent genetic testing, it is clear that humans separated from the chimpanzee line 5 to 7 million years earlier. The Leakeys spent their lives digging in the earth in the search for human origins. At a time when few others could entertain the thought, Louis demonstrated that our species had its beginnings on the African continent.


Most scientists agree that the human species emerged somewhere in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This belief is based on fossilized bones and skulls that have been uncovered in East Africa and dated accurately by radiometric dating. These bones and skulls range from


25,000 to 4.4 million years old. They show many different stages of human and primate evolution. These fossils have been uncovered by paleoarchaeologists — scientists who study the material remains of the entire human evolutionary line.

Based on the fossil evidence, paleoarchaeologists can tell this story: For 99.9 percent of our history, from the time of the first living cell, the human ancestral line was the same as that of chimpanzees. Then, about 5 to 7 million years ago, a new line split off from the chimpanzee line. The new group appeared in open savanna rather than in rain forest jungle. The old group in the rain forest continued to evolve. Two of its species still exist: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.

The new group in the savanna evolved over the thousands of years into several species. It's unclear how many, but there were at least 18 different ones. Finally, only one was left: humans, or Homo sapiens. All the species before us back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees are now collectively called “hominins.” They used to be called “hominids.”

Imagine your mother holding hands with her mother. She is holding hands with her mother. Now picture this chain going back in time for 5 million years. The final hand would belong to an unknown kind of ape, sometimes called the "missing link." His descendants evolved into chimpanzees, bonobos, and, ultimately, your mother. If each generation averaged 14 years, there would be about 360,000 hand-holders in the hominine line.

Paleoarchaeologists debate what names to put on the bones they find. They have to decide which ones ought to be considered a separate species. They more or less agree on three main categories of species before Homo sapiens; these are Australopithecus (2 to 4 million years ago), Homo habilis (1.8 to 2.5 million years ago), and Homo erectus (2 to 4 million years ago). Clearly, some of these species must have overlapped during hominine evolution.

What scientists now know took many years to figure out. The first early human fossil bones were found in Europe. Neanderthals were first discovered in Germany in 1857 and Cro-Magnons in France in 1868. Java Man was found in Indonesia in 1894.

Most paleoarchaeologists in the 1920s and ’30s felt certain that Homo sapiens must have evolved in Europe. The other possibility was Asia, since a group of fossils known as Peking Man was found in China in 1923–1927. Africa, widely known then as the “Dark Continent,” was not considered a possibility. The racist thinking of the time ruled it out in scientists' minds.

The Leakeys look to AfricaWhen did anyone start looking in Africa for hominine fossils? One German professor found a Homo sapiens skeleton in 1913 in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). A professor in South Africa found a child’s skull there in 1924. But archaeologists denied that these bones were significant. The first to make finds that others took seriously was an English couple, Louis and Mary Leakey.

Louis Leakey was born and grew up in Kenya, in a tiny village near Nairobi, now the capital of Kenya. Louis’s parents were missionaries from England. Louis spent much of his childhood hunting and trapping with the local Kikuyu boys. He spoke Kikuyu as a native


language and went through ceremonies with his Kikuyu peers. At the age of 13, Louis built his own house, as was Kikuyu custom. He also found some ancient hand axes. At 16, he traveled to London to enter Cambridge University and become an archaeologist.

Mary Nicol grew up in England, but her father took the family traveling each year, mostly to southern France. He loved Stone Age history and showed Mary archaeological sites in France. She was only 13 when he died. After, her mother sent her to strict Catholic schools in London. Mary rebelled and was expelled several times. At 17, she took charge of her own education, learning to fly a glider, and attending lectures in archaeology.

Mary and Louis met in London in 1933 when she was 20 and he 30. In 1935, she joined him in Tanzania during one of his expeditions. They married the following year.

Louis chose the Olduvai Gorge as his main area of research. It lies about 200 miles southwest of Nairobi, in present-day Tanzania. Olduvai Gorge took shape when a river cut through the sediment that had formed over 2 million years at the bottom of a huge ancient lake.

About 20,000 years ago, an earthquake drained the lake; after that, the river cut a deep gorge through the sediment of the old lake bed. The river sliced mostly through the shoreline of the lake. By doing so, it revealed the remains of people and other animals that had once gathered there. Almost 2 million years of history are exposed in the 25-mile-long main gorge and in a side gorge 15 miles long.

Olduvai Gorge lies in the Great Rift Valley, a massive geological fault in the African plate. The fault line runs from the Red Sea southward through Ethiopia and Tanzania, down to the mouth of the Zambezi River in Mozambique. The fault is deepening in the plate. Eventually this crack will deepen so much that the eastern piece of Africa will break off and move away.

Mountains and volcanoes frame the edge of the Great Rift Valley. The volcanic eruptions produce ash, which easily buries and fossilizes bones. This makes the valley an ideal spot to find fossils. After being buried under layers of soil for millions of years, the fossils are moved upward as the Earth continues to shift.

Life in the fieldLife was an adventure for Louis and Mary in the Great Rift Valley. They lived in tents or mud huts with dirt floors and kerosene lamps. Often they had no fresh vegetables or fruit, living on fresh fish, canned food, rice and corn meal. Sometimes Louis shot a gazelle for its meat. Lions prowled their camps at night. African servants cooked and served their meals and washed their clothes.

The Leakeys lived outdoors in some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Gorgeous volcanic mountains surrounded them. The Serengeti Plain spread out before them, hosting flamingos, rhinos, giraffes, lions, leopards, antelope, and zebra. The couple worked early and late in the day to avoid the hottest sun. They used a dental pick and an artist’s brush. Ever so slowly, they unearthed hidden fossils of long ago.


Louis and Mary found many ancient tools and fossils of extinct animals. But finding human fossils proved more difficult. In 1948, Mary found a primate skull that they thought might be the “missing link” connecting apes and humans, but it turned out not to be. In 1959, Mary discovered a 1.75-million-year-old skull. The find made the Leakeys famous. In 1960, Louis found the hand and foot bones of a 12-year-old, whom he named Homo habilis, a new species of hominine.

Until the 1950s, fossil hunting was filled with confusion. There was no accurate way to date the bones. Geologists could only make an estimate based on the age of the rocks in which they were found.

Things changed with the arrival of radiometric dating. Now fossil ages could be identified much more accurately. Carbon-14 atoms would not work for dates that go as far back as early hominins; instead, potassium found in the volcanic ash was used in a potassium-argon radiometric-dating technique.

Louis Leakey was convinced that humans had evolved from the apes, which he realized were fast losing their territory in Africa. They had never been studied in the wild, only in captivity. Leakey was sure knowing more about them would provide insights into hominine behavior. He began to raise money for people to study apes in their own habitat before it was too late. He chose the people himself. He looked for young women who could do this work. In 1960, he helped a young Jane Goodall begin her study of chimpanzees in the wild. Later, he raised money for Dian Fossey to study gorillas and Biruté Mary Galdikas to study orangutans.

Finding LucyMeanwhile, others had begun searching for fossil bones in Africa. The next spectacular find occurred in the Ethiopian part of the Great Rift Valley. In 1974, Donald Johanson, an archaeologist, found parts of a skeleton there that dated back 3.2 million years. They were the oldest hominine bones yet discovered. Johanson nicknamed the skeleton “Lucy.”

Lucy was assumed to be female because the bones were of a small hominine, roughly 3 and a half feet tall. Only about 20 percent of a full skeleton was found, and most of the skull was missing. Importantly, the foot, leg, and pelvis bones showed that Lucy walked upright. This was evidence that as humans evolved they began walking upright before their brains grew. Previously scientists had thought brain growth came first.

The Leakey legacyMary and Louis Leakey raised three sons, who lived with them in the field. Their son Richard went on to run the Kenya Wildlife Service, focusing on saving elephants.

Louis died in 1972. Afterward, Mary became a leading scientist in her own right. She opened a camp 35 miles from Olduvai, where the soil dated to 3.59 to 3.77 million years old. There, in 1976, she found an astonishing set of hominine footprints preserved in volcanic ash, more evidence that hominins of that time walked upright.


Mary Leakey lived at Olduvai long enough to see leopards and rhinos dwindle to near extinction. She died in 1996 at age 84.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Louis and Mary Leakey, there’s overwhelming evidence that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. It has been confirmed by genetic testing that humans separated from the chimpanzee line 5 to 7 million years earlier. The Leakeys spent their lives digging in the earth in the search for human origins. At a time when few others could entertain the thought, Louis demonstrated that our species had its beginnings on the African continent.


Most scientists agree that humans emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Scientists believe this because fossilized bones and skulls were uncovered in East Africa. Ash from volcanoes was found near the bones. By testing the ash, scientists could tell their ages. The bones and skulls range from 25,000 to 4.4 million years old. They show many different stages of human and primate evolution. Paleoarchaeologists uncovered the fossils. These scientists study the remains of humans throughout evolution.

Based on the fossil evidence, paleoarchaeologists tell this story: For 99.9 percent of our history, humans and chimpanzees shared the same line. Even from the time of the first living cell, humans and chimps were part of the same line. Then, about 5 to 7 million years ago, a new line split off from the chimpanzees. The new group lived in open savanna rather than in rain forest jungle. The old group in the rain forest continued to evolve. Two of its species still exist: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.

The new group in the savanna evolved over thousands of years. If formed into several species. It's unclear how many, but we know of at least 18. Finally, only one was left: humans, or Homo sapiens. All the species before us back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees are now called “hominins.” They used to be called “hominids.”

Try visualizing it like this. Imagine your mother holding hands with her mother. She holds hands with her mother. Imagine this chain continuing. Go back in time 5 million years. The final hand would belong to an unknown kind of ape, sometimes called the "missing link." His descendants evolved into chimpanzees, bonobos, and, ultimately, your mother. If each generation averaged 14 years, there would be about 360,000 hominins holding hands.

Paleoarchaeologists have to decide which bones belong to separate species. They mostly agree on three main categories of species before Homo sapiens. The oldest was Australopithecus who lived 2 to 4 million years ago. Homo habilis lived 1.8 to 2.5 million years ago. The closest to our times was Homo erectus who lived 2 to 4 million years ago. Clearly, some of these species lived at the same time.

What scientists now know took many years to figure out. The first early human fossil bones were found in Europe. Neanderthal bones were discovered in Germany in 1857 and Cro-Magnon bones in France in 1868. Java Man was found in Indonesia in 1894.


Most paleoarchaeologists in the 1920s and ’30s were certain that Homo sapiens evolved in Europe. The other possibility was Asia, since a group of fossils known as Peking Man was found in China in 1923–1927. Africa was not considered a possibility. Racist thinking was common among scientists then. Africa was widely known as the “Dark Continent.” The ignorance of the time ruled out Africa in scientists' minds.

The Leakeys look to AfricaWhen did anyone start looking in Africa for hominine fossils? One German professor found a Homo sapiens skeleton in 1913 in Tanzania. Then in 1924, a South African professor found a child’s skull there. But archaeologists didn't believe these bones were meaningful. The first discovery that scientists took seriously was made by an English couple, Louis and Mary Leakey.

Louis Leakey was born and grew up in Kenya. Louis’s parents were missionaries from England. Louis spent much of his childhood hunting and trapping with the local Kikuyu boys. He spoke Kikuyu as a native language. As a child, he went through ceremonies with other Kikuyu. At the age of 13, Louis built his own house, as was Kikuyu custom. He also found some ancient hand axes. At 16, he traveled to London to enter Cambridge University and become an archaeologist.

Mary Nicol grew up in England. Each year her father took the family traveling, mostly to southern France. He loved Stone Age history and showed Mary archaeological sites in France. She was only 13 when he died. After, her mother sent her to strict Catholic schools in London. Mary rebelled and was expelled several times. At 17, she took charge of her own education. She learned to fly a glider, and began attending lectures in archaeology.

Mary and Louis met in London in 1933 when she was 20 and he 30. In 1935, she joined him in Tanzania during one of his expeditions. They married the following year.

Louis chose the Olduvai Gorge as his main area of research. It lies about 200 miles southwest of Nairobi, Kenya. Today the area is part of Tanzania. Olduvai Gorge took shape where sediment had formed over 2 million years at the bottom of a huge ancient lake.

About 20,000 years ago, an earthquake struck and the lake emptied. After, a river cut through the sediment of the old lake bed. A deep gorge formed. The river sliced through the shoreline of the lake. By doing so, the remains of people and other animals that had once gathered there were revealed. Almost 2 million years of history are exposed in the gorge.

Olduvai Gorge lies in the Great Rift Valley, a massive fault, or crack, in the African plate. The fault line starts from the Red Sea, which separates Africa and Asia. Then it runs southward through Ethiopia and Tanzania. It ends down in Mozambique. The crack in the plate is slowly getting deeper. Eventually it will deepen so much that part of eastern Africa will break off.

Mountains and volcanoes line the Great Rift Valley. When the volcanoes erupt they shoot off ash. As the ash lands, it buries and fossilizes bones. This makes the valley an ideal spot to find fossils. The fossils remained buried under layers of soil for millions of years. But, as the Earth shifts, the fossils are moved closer to surface where we can find them.


Life in the fieldLife was an adventure for Louis and Mary in the Great Rift Valley. They lived in tents or mud huts. Kerosene lamps provided light at night. Often they had no fresh vegetables or fruit, living on fish, canned food, rice and corn meal. Sometimes Louis hunted gazelles for meat. Lions prowled their camps at night. African servants cooked their meals and washed their clothes.

The Leakeys lived outdoors in some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Volcanic mountains surrounded them. The Serengeti Plain spread out before them. Rhinos, giraffes, lions, leopards, antelope, and zebra lived on the plains. The couple worked with a dental pick and an artist’s brush. Ever so slowly, they unearthed fossils hidden long ago.

Louis and Mary found many fossils of extinct animals. But finding human fossils proved more difficult. In 1948, Mary discovered a primate skull that they thought might be the “missing link” connecting apes and humans. It turned out not to be. In 1959, Mary discovered a 1.75-million-year-old skull. The find made the Leakeys famous. In 1960, Louis found the hand and foot bones of a 12-year-old. He named it Homo habilis, a new species of hominine.

Until the 1950s, fossil hunting was filled with confusion. No accurate way to date the bones existed. Geologists could only make an estimate based on the age of the rocks they were found in.

Things changed with the arrival of radiometric dating. Now fossil ages could be identified much more accurately. Carbon-14 atoms would not work for dates that go as far back as early hominins; instead, potassium found in the volcanic ash was used in a new radiometric-dating technique.

Louis Leakey was convinced that humans had evolved from apes. Leakey thought knowing more about the apes would help understand hominine behavior. But, no one had studied them in the wild, only in captivity.

Leakey realized apes were losing their territory to humans. He wanted to study them before it was too late. So he set out to raise money for people to study apes in their own habitat. In 1960, he helped Jane Goodall begin her study of chimpanzees in the wild.

Finding LucyMeanwhile, others had begun searching for fossil bones in Africa. The next spectacular find occurred in the Ethiopian part of the Great Rift Valley. In 1974, Donald Johanson, an archaeologist, found parts of a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton. They were the oldest hominine bones yet discovered. Johanson nicknamed the female skeleton “Lucy.”

Lucy was just 3 and a half feet tall. Importantly, the foot, leg, and pelvis bones showed that Lucy walked upright. This was evidence that as humans evolved they began walking upright before their brains grew larger.


The Leakey legacyMary and Louis Leakey raised three sons in Africa. Their son Richard went on to run the Kenya Wildlife Service, focusing on saving elephants.

Louis died in 1972. Afterward, Mary opened a camp 35 miles from Olduvai, where the soil dated to 3.59 to 3.77 million years old. There, in 1976, she found an astonishing set of hominine footprints. They had been preserved in volcanic ash. The discovery added more evidence that hominins of that time walked upright.

Mary Leakey lived at Olduvai long enough to see leopards and rhinos become nearly extinct. She died in 1996 at age 84.

Thanks to the work of Louis and Mary Leakey, there’s overwhelming evidence that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. It is clear that humans separated from chimpanzees 5 to 7 million years earlier. Recent genetic testing has confirmed it. The Leakeys spent their lives searching for human origins. At a time when few others could think it, Louis demonstrated that humankind began in Africa.


Jane GoodallGoodall pioneered the study of chimpanzees in the wild, demonstrating how similar chimpanzee behavior is to that of humans, and helping to show the close evolutionary relationship of the two species.

Jane Goodall: Biography of a Primatologist (1170L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown

In 1960 Jane Goodall pioneered the study of chimpanzees in the wild, showing the world how similar chimpanzee behavior is to that of humans, and helping to demonstrate the close evolutionary relationship of the two species.

An early interest in animal lifeJane Goodall's parents were Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, a car-racing businessman, and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a novelist who published under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall.

When Jane was just over a year old, her father gave her a stuffed toy, a lifelike replica of a chimpanzee, named “Jubilee” after the first chimpanzee infant ever born at the London Zoo. The toy horrified some of her mother’s friends, who thought that it would give Jane nightmares. They could not foresee the favorable influence it would have on her.

Goodall’s interest in observing animal life showed up early. When she was 4, she wanted so badly to know how an egg came out of a hen that she hid inside a small henhouse for nearly four hours waiting to see it happen. Meanwhile, the whole household had been searching for her and had even reported her missing to the police.

Goodall’s fascination with Africa was aroused by reading The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. Lofting depicts Dolittle as a kindly doctor who travels to Africa and talks to animals. Jane also read all of the Tarzan books. Her mother encouraged her dream of studying animals in Africa — assuring her that she could do it if she worked hard and believed in herself.

Goodall’s parents divorced when she was 12, and when she graduated from secondary school in 1952, her family could not afford to send her to college. Instead, she went to secretarial school and then worked as a secretary, including a job at Oxford University typing and filing. In 1956, a school friend invited her to visit the friend’s family farm in the highlands of Kenya. Goodall went back to live at home, worked hard as a waitress, and in five months saved enough money for the round-trip fare on a ship to Mombasa.


A meeting with Louis LeakeyIn 1957, Goodall visited her friend’s family on their farm outside Nairobi and subsequently found a job as a secretary in the city. Her interest in animals led her to contact Louis Leakey, the famous seeker of hominine bones, who was then working in Africa. He promptly hired her as his secretary. Leakey had been looking for someone to study chimpanzees in the wild and, after he got to know Goodall, felt that she would be perfect. Leakey believed that a woman would be more patient than a man in the field and would be less likely to kindle the aggressions of male chimps. She returned to London to study primates in the London Zoo while he raised funds to support her field studies and arranged her equipment.

In 1960, when she was 26, Goodall eagerly traveled 600 miles southwest of Nairobi to live at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Preserve, on Lake Tanganyika. There, about 150 chimpanzees made their home in a 20- to 30-square-mile area. It took her months to accustom the chimps to her presence but, after nearly a year, most of them would allow her to approach closer than a hundred yards.

Observing chimpanzee cultureGoodall had little professional training in animal studies. She worked unconventionally, doing things like giving the chimpanzees names instead of numbers and perceiving the individual personality of each one. She also found that baiting the animals with bananas helped to attract them close enough for her to observe their social behavior and to photograph them.

Within four months, Goodall had observed behavior that contradicted a belief strongly held by archaeologists: that only humans used tools. “Man the tool-maker” was the phrase they used. But Goodall saw a chimp break off a twig, strip its bark, and insert it into a termite mound. When the chimp withdrew the twig, it was covered with delicious termites ready to be licked off. Since then, other researchers have observed chimpanzees using more than half a dozen tools for assorted purposes. Chimp societies across Africa vary in their use of tools. Other animals, including some birds and dolphins, are now known to use tools.

Chimps were also widely believed to be vegetarians, but Goodall observed them hunting, killing, and eating small colobus monkeys. Goodall made her findings public in her book In the Shadow of Man (1971).

Leakey believed that having a PhD would help give credibility to Goodall’s work. He raised the funds to send her to Cambridge University, where she received in 1965 a PhD in ethology (the scientific study of animal behavior) with a dissertation titled “Behavior of the Free-Ranging Chimpanzee.”

Leakey also sent a professional photographer, Hugo Van Lawick, to Gombe to record Goodall’s work there. The two fell in love and married in 1964. Their son, Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, was born in 1967. They called him “Grub” and raised him in Gombe with the chimpanzees. In 1972, Goodall and her husband published a children’s book about their son called Grub: The Bush Baby. But their marriage deteriorated. They divorced in 1974, and a year later she married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks, who proved to


be a deeply compatible partner. However, he died of cancer after only five years of marriage.

After Goodall recovered from the death of her husband, she wrote her definitive scientific work, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986). In this book, she summarized and analyzed all the data gathered by herself and others at Gombe. By this time, the data included acts of warfare, murder, brutality, and even cannibalism by her beloved chimpanzees, challenging her belief in their inherent goodness. For the first 10 years, she had believed that they were “rather nicer than human beings,” but now she had to acknowledge that in certain circumstances, such as competition for food, sex, or territory, or under emotions of jealousy, fear, or revenge, their behavior proved as dark and troubling as that seen in humans.

At the same time, chimpanzees often demonstrated mutual sharing, helping, and compassion. Mothers, children, and siblings developed deep ties, often assisting each other throughout their lifetimes. Older siblings adopted younger ones if a mother died, and would even adopt an orphan from another mother if it had no relative to protect it. Some mothers were more attentive and playful than others, and Goodall observed that their chimps grew up less depressed and aggressive than the chimps whose mothers were less attentive.

Some primatologists have criticized Goodall’s methods, especially her use of bananas in feeding stations to attract chimps. They claim that the food causes higher levels of aggression and conflict, distorting normal behavior. But other research has shown similar levels of conflict without feeding stations.

Messenger of compassionSince finishing The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall has devoted herself to writing, speaking, and fundraising to support the study and protection of chimpanzees and other wild animals. In 1976, Goodall and a friend founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research and efforts to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It has many offices worldwide.

In 1991, a group of 16 teenagers met Goodall on the back porch of her home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to discuss what they could do to help the environment, animals, and the global human community. Out of that meeting Goodall organized Roots and Shoots, a global youth program that now has thousands of groups in more than 100 countries.

Goodall is a devoted vegetarian and in 2005 published Harvest of Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating, one of more than 20 books she has written. Goodall remains extremely active in wildlife conversation work.

The world has recognized Goodall as a scientist and a special emissary of hope and compassion. Her awards include numerous honorary doctorates and Disney’s Animal Kingdom Eco Hero Award. In 2002, Secretary General Kofi Annan named her a United Nations Messenger of Peace.


Jane Goodall: Biography of a Primatologist (1060L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown, adapted by Newsela

In 1960 Jane Goodall pioneered the study of chimpanzees in the wild. Her research showed the world how similar chimpanzee behavior is to that of humans, and helped demonstrate the close evolutionary relationship of the two species.

An early interest in animal lifeJane Goodall was born to a car-racing businessman and a novelist.

When Jane was just over a year old, her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee toy, named “Jubilee” after the first chimpanzee infant ever born at the London Zoo. No one could have foreseen the influence it would have on her.

Goodall’s interest in observing animal life began early. When she was 4, she wanted so badly to know how an egg came out of a hen that she hid inside a small henhouse for nearly four hours waiting to see it happen.

Goodall’s fascination with Africa was aroused by reading The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. Lofting depicts Dolittle as a kindly doctor who travels to Africa and talks to animals. Jane also read all of the Tarzan books. Her mother encouraged her dream of studying animals in Africa — assuring her that she could do it if she worked hard and believed in herself.

Goodall’s parents divorced when she was 12. She graduated from secondary school in 1952, but her family could not afford to send her to college. Instead, she went to work as a secretary. In 1956, a friend invited her to visit her family's farm in Kenya. Goodall went back to live at home, and worked hard as a waitress. In five months, she'd saved enough money for the round-trip fare on a ship to Mombasa, Kenya.

A meeting with Louis LeakeyIn 1957, Goodall visited her friend’s family on their farm outside Nairobi and subsequently found a job as a secretary in the city. Her interest in animals led her to contact Louis Leakey, the famous seeker of hominine bones, who was then working in Africa. He promptly hired her as his secretary. Leakey had been looking for someone to study chimpanzees in the wild. After he got to know Goodall, he felt that she would be perfect. Leakey believed that a woman would be more patient than a man in the field and would be less likely to trigger the aggressions of male chimps. She returned to London to study primates in the London Zoo while he raised money to support her field studies and arranged her equipment.

In 1960, when she was 26, Goodall eagerly traveled 600 miles southwest of Nairobi to live at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Preserve, on Lake Tanganyika. There, about 150 chimpanzees made their home in a 20- to 30-square-mile area. It took her months to accustom the chimps to her presence but, after nearly a year, most of them would allow her to approach closer than a hundred yards.


Observing chimpanzee cultureGoodall had little professional training in animal studies. She worked unconventionally, doing things like giving the chimpanzees names instead of numbers and perceiving the individual personality of each one. She also found that baiting the animals with bananas helped to attract them close enough for her to observe their social behavior and to photograph them.

Within four months, Goodall had observed behavior that contradicted a belief strongly held by archaeologists: that only humans used tools. “Man the tool-maker” was the phrase they used. But Goodall saw a chimp break off a twig, strip its bark, and insert it into a termite mound. When the chimp withdrew the twig, it was covered with delicious termites ready to be licked off. Since then, other researchers have observed chimpanzees using more than half a dozen tools for assorted purposes. Chimp societies across Africa vary in their use of tools. Other animals, including some birds and dolphins, are now known to use tools.

Chimps were also widely believed to be vegetarians, but Goodall observed them hunting, killing, and eating small colobus monkeys. Goodall made her findings public in her book In the Shadow of Man (1971).

Leakey believed that having a PhD would help give credibility to Goodall’s work. He raised the funds to send her to Cambridge University, where she received in 1965 a PhD in ethology (the scientific study of animal behavior) with a dissertation titled “Behavior of the Free-Ranging Chimpanzee.”

Leakey also sent a photographer, Hugo Van Lawick, to Gombe to record Goodall’s work there. The two fell in love and married in 1964. Their son, Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, was born in 1967. They called him “Grub” and raised him in Gombe with the chimpanzees. In 1972, Goodall and her husband published a children’s book about their son called Grub: The Bush Baby. But their marriage deteriorated. They divorced in 1974. A year later, she married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks. However, he died of cancer after only five years of marriage.

After Goodall recovered from the death of her husband, she wrote her definitive scientific work, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986). In this book, she detailed acts of warfare, murder, brutality, and even cannibalism by her beloved chimpanzees. When Goodall began studying chimps, she believed in their basic goodness. For the first 10 years, she had believed that they were “rather nicer than human beings.” But now she had to acknowledge that in certain circumstances, such as competition for food, sex, or territory, or under emotions of jealousy, fear, or revenge, their behavior changed. It proved as dark and troubling as that seen in humans.

At the same time, chimpanzees often demonstrated mutual sharing, helping, and compassion. Mothers, children, and siblings developed deep ties. Throughout their lifetimes they often assisted each other. Older siblings adopted younger ones if a mother died, and would even adopt an orphan from another mother if it had no relative to protect it. Some mothers were more attentive and playful than others, and Goodall observed that their chimps grew up less depressed and aggressive than the chimps whose mothers were less attentive.



Messenger of compassionSince finishing The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall has devoted herself to writing, speaking, and fundraising to support the study and protection of chimpanzees and other wild animals. In 1976, Goodall and a friend founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research and efforts to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It has many offices worldwide.

In 1991, a group of 16 teenagers met Goodall at her home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They wanted to discuss what they could do to help the environment, animals, and the global human community. Out of that meeting, Goodall organized Roots and Shoots, a global youth program that now has thousands of groups in more than 100 countries.

Goodall remains extremely active in wildlife conservation work. In 2002, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.


Jane Goodall pioneered the study of chimpanzees in the wild. She demonstrated how similar chimpanzee behavior is to that of humans, and helped to show the close evolutionary relationship of the two species.

An early interest in animal lifeJane Goodall's father was a car-racing businessman. Her mother wrote novels.

When Jane was just over a year old, her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee toy named “Jubilee,” after the first chimpanzee infant ever born at the London Zoo. No one could have foreseen the influence it would have on her.

Goodall’s interest in observing animal life began early. When she was 4, she wanted so badly to know how an egg came out of a hen that she hid inside a small henhouse for nearly four hours waiting to see it happen.

Goodall’s fascination with Africa was aroused by reading The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. Lofting depicts Dolittle as a kindly doctor who travels to Africa and talks to animals. Jane also read all of the Tarzan books.

Goodall’s parents divorced when she was 12. She could not afford to attend college. Instead, she went to work as a secretary. In 1956, a friend invited her to visit her family's farm in Kenya. Goodall went back to live at home, and worked hard as a waitress. In five months, she'd saved enough money for the fare on a ship to Kenya.


A meeting with Louis LeakeyIn 1957, Goodall visited her friend’s family on their farm outside Nairobi. She soon found a job as a secretary in the city. Her interest in animals led her to contact Louis Leakey, the famous seeker of hominine bones, who was then working in Africa. He promptly hired her as his secretary.

Leakey had been looking for someone to study chimpanzees in the wild. After he got to know Goodall, he felt that she would be perfect. Leakey believed that a woman would be more patient than a man in the field. A woman's presence might also be less likely to trigger the aggressions of male chimps. She returned to London to study primates in the London Zoo. Meanwhile, Leakey raised money to support her field studies and arranged her equipment.

In 1960, when she was 26, Goodall eagerly traveled 600 miles southwest of Nairobi to live at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Preserve, on Lake Tanganyika. There, about 150 chimpanzees made their home in a 20- to 30-square-mile area. It took months for the chimps to get used to her presence. After nearly a year, most of them would allow her to get within a hundred yards.

Observing chimpanzee cultureGoodall had little professional training in animal studies. She found her own way of working. Instead of giving the chimpanzees numbers, she gave them names. She wanted to understand the personality of each one. She also found that baiting the animals with bananas helped to attract them close enough for her to observe their social behavior and to photograph them.

Within four months, Goodall had observed behavior that went against a belief strongly held by archaeologists: that only humans used tools. “Man the tool-maker” was the phrase they used. But Goodall saw a chimp break off a twig, strip its bark, and insert it into a termite mound. When the chimp withdrew the twig, it was covered with delicious termites ready to be licked off. Since then, other researchers have observed chimpanzees using more than half a dozen tools for assorted purposes. Chimp societies across Africa vary in their use of tools. Other animals, including some birds and dolphins, are now known to use tools.

Chimps were also widely believed to be vegetarians. However, Goodall observed them hunting, killing, and eating small colobus monkeys. Goodall made her findings public in her book In the Shadow of Man (1971).

Leakey believed that having a PhD would help give credibility to Goodall’s work. He raised the funds to send her to Cambridge University. In 1965, she received a PhD in ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior.

Leakey also sent a photographer, Hugo Van Lawick, to Gombe to record Goodall’s work there. The two fell in love and married in 1964. Their son, Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, was born in 1967. They called him “Grub” and raised him in Gombe with the chimpanzees. In 1972, Goodall and her husband published a children’s book about their son called Grub: The Bush Baby. But their marriage deteriorated, and they divorced in 1974. A year later, she


married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks. However, he died of cancer after only five years of marriage.

After Goodall recovered from the death of her husband, she wrote her defining scientific work, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986). In this book, she detailed acts of warfare, murder, brutality, and even cannibalism by her beloved chimpanzees. When Goodall began studying chimps, she believed in their basic goodness. For the first 10 years, she had believed that they were “rather nicer than human beings.” But now she had seen that in certain situations, such as competition for food, a mate, or territory, or under emotions of jealousy, fear, or revenge, they changed. Their behavior proved as dark and troubling as that seen in humans.

At the same time, chimpanzees often demonstrated sharing, helping, and compassion. Mothers, children, and siblings developed deep ties. Throughout their lifetimes they assisted each other. Older siblings adopted younger ones if a mother died. They would even adopt an orphan from another mother if it had no relative to protect it. Some mothers were more attentive and playful than others. Goodall observed that their chimps grew up less depressed and aggressive than the chimps whose mothers were less attentive.


Messenger of compassionSince finishing The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall has devoted herself to writing, speaking, and fundraising to support the study and protection of chimpanzees and other wild animals. In 1976, Goodall and a friend founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research and efforts to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It has offices worldwide.

In 1991, a group of 16 teenagers met Goodall at her home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They wanted to discuss what they could do to help the environment, animals, and the global human community. Out of that meeting, Goodall organized Roots and Shoots, a global youth program. It now has thousands of groups in more than 100 countries.

Goodall remains extremely active in wildlife conservation work. In 2002, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.


Jane Goodall pioneered the study of chimpanzees in the wild. She demonstrated how similar chimpanzee behavior is to human behavior. Her research helped to show the close relationship of the two species and how they evolved together.


An early interest in animal lifeJane Goodall's father was a car-racing businessman. Her mother was a writer of novels.

When Jane was just a year old, her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee toy. It was named “Jubilee” after the first chimpanzee ever born at the London Zoo. No one could have known the influence it would have on her.

Goodall began observing animals early on. When she was 4, she wanted badly to know how an egg came out of a hen. So she hid inside a small henhouse for hours waiting to see it happen.

Goodall became fascinated with Africa after reading The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. The Dolittle character was a doctor who travels to Africa and talks to animals. Jane also read all of the Tarzan books.

Goodall’s parents divorced when she was 12. She could not afford to attend college. So instead she went to work as a secretary. In 1956, a friend invited her to visit her family's farm in Kenya. Goodall went back to live at home, and worked hard as a waitress. In five months, she'd saved enough money for the ship to Kenya.

A meeting with Louis LeakeyIn 1957, Goodall visited her friend’s family on their farm outside Nairobi. She soon found a job as a secretary in the city. Her interest in animals led her to contact Louis Leakey. The famous seeker of hominine bones was then working in Africa. He promptly hired her as his secretary.

Leakey had been looking for someone to study chimpanzees in the wild. After he got to know Goodall, he knew she would be perfect. Leakey believed that a woman would be more patient than a man in the field. A woman's presence might also be less likely to make male chimps act aggressively. She returned to London to study primates in the London Zoo. Meanwhile, Leakey raised money to support her field studies.

In 1960, when she was 26, Goodall eagerly traveled 600 miles southwest of Nairobi. She was headed to live at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Preserve on Lake Tanganyika. About 150 chimpanzees lived there. It took months for the chimps to get used to her presence. After nearly a year, most of them allowed her to come within a hundred yards.

Observing chimpanzee cultureGoodall had little professional training in animal studies. She worked in her own way. Scientists at the time gave chimpanzees numbers. Instead, she gave them names. Goodall wanted to understand the personality of each one. She also gave the animals bananas to get them to come close to her. Goodall wanted them close enough to observe their social behavior and to photograph them.

Goodall soon observed behavior that other archaeologists hadn't: chimps used tools. Archaeologists thought only humans used tools. But Goodall saw a chimp break off a twig, strip its bark, and insert it into a termite mound. When the chimp withdrew the twig, it was


covered with delicious termites ready to be licked off. Since then, other researchers have observed chimpanzees using more than half a dozen tools. Some birds and dolphins are now known to use tools.

Chimps were also widely believed to be vegetarians. However, Goodall observed them hunting, killing, and eating small colobus monkeys.

Leakey believed that having a PhD would help give credibility to Goodall’s work. He raised the money to send her to Cambridge University. In 1965, she received a PhD in ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior.

Leakey also sent a photographer, Hugo Van Lawick, to Gombe to record Goodall’s work there. The two fell in love and married in 1964. Their son, Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, was born in 1967. They called him “Grub” and raised him in Gombe with the chimpanzees. In 1972, Goodall and her husband published a children’s book about their son called Grub: The Bush Baby. But their marriage fell apart and they divorced in 1974. A year later, she married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks. However, he died of cancer after only five years of marriage.

After Goodall recovered from his death, she wrote her most famous book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986). In it she detailed acts of warfare, murder, and brutality by her beloved chimpanzees. She even recorded cannibalism.

When Goodall began studying chimps, she believed they were basically good. For the first 10 years, she thought they were “rather nicer than human beings.” But now she had seen them competing for food, sex, or territory. Under emotions of jealousy, fear, or revenge, they changed. Their behavior was no better than humans.

At the same time, chimpanzees shared and helped one another. Mothers, children, and siblings developed deep ties. Older siblings adopted younger ones if a mother died. They would even adopt an orphan from another mother if it had no relative to protect it. Some mothers were more attentive and playful than others. Goodall observed that their chimps grew up less depressed and aggressive than the chimps whose mothers were less attentive.

Some primatologists have criticized Goodall's methods. She left bananas at feeding stations to attract chimps. They claim that the food causes higher levels of aggression and conflict. But other research has shown similar levels of conflict without feeding stations.

Messenger of compassionToday, Goodall devotes herself to writing and speaking. In 1976, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research and protect chimpanzees and their habitats.

In 1991, a group of 16 teenagers met Goodall at her home in Tanzania. They wanted to discuss what they could do to help the environment, animals, and the human community. Out of that meeting, Goodall organized Roots and Shoots, a global youth program. It now has thousands of groups in more than 100 countries.

Goodall is still extremely active in wildlife conservation work.


Collective Learning (Part 1)In the first essay of a four-part series, David Christian explains what collective learning is and why it makes us humans so unusual.

Collective Learning Part I: Using Language to Share and Build Knowledge (1070L)By David Christian

In the first essay of a four-part series, David Christian explains what collective learning is and why it makes us humans so unusual.

Look at the technology around you: your phone, your computer, your car. Think about how complicated it was to create these technologies. Now ask yourself: If, during your lifetime, you could never speak to another human being, how much of that technology could you dream up? How much of it could you actually build? No matter how smart and creative you might be, the answer is probably simple: “Not much!”

The same is true of other aspects of human societies: religions, legal systems, literature, and sciences. Each of us is pretty smart, but all that makes up human culture is not the product of individual geniuses. Instead, all the many different things that express the astonishing creativity of our species were slowly built up over time as millions of individuals shared their ideas over many generations.

The power of informationA species with lots of information about its environment can exploit its surroundings more effectively. To feed herself and her cubs, a lioness needs to know where to hunt prey. If she doesn’t have this information, she and her cubs will die! But if she can learn about the movements of, say, antelopes, she will have a steady diet and will prosper, probably having more offspring.

But the lioness is still like a stand-alone computer — she has only as much memory as she can accumulate in her lifetime. Humans are more like networked computers, with a (more or less) infinite capacity for memory to expand. Because of how we can communicate and share knowledge, we can tap into a vast information network assembled by millions of humans, living and dead. No one person knows it all. Human knowledge is distributed among individuals, shared when necessary, and passed on and added to by each generation.

For example, in early foraging societies, elders passed on what they knew to younger individuals. They taught how to hunt, what seasons were best for particular foods, and what social rules would allow one to travel through a neighbor’s territory. As a result, each human gained access to knowledge that had been generated by previous generations, and each


individual could add to that body of knowledge. Our species has a colossal amount of information about the world and, therefore, a lot of power.

Collective learning empowers humans in another way, too, because individuals who share information can work together efficiently. In fact, we humans now share information so efficiently that we can collaborate in teams of people stretching across the entire globe. No other creature is capable of teamwork on this scale.

Sharing information doesn’t give us power just over our surroundings. It also gives us power over other humans. Powerful individuals or groups are usually those with the most information. Well-connected individuals also have larger networks and can form larger and more powerful alliances. Information really is power!

Language and human historyIf the sharing of ideas is so important, why don’t chimps exchange ideas the way humans do? It’s probably not because they aren’t smart enough. The problem is in the sharing. Chimp language does not allow chimps to share enough information with each other.

To get an idea of those limitations, and of how powerful human language is, try telling a friend how to play football without talking, writing, or drawing. With gestures you can really only exchange ideas about what is right in front of you. You need to be able to talk about the future and the past, about distant landscapes and ones that don’t yet exist.

Think of the power of a simple phrase such as “pink elephant.” By saying those two words, I can plant in your mind a picture of something that does not exist and never will. Chimp language cannot do such things, but humans routinely exchange word pictures like that every day. This ability for “symbolic language” has allowed us to cross a major threshold in our ability to communicate: that of collective learning.

Human language explains why we can share ideas in such rich detail and across generations. Over perhaps 200,000 years, humans have built and stored a vast body of technologies, rituals, stories, and traditions that provide more and more powerful ways of dealing with our surroundings and with each other.

That’s why I believe collective learning is the key to understanding human history!

When did collective learning begin?That’s really a way of asking, “When did human history begin?” To tackle this difficult and important question, we need to approach the problem like an archaeologist.

If you were an archaeologist, what would you expect a species capable of collective learning to leave behind? What evidence might you find? One possible answer: technologies such as stone tools. That’s exactly why Louis Leakey thought that we should regard Homo habilis as humans. As early as 2 million years ago, they were making simple stone tools. But there’s a problem. Thanks to the work of Leakey’s protégé Jane Goodall and other primatologists, we now know that chimps can make tools; for example, they use twigs to get tasty termites out of termite mounds. In fact, lots of animals use tools, but none seem to accumulate new technologies over time as well as humans do.


On the other hand, by about 50,000 years ago, we know that some humans had migrated to Australia. To do so they must have crossed approximately 40 miles of open water, thus possessing great boat-building and navigational skills. At the same time, in Eurasia, new types of tools and new kinds of art and sculpture started to emerge.

But collective learning likely predates 50,000 years ago. At sites in Africa, there is tantalizing evidence for innovative thinking and new technologies from 100,000 years ago or even earlier. Delicately made stone tools may have appeared 200,000 years ago. At sites like Blombos Cave in South Africa — where there is evidence of human habitation almost 100,000 years ago — we also find ochre, a rock whose dust can be used to paint the body. If people were painting themselves they may have been thinking in new ways, suggesting a richer form of language.

We also find signs that people learned to attach stone blades to sticks. This technique, “hafting,” is unique to humans and illustrates how collective learning works. As the use of small stone blades became widespread, we presume that these early humans knew how to use their sharp stone edges to shape wooden spears or digging sticks. We also know that foragers often used natural resins and fibers to carefully bind shaped blades to shafts, to form spears or arrows. Combine these ideas and you have a new technology: hafting.

A model of collective learning networksNow we need to start thinking about how collective learning works in different periods of human history. The diagram opposite is a very simple map of the relations between three people (or perhaps three groups of people). We will use it to help us think about how humans exchange information and how these exchanges have shaped human history. You can imagine this as a map of information exchanges or collective learning between individuals in a few small communities of foragers.

Could you draw a similar map of relations in your classroom? How similar would it be? You might find small clusters of close friends, but you would also find that some individuals have more links than others. And you’ll find that some individuals have links that reach well beyond their own clusters of friends and well beyond the classroom. If you map all the links you’ll find that it’s the long-distance links that hold entire networks together and ensure that information can circulate through the whole network.

As the course progresses we’ll look more carefully at the relationship between networks and collective learning, and how this has affected human history.

Collective Learning Part I: Using Language to Share and Build Knowledge (950L)By David Christian, adapted by Newsela



Look at the technology around you: your phone, your computer, your car. Think about how complicated it was to create these technologies. Now ask yourself: If, during your lifetime, you could never speak to another human being, how much of that technology could you dream up? How much of it could you actually build? No matter how smart and creative you might be, the answer is probably simple: “Not much!”

The same is true of other parts of human society. Religions, the law, literature, and the sciences all represent collective knowledge. Each of us is pretty smart, but all that makes up human culture is not the product of individual geniuses. Instead, all the creative things that define our species were slowly built up over time. They appeared as millions of individuals shared their ideas over many generations.

The power of informationA species with lots of information about its environment can take advantage of that environment. To feed herself and her cubs, a lioness needs to know where to hunt. If she doesn’t have this information, she and her cubs will die. But if she can learn about the movements of, say, antelopes, she will have a steady diet and will prosper. Her hunting will probably result in more offspring.

But the lioness is still like a single computer. She has only as much memory as she can gather in her lifetime. Humans are more like linked computers, with unlimited memory to expand. Our ability to share knowledge means we can tap into a huge information network assembled by millions of humans, living and dead. No one person knows it all. Human knowledge is shared when necessary, and passed on and added to by each generation.

For example, before there was farming, elders passed on what they knew to younger individuals. They taught how to hunt and what seasons were best for particular foods. As a result, each human learned the knowledge that had been gathered by previous generations. In turn, each individual could add to that body of knowledge. Our species has a huge amount of information about the world. All that information equals a lot of power.

Collective learning empowers humans in another way, too, because individuals who share information can work together better. In fact, we humans now share information so well that we can work together in teams of people stretching across the entire globe. No other creature is capable of teamwork on this scale.

Sharing information doesn’t give us power just over our surroundings. It also gives us power over other humans. Powerful individuals or groups are usually those with the most information. Well-connected individuals also have larger networks and can form larger and more powerful alliances. Information really is power!

Language and human historyIf the sharing of ideas is so important, why don’t chimps exchange ideas the way humans do? It’s probably not because they aren’t smart enough. The problem is in the sharing. Chimp language does not allow chimps to share enough information with each other.


To get an idea of how powerful human language is, try telling a friend how to play football without talking, writing, or drawing. With gestures you can really only exchange ideas about what is right in front of you. You need to be able to talk about the future and the past, and things that don’t yet exist.

Think of the power of a simple phrase such as “pink elephant." By saying those two words, I can plant in your mind a picture of something that does not exist and never will. Chimp language cannot do such things, but humans regularly exchange word pictures. This ability for “symbolic language” has allowed us to cross a major threshold in our ability to communicate: that of collective learning.

Human language explains why we can share detailed ideas across generations. Over perhaps 200,000 years, humans have gathered a huge amount of technologies, rituals, stories, and traditions. These have combined to give us more powerful ways of dealing with our surroundings and with each other.


When did collective learning begin?That’s really a way of asking, “When did human history begin?” To tackle this difficult and important question, we need to think like an archaeologist.

If you were an archaeologist, what would you expect a species capable of collective learning to leave behind? One possible answer: technologies such as stone tools. That’s exactly why Louis Leakey thought that we should regard Homo habilis as humans. As early as 2 million years ago, they were making simple stone tools. But there’s a problem. Thanks to the work of Leakey’s protégé Jane Goodall and other primatologists, we now know that chimps can make tools; for example, they use twigs to get termites out of termite mounds. In fact, lots of animals use tools, but none seem to build on new technologies over time as well as humans do.

On the other hand, by about 50,000 years ago, we know that some humans had migrated to Australia. To do so they must have crossed approximately 40 miles of open water. This meant they had great boat-building and navigational skills. At the same time, in Eurasia, new types of tools and new kinds of art started to emerge.

But collective learning likely goes back more than 50,000 years ago. At sites in Africa, there is strong evidence for innovative thinking and new technologies from 100,000 years ago or even earlier. Delicately made stone tools may have appeared 200,000 years ago.

We also find signs that people learned to attach stone blades to sticks. This technique, “hafting,” is unique to humans and shows how collective learning works. As the use of small stone blades became common, we presume that these early humans knew how to use their sharp stone edges to shape wooden spears or digging sticks. We also know that hunters often used natural resins and fibers to carefully bind shaped blades to shafts, to form spears or arrows. Combine these ideas and you have a new technology: hafting.


A model of collective learning networksNow we need to examine how collective learning works in different periods of human history. The diagram opposite is a very simple map of the relations between three people (or perhaps three groups of people). We will use it to help us think about how humans exchange information and how these exchanges have shaped human history. You can imagine this as a map of information exchanges or collective learning between individuals in a few small communities of foragers.

Could you draw a similar map of relations in your classroom? How similar would it be? You might find small clusters of close friends, but you would also find that some individuals have more links than others. And you’ll find that some individuals have links that reach well beyond their own clusters of friends and well beyond the classroom. If you map all the links you’ll find that it’s the long-distance links that hold entire networks together and ensure that information can circulate through the whole network.

As the course moves along, we’ll look more carefully at the relationship between networks and collective learning. We'll examine how this relationship affected human history.

Collective Learning Part I: Using Language to Share and Build Knowledge (780L)By David Christian, adapted by Newsela


Look at the technology around you: your phone, your computer, your car. Think about how challenging it was to make them. Imagine if you could never speak to another human being. How much of that technology could you think of? How much of it could you actually build? No matter how smart and creative you might be, the answer is probably: “Not much!”

The same is true of other parts of human society. Religions, the law, art and science all represent collective knowledge. All of these things were not invented by one smart person. They were actually built up over time. Slowly, they appeared as millions of people shared their ideas over many generations.

The power of informationA species with lots of information about its environment can better take advantage of its environment. A lioness needs to know where to hunt. If she doesn’t have this information, she and her cubs will die. But if she can learn to track her prey, she will be able to eat. Her hunting will probably result in more offspring.

But the lioness is still like a single computer. She has only as much memory as she can gather in her lifetime. Humans are more like linked computers, with unlimited memory to grow. Our ability to share knowledge means we can get into a huge network of information made by millions of humans, living and dead. No one person knows it all. Human knowledge is shared when necessary, and passed on and added to by each generation.


For example, before there was farming, elders passed on what they knew to younger people. They taught them how to hunt. They explained what seasons were best for certain foods. As a result, each human learned the knowledge that had been gathered by past generations. In turn, each person could add to that body of knowledge. Humans have a huge amount of information about the world. All that information equals a lot of power.

Collective learning helps people work together better. In fact, we humans now share information so well that we can work together in teams of people stretching across the Earth. No other creature does teamwork so well.

Sharing information doesn’t give us power just over our surroundings. It also gives us power over other humans. Powerful people are usually those with the most information. Well-connected people can form larger and more powerful alliances. Information really is power!

Language and human historySo why don’t chimps share information the way humans do? It’s probably not because they are too dumb. The problem is in the sharing. Chimp language does not allow chimps to share enough information with each other.

Try telling a friend how to play football without talking, writing, or drawing. Using your hands to talk can really only help you talk about what is right in front of you. You need to be able to talk about the future and the past, and things that don’t yet exist.

Think of the power of a simple phrase such as “pink elephant.” By saying those two words, I can give you a picture of something that does not exist and never will. Chimp language cannot do such things. Humans regularly exchange word pictures, or symbolic language.

Symbolic language lets people pass down ideas. It's how we've gathered so much technology over perhaps 200,000 years. These have combined to give us more powerful ways of dealing with our surroundings and with each other.


When did collective learning begin?That’s really a way of asking, “When did human history begin?” To answer this question, we need to think like an archaeologist. An archaeologist studies people from the past.

If you were an archaeologist, what would you expect a collective learning species, like humans, to leave behind? One possible answer: technologies such as stone tools. That’s exactly why Louis Leakey thought that we should regard Homo habilisas humans. As early as 2 million years ago, they were making simple stone tools. But there’s a problem. Scientists who study primates later found that chimps can make tools. They use twigs to get termites out of termite mounds. In fact, lots of animals use tools, but none seem to build on new technologies over time as well as humans do.

On the other hand, we know that some humans went to Australia about 50,000 years ago. This meant they had great boat-building skills. They would have also known how to


navigate. At the same time, in Eurasia, new types of tools and new kinds of art started to appear.

But collective learning likely goes back more than 50,000 years ago. In Africa, there is strong evidence of new technologies from 100,000 years ago or even earlier. Delicately made stone tools may have appeared 200,000 years ago.

A model of collective learning networksNow we need to examine how collective learning works in different periods of human history. The diagram opposite is a very simple map of the relations between three people. We will use it to help us think about how humans exchange information and how these exchanges have shaped human history. You can imagine this as a map of collective learning between people in a few small communities of foragers.

Could you draw such a map for your classroom? How similar would it be? You might find small clusters of close friends, but you would also find that some people have more links than others. And you’ll find that some people have links that reach well beyond the classroom. If you map all the links, you’ll find that it’s the long-distance links that hold entire networks together. Those long-distance links are what allow information to travel through the whole network.

As the course moves along, we’ll look more carefully at the relationship between networks and collective learning. We'll examine how this relationship shaped human history.


Foraging For 95 percent of their time on Earth, humans have sustained themselves by foraging, that is, by hunting and gathering food from their natural environment.

Foraging: Life as a Hunter-Gatherer (1160 L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown

For 95 percent of their time on Earth, humans have sustained themselves by foraging, that is, by hunting and gathering food from their natural environment.

The Evolution of ForagingLiving as we do with mass-produced food, markets, and restaurants in every town, it takes some imagination to think of finding food every day in the natural environment. Yet that is just what humans (Homo sapiens) have done for most of their time on Earth — from their appearance about 200,000 years ago until about 11,000 years ago when they began to develop agriculture. Before Homo sapiens evolved, our hominine ancestors foraged for millions of years.

Foraging means relying on food provided by nature through the gathering of plants and small animals, birds, and insects; scavenging animals killed by other predators; and hunting. The word foraging can be used interchangeably with “hunting and gathering.”

Humans are not the only creatures who forage; many animals do too. What is different about human foraging? Answers may vary, but the common idea would be that humans, by means of our ability to communicate verbally, accumulated knowledge, passed it on to younger generations, and worked together cooperatively. These skills enabled humans to gradually refine their foraging methods, further distinguishing us from some of our competitors in the animal kingdom.

In fact, one could say that foraging made us human. As fruit trees in the rain forest became less abundant in the cooling, drying climate, the hominines who survived had to find other food sources. As they did, many traits evolved: walking on two feet (bipedalism), loss of most body hair, smaller intestines, larger brains, and better communication. These are essentially the hallmarks of being human.

One of the most significant steps that hominines ever took was to learn to control fire. They probably did this by tending fires started by lightning. No one knows exactly when this occurred, but hominines may have been using fire to cook meat and roots more than a million years ago. The systematic, controlled use of fire may have begun before Homo sapiens, or it may be one of the species’ distinguishing features.

Cooked food provided more nutrition, required less chewing, and allowed intestines to shorten, all of which contributed to brain development. The social scene of eating together


around a fire may have promoted language development, further contributing to awareness and collective learning. These changes in food consumption were an important step in increasing the flow of energy through human systems.

Humans gradually developed their skill in hunting. At first hominines probably scavenged meat that had been killed by other animals. They could drag a carcass to a safe place and use their stone tools to butcher the flesh and crack the bones for marrow. As they developed better weapons and learned to hunt together, they were able to take down larger animals and to devise innovative ways for defeating multiple prey. Herding groups of animals over a cliff and retrieving the carcasses later is one example of this.

The economics of foragingClimate and environment determined what life was like for any specific group of humans, but some generalizations apply to any group of foragers. They must have possessed a detailed knowledge of their environment. They must have had a large territory in which to forage, larger if they lived in harsh environmental conditions that provided fewer food resources, and smaller if they had abundance. Most foragers lived by moving frequently and making temporary encampments. They might have repeated seasonal movements based on animal migrations or the ripening of different plant food sources. Foragers usually lived in small groups of 15 to 30, and split up further when food became scarce or when conflicts arose. Populations grew extremely slowly, if at all. Mother's milk provided the only sustenance for infants and nursing extended for three to four years, often preventing a new pregnancy. In any case, mothers could not carry more than one infant at a time. In these close-knit groups, foragers usually shared the food they accumulated, especially prizes of fresh meat. Apparently, foraging societies were the most egalitarian in human history.

The Bushmen of southern AfricaUntil relatively recently, five different groups of people had been living as foragers in the same place for 30,000 years. And it’s a semidesert — the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. The groups each have a name, but collectively they are known as the San people, or Bushmen — the First People. Most call themselves Bushmen when referring to themselves collectively.

How did the Bushmen survive as foragers in such harsh environmental conditions for so many years? Their survival has given the human community a valuable example of the skills of foragers in extremely challenging surroundings.

The Bushmen moved every day during the rainy season in search of budding edible greens. They constructed simple shelters against the rain at night. During the dry season, however, they built more stable huts of branches and grass around water sources. Finding water was their essential activity. Sometimes they had to dig deep holes wherever the sand was damp and sip up water through hollow grass straws, often storing it in ostrich eggshells, which held about five cups, more than a day’s supply.

The tools of the Bushmen were simple. Men used a bow with poison-tipped arrows and spears for hunting deer, antelope, kudu (another species of antelope), and buffalo. For


gathering, the women used a blanket, a sling made of hide, a cloak to carry wood and food, smaller carrying bags, and a digging stick about three feet long and about an inch in diameter. Nuts and roots provided the staple foods. Women also collected fruit, berries, bush onions, and ostrich eggs. Insects — grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites — supplied a portion of the Bushmen’s protein. Hunting contributed about 20 percent of the total diet, while gathering provided 80 percent.

The Bushmen spent a large portion of their time in “leisure” activities — conversation, joking, singing, and dancing. Decisions were reached by consensus, with women having relative equality with men. Chiefs were designated, but they had little additional power.

Studies of the Bushmen began in the 1950s when they still lived in the traditional way. By the 1990s most had been forced to adopt subsistence farming as African governments had created game preserves out of some of their former hunting territories.

Debates about foragingPeople who study foragers are archaeologists and anthropologists. Archaeologists examine human societies through material, cultural, and environmental data left behind. Their work encompasses human societies from the development of the first tools up to recent decades. Anthropologists study contemporary societies that still live much like pre-agricultural ones. Both types of study are challenging and open to varied interpretations. Conclusions about ancient foragers reached from studying modern foragers are especially tentative, since modern foragers cannot escape completely the world around them. Modern foraging communities often use contemporary tools and partially rely on fairly recent agricultural and technological advances. Their lands have also been greatly limited by development and the overall increase in the global population.

Traditionally, archaeologists and anthropologists have thought that men did the hunting in foraging societies, while women did the gathering. However, recent studies have challenged this view. People studying apes often point out that primate females can provide for themselves and their offspring, without male assistance. Among many current foraging societies, men and women are flexible about who hunts small birds and animals, and, in some cultures, the hunting and gathering roles are exchanged. The current view holds that past foragers had flexible gender roles, depending on individual skills, knowledge, and the local environment.

Another ongoing debate among experts concerns the standards of physical and mental health among foragers. Traditionally, foragers were viewed as backward “cavemen” with short, miserable lives, barely eking out an existence. In the 1960s, fieldwork done among surviving foragers (the Bushmen in Botswana, the Aboriginals in Australia, and the Yanomami in the Brazilian rain forest) revealed that foragers enjoy good nutrition obtained in a few hours a day, leaving plenty of time for socializing and grooming. By the 1980s, this view was challenged, and no agreement has yet been reached.

A third debate concerns how much human foragers have affected the environment in which they lived. For a long time, it was assumed that humans had little effect on the rest of nature until they developed agriculture.


Since the 1960s, scientists have questioned this assumption. They have pointed to two indications that foragers did make a significant impact. For one thing, archaeologists have found evidence that foragers set fire to large areas of land. Presumably they did this to drive animals out for killing and to promote the growth of fresh plants that would attract animals and would provide food for gathering. The Australian Aboriginal use of this practice was given the name “firestick farming.” These fires turned scrubland into grassland and suppressed some species, altering the environment.

In addition, whenever humans migrated into new parts of the world, a wave of extinctions of other large animals occurred. In North and South America, about 75 percent of the animals weighing more than 100 pounds went extinct within a couple of thousand years after humans arrived. These animals included mastodons, camels, horses, and saber-toothed tigers. In Australia, where humans are thought to have arrived about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, similar extinctions occurred roughly 30,000 years ago. The rate of extinction was about 85 percent and included giant kangaroos and marsupial lions. In Eurasia, the extinctions occurred more gradually and included mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elk. While debate continues, it may be that a combination of changing climate, human hunting, and other changes brought about by humans may have done these large animals in.


For 95 percent of their time on Earth, humans have survived by foraging, that is, by hunting and gathering food from their environment.

The Evolution of ForagingLiving as we do with mass-produced food, markets, and restaurants in every town, it takes some imagination to think of finding food every day in the natural environment. Yet that is just what humans (Homo sapiens) have done for most of their time on Earth — from their appearance about 200,000 years ago. It was just 11,000 years ago when they began to develop agriculture. Before Homo sapiens evolved, our hominine ancestors foraged for millions of years.

Foraging means relying on food provided by nature through the gathering of plants and small animals, birds, and insects; scavenging animals killed by other predators; and hunting. The word foraging can be used interchangeably with “hunting and gathering.”

Humans are not the only creatures who forage; many animals do too. What is different about human foraging? It's hard to say. The common idea would be that humans, by means of our ability to communicate verbally, accumulated knowledge, passed it on to younger generations, and worked together cooperatively. These skills allowed humans to gradually refine their foraging methods. Developing these skills helped distinguish us from some of our competitors in the animal kingdom.

In fact, one could say that foraging made us human. As fruit trees in the rain forest became less abundant in the cooling, drying climate, the hominines who survived had to find other


food sources. As they did, many traits evolved. We began walking on two feet (bipedalism), lost most of our body hair, developed smaller intestines and larger brains, and became better communicators. These are essentially the hallmarks of being human.

One of the most significant steps that hominines ever took was to learn to control fire. They probably did this by tending fires started by lightning. No one knows exactly when this occurred. Scientists believe hominines may have been using fire to cook meat and roots more than a million years ago. The machine-like, controlled use of fire may have begun before Homo sapiens or it may be one of the species’ distinguishing features.

Cooked food provided more nutrition, required less chewing, and allowed intestines to shorten. Most importantly, it helped the brain to develop more. The social scene of eating together around a fire may have helped language to develop more, too. Improvements in language further contributed to awareness and collective learning. These changes in food consumption were an important step in increasing the flow of energy through human systems.

Humans gradually developed their skill in hunting. At first, hominines probably scavenged meat that had been killed by other animals. They could drag the body of the dead animal to a safe place. Then they'd use their stone tools to butcher the meat and crack the bones for marrow. As they developed better weapons and learned to hunt together, they were able to take down larger animals and to come up with innovative ways for defeating several prey. Herding groups of animals over a cliff and retrieving the animals' bodies later is one example of this.

The economics of foragingClimate and environment determined what life was like for any specific group of humans. However, some generalizations apply to any group of foragers. They must have possessed a detailed knowledge of their environment. They must have had a large territory in which to forage, larger if they lived in harsh environmental conditions that provided fewer food resources, and smaller if they had abundance. Most foragers lived by moving frequently and making temporary camps. They might have repeated seasonal movements based on animal migrations or the ripening of different plant food sources. Foragers usually lived in small groups of 15 to 30. When food became scarce or when conflicts arose they split up further.

Populations grew extremely slowly, if at all. Mother's milk provided the only food for infants and nursing extended for three to four years, often preventing a new pregnancy. In any case, mothers could not carry more than one infant at a time. In these close-knit groups, foragers usually shared the food they accumulated, especially prizes of fresh meat. Apparently, foraging societies allowed for everyone to be treated the same way. The societies were some of the most egalitarian in human history.

The Bushmen of southern AfricaUntil relatively recently, five different groups of people had been living as foragers in the same place for 30,000 years. And it’s a semidesert — the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. The groups each have a name, but collectively they are known


as the San people, or Bushmen, — the First People. Most call themselves Bushmen when referring to themselves collectively.

How did the Bushmen live as foragers in such harsh environmental conditions for so many years? Their survival has given the human community a valuable example of the skills of foragers in extremely challenging surroundings.

The Bushmen moved every day during the rainy season in search of budding edible greens. They constructed simple shelters against the rain at night. During the dry season, however, they built more stable huts of branches and grass around water sources. Finding water was their main activity. Sometimes they had to dig deep holes wherever the sand was damp and sip up water through hollow grass straws. Often they'd store water in ostrich eggshells, which held about five cups, more than a day’s supply.

The tools of the Bushmen were simple. Men used a bow with poison-tipped arrows and spears for hunting deer, antelope, and buffalo. For gathering, the women used a blanket, a sling made of hide, a cloak to carry wood and food, smaller carrying bags, and a digging stick about three feet long and about an inch in diameter. Nuts and roots provided the staple foods. Women also collected fruit, berries, bush onions, and ostrich eggs. Insects — grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites — supplied a portion of the Bushmen’s protein. Hunting contributed about 20 percent of the total diet. Gathering provided the other 80 percent.

The Bushmen spent a large portion of their time in “leisure” activities — conversation, joking, singing, and dancing. Decisions were reached by consensus, with women having relative equality with men. Chiefs were designated, but they had little additional power.

Studies of the Bushmen began in the 1950s when they still lived in the traditional way. By the 1990s, most had been forced to adopt subsistence farming. Some of their former hunting territories were turned into game preserves by African governments.

Debates about foragingPeople who study foragers are archaeologists and anthropologists. Archaeologists examine human societies through material, cultural, and environmental information left behind. Their work encompasses human societies from the development of the first tools up to recent decades. Anthropologists study contemporary societies that still live much like pre-agricultural ones.

Both types of study are challenging and open to interpretation. Conclusions about ancient foragers reached from studying modern foragers are especially tentative. Comparing them to ancient foragers is difficult since modern foragers cannot escape completely the world around them. Modern foraging communities often use contemporary tools and partially rely on fairly recent agricultural and technological advances. Their lands have also been greatly limited by development and the overall increase in the global population.

Traditionally, archaeologists and anthropologists have thought that men did the hunting in foraging societies, while women did the gathering. However, recent studies have challenged this view. People studying apes often point out that primate females can provide for


themselves and their offspring. They do it without male assistance. Among many current foraging societies, men and women are flexible about who hunts small birds and animals. In some cultures, the hunting and gathering roles are even exchanged. The current view holds that past foragers had flexible gender roles, depending on individual skills, knowledge, and the local environment.

Another ongoing debate among experts concerns the standards of physical and mental health among foragers. Traditionally, foragers were viewed as backward “cavemen” with short, miserable lives, barely eking out an existence. In the 1960s, fieldwork done among surviving foragers (the Bushmen in Botswana, the Aboriginals in Australia, and the Yanomami in the Brazilian rain forest) revealed that foragers enjoy good nutrition obtained in a few hours a day. The rest of their day is spent socializing and grooming. By the 1980s, this view was challenged. No agreement has yet been reached.

A third debate concerns how much human foragers have affected the environment in which they lived. For a long time, it was assumed that humans had little effect on the rest of nature until they developed agriculture.

Since the 1960s, scientists have questioned this assumption. They have pointed to two indications that foragers did make a significant impact. For one thing, archaeologists have found evidence that foragers set fire to large areas of land. Presumably they did this to drive animals out for killing and to promote the growth of fresh plants that would attract animals and would provide food for gathering. The Australian Aboriginal use of this practice was given the name “firestick farming.” These fires turned scrubland into grassland and suppressed some species, altering the environment.

In addition, whenever humans migrated into new parts of the world, a wave of extinctions of other large animals occurred. In North and South America, about 75 percent of the animals weighing more than 100 pounds went extinct within a couple of thousand years after humans arrived. These animals included mastodons, camels, horses, and saber-toothed tigers.

In Australia, humans are thought to have arrived about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Similar extinctions occurred there roughly 30,000 years ago. The rate of extinction was about 85 percent and included giant kangaroos and marsupial lions. In Eurasia, the extinctions occurred more gradually and included mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elk. While debate continues, it may be that a combination of changing climate, human hunting, and other changes brought about by humans may have done these large animals in.


For 95 percent of their time on Earth, humans have survived by foraging, that is, by hunting and gathering food from their environment.


The Evolution of ForagingFinding food is no problem for most humans today. We live with mass-produced food, markets, and restaurants in nearly every town. Now imagine trying to find food every day in nature. Yet that is just what humans (Homo sapiens) have done for most of their time on Earth. We first appeared about 200,000 years ago. It wasn't until 11,000 years ago that we began to develop agriculture. Before Homo sapiens evolved, our hominine ancestors foraged for millions of years.

Foraging means relying on food provided by nature. We gathered plants and small animals, birds, and insects; picked up animals killed by other predators; and hunted. Foraging is often described as “hunting and gathering.”

Humans are not the only creatures who forage; many animals do too. What is different about human foraging? It's hard to say. Yet, the common idea would be that humans, by means of our ability to use words, can share knowledge we've gathered over time. We passed it on to younger generations, and worked together cooperatively. These skills allowed humans to gradually make foraging easier and easier. They make us different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

In fact, one could say that foraging made us human. As fruit trees in the rain forest became less abundant in the cooling, drying climate, the hominines who survived had to find other food sources. As they did, many traits evolved. We began walking on two feet, lost most of our body hair, developed smaller intestines and larger brains, and became better communicators. These are the hallmarks of being human.

One of the most significant steps that hominines ever took was to learn to control fire. They probably did this by tending fires started by lightning. No one knows exactly when this occurred. Scientists believe hominines may have used fire to cook more than a million years ago.

Cooked food provided more nutrition. Most importantly, it contributed to brain development. Eating and chatting together around a fire may have promoted language development. Improvements in language contributed to awareness and collective learning.

Humans gradually developed their skill in hunting. At first, hominines probably scavenged meat killed by other animals. They'd find a carcass and drag it to a safe place. Then they'd use their stone tools to butcher it. As they developed better weapons and learned to hunt together, they were able to take down larger animals.

The economics of foragingClimate and environment determine the life of any specific group of humans. However, we make generalizations about foragers. They must have possessed a detailed knowledge of their environment. They must have had a large territory in which to forage. If they lived in harsh environmental conditions that provided fewer food resources, they would need a very large area. A smaller area would suffice if food was abundant.

Most foragers lived by moving frequently. They slept in temporary camps. They might move with the seasons to follow animal migrations or the ripening of different plant food sources.


Foragers usually lived in small groups of 15 to 30. When food became scarce, or conflicts arose, they split up further.

Populations grew extremely slowly, if at all. Mother's milk provided the only food for infants. Because nursing lasted for three to four years, it often prevented a new pregnancy. In any case, mothers could not carry more than one infant at a time. In these close-knit groups, foragers usually shared food. Apparently, foraging societies were the fairest in human history.

The Bushmen of southern AfricaUntil relatively recently, five different groups of people had been living as foragers in the same place for 30,000 years. And it’s a semidesert — the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. The groups each have a name. But, collectively they are known as the San, or the First People. They are most commonly called Bushmen.

How did the Bushmen survive as foragers in such harsh environmental conditions for so many years? Their survival has given the human community a valuable example of the skills of foragers in extremely challenging surroundings.

The Bushmen moved every day during the rainy season in search of greens to eat. They constructed simple shelters against the rain at night. During the dry season, however, they built more stable huts of branches and grass around water sources. Finding water was their main activity. Sometimes they had to dig deep holes wherever the sand was damp. They'd put hollow grass straws into the holes to sip water through. Often they'd store water in ostrich eggshells, which held about five cups, more than a day’s supply.

The tools of the Bushmen were simple. Men used a bow with poison-tipped arrows and spears for hunting deer, antelope, and buffalo. For gathering, the women used a blanket, a sling made of hide, a cloak to carry wood and food, smaller carrying bags, and a digging stick about three feet long and about an inch in diameter.

Nuts and roots were the basis of their diet. Women also collected fruit, berries, onions, and ostrich eggs. Insects — grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites — supplied a portion of the Bushmen’s protein. Hunting was 20 percent of the total diet. Gathering provided the other 80 percent.

The Bushmen spent a large portion of their time in “leisure” activities — conversation, joking, singing, and dancing. Decisions were reached as a group. Women were relatively equal with men.

Studies of the Bushmen began in the 1950s when they still lived in the traditional way. By the 1990s, most had been forced to adopt farming. Some of their former hunting territories were turned into game preserves by African governments.

Debates about foragingPeople who study foragers are archaeologists and anthropologists. Archaeologists examine human societies through material, cultural, and environmental records left behind. Their


work includes human societies from the development of the first tools up to recent decades. Anthropologists study societies that today still live much like the ones before agriculture.

Both types of study are challenging and open to interpretation. Conclusions about ancient foragers reached from studying modern foragers are especially uncertain. Comparing them to ancient foragers is difficult since modern foragers cannot escape completely the world around them. Today's foraging communities often use modern tools and partially rely on recent advances in technology. Their lands have also been greatly limited by development and the overall increase in the global population.

Traditionally, archaeologists and anthropologists have thought that men did the hunting in foraging societies. It was thought that women did the gathering. However, recent studies have challenged this view. People studying apes often point out that the females can provide for themselves and their offspring. They don't need male assistance.

Among many current foraging societies, men and women are flexible about who hunts birds and animals. In some cultures, hunting and gathering roles are even exchanged. The current view holds that past foragers had flexible gender roles. Men or women might fill different jobs depending on individual skills, knowledge, and the local environment.

Another ongoing debate among experts concerns the quality of life among foragers. Traditionally, foragers were viewed as having short, miserable lives, barely surviving. In the 1960s, fieldwork done among surviving foragers (the Bushmen in Botswana, the Aboriginals in Australia, and the Yanomami in the Brazilian rain forest) revealed that foragers enjoy good nutrition obtained in a few hours a day. The rest of their day is spent socializing and grooming. By the 1980s, this view was challenged. No agreement has yet been reached.

A third debate concerns how much human foragers affected their environment. For a long time, it was assumed that humans had little effect on nature until they developed agriculture.

Since the 1960s, scientists have questioned this assumption. They have pointed to two indications that foragers did make a significant impact. For one thing, archaeologists have found evidence that foragers set fire to large areas of land. Presumably they did this to drive animals out for killing. Burning land also promotes the growth of fresh plants that would provide food and attract animals. The Australian Aboriginal use of this practice was given the name “firestick farming.” These fires turned scrubland into grassland and suppressed some species, altering the environment.

In addition, whenever humans migrated into new parts of the world, a wave of extinctions of large animals occurred. In North and South America, about 75 percent of the animals weighing more than 100 pounds went extinct within a couple of thousand years after humans arrived. These animals included mastodons, camels, horses, and saber-toothed tigers.

In Australia, humans are thought to have arrived about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Similar extinctions occurred there roughly 30,000 years ago. The rate of extinction was about 85 percent and included giant kangaroos and marsupial lions. In Eurasia, the extinctions occurred more gradually and included mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elk. The


debate continues. Yet, it may be that a combination of changing climate, human hunting, and other changes brought about by humans may have done these large animals in.


For 95 percent of our time on Earth, humans have survived by foraging. That is, we have hunted and gathered food from nature.

The Evolution of ForagingFinding food is no problem for most humans today. We live with factory food, markets, and restaurants in nearly every town. Now imagine trying to find food every day in nature. Yet that is just what humans (Homo sapiens) have done for most of their time on Earth. We first appeared about 200,000 years ago. Yet, it wasn't until 11,000 years ago that we began to develop agriculture. And before Homo sapiens evolved, our hominine ancestors foraged for millions of years.

Foraging means relying on food found in nature. We gathered plants and small animals, birds, and insects. We picked up animals killed by other predators, and hunted. Foraging is often described as “hunting and gathering.”

Humans are not the only creatures who forage; many animals do too. What is different about human foraging? Answers vary. Yet, because humans could speak they began to gather knowledge. We passed it on to younger generations, and worked together. These skills helped humans become better foragers. It's what makes us different from other animals.

In fact, one could say that foraging made us human. As fruit trees in the rain forest became less common in the cooling, drying climate, the hominines who survived had to find other food sources. As they did, many traits evolved. We began walking on two feet, and lost most of our body hair. Our intestines became smaller and our brains got larger. And we became better communicators. These are the hallmarks of being human.

One of the most significant steps that hominines took was to control fire. They probably learned this by tending fires started by lightning. No one knows exactly when this occurred. Scientists believe hominines may have used fire to cook more than a million years ago.

Cooked food provided more nutrition. Most importantly, it contributed to brain development. Eating and chatting together around a fire may have helped languages develop. Those improvements in language led to greater awareness and collective learning.

Humans gradually developed their skill in hunting. At first, hominines probably scavenged meat killed by other animals. They'd find the body of an animal and drag it to a safe place. Then they'd butcher it with stone tools. As they developed better weapons and learned to hunt together, they were able to take down larger animals.


The economics of foragingClimate and environment determine the lives of any group of humans. However, foragers share common characteristics. They must have possessed a detailed knowledge of their environment. They needed a large enough territory to move around in and forage.

Most foragers lived by moving frequently. They slept in temporary camps. When seasons changed, they followed animals as they migrated. Plants ripened at different times, so foragers moved to pick them. Foragers usually lived in small groups of 15 to 30. When food became scarce, or conflicts arose, they split up further.

Populations grew extremely slowly, if at all. Mother's milk provided the only food for infants. Because nursing lasted for three to four years, it often prevented a new pregnancy. In any case, mothers could not carry more than one infant at a time. In these close-knit groups, foragers usually shared food. Apparently, foraging societies were the fairest in human history.

The Bushmen of southern AfricaUntil relatively recently, five different groups of people lived as foragers in the same place for 30,000 years. And it’s a semidesert — the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. The groups each have a name. But, together they are known as the Bushmen.

How did the Bushmen survive as foragers in a harsh desert for so long?

The Bushmen moved every day during the rainy season in search of greens to eat. They constructed simple shelters against the rain. During the dry season, however, they built more stable huts near water sources. Finding water was their main activity. Sometimes they dug deep holes when they found damp sand. They'd put hollow grass straws into the holes to sip water through. They might store water in ostrich eggshells for later.

The Bushmen had simple tools. Men used a bow with poison-tipped arrows and spears for hunting deer, antelope, and buffalo. For gathering, the women used a blanket, a sling made of hide, and a cloak to carry wood and food. They dug in the ground with sticks about three feet long.

Their diet was mostly nuts and roots. Women also collected fruit, berries, onions, and ostrich eggs. Grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites gave Bushmen protein. Hunting was 20 percent of their total diet. Gathering provided the other 80 percent.

The Bushmen spent a large portion of their time at leisure — talking, joking, singing, and dancing. Decisions were reached as a group. Women were relatively equal with men.

As of the 1950s, Bushmen still lived in the traditional way. But, by the 1990s, most had been forced to adopt farming. Some of their former hunting grounds were turned into game preserves by African governments.

Debates about foragingForagers are studied by archaeologists and anthropologists. Archaeologists examine human societies through material, cultural, and environmental records. They study humans from the


first tools up to recent decades. Anthropologists study societies today that still live much like pre-agricultural ones.

Both archaeology and anthropology come up with theories that are open to interpretation. Researchers draw conclusions about ancient foragers by studying modern foragers. Yet, comparing modern foragers to ancient ones is difficult. Modern foragers cannot completely escape the world around them. Today's foraging communities often use modern tools and technology. Much of their lands have been taken over.

Traditionally, archaeologists and anthropologists have thought that men did the hunting in foraging societies. Women did the gathering, they thought. However, recent studies challenge this view. People studying apes often point out that the females can provide for themselves. They don't need male assistance.

Among many current foraging societies, men and women are flexible about who hunts. In some cultures, hunting and gathering roles are even exchanged. By studying current foragers, scholars think ancient foragers were also flexible about roles.

Another ongoing debate among experts concerns the quality of life among foragers. Traditionally, foragers were viewed as having short, miserable lives, barely surviving. In the 1960s, fieldwork was done among surviving foragers — the Bushmen in Botswana, the Aboriginals in Australia, and the Yanomami in Brazil. It revealed that foragers enjoy good nutrition obtained in a few hours a day. The rest of their day is spent socializing and grooming. But by the 1980s, this view was challenged.

A third debate concerns how much human foragers affected their environment. For a long time, it was assumed that early humans had little effect on nature. Experts thought that the arrival of agricultural societies led to environmental effects.

Since the 1960s, scientists have questioned this view. They pointed to two signs that foragers made a serious impact. For one thing, archaeologists have found evidence that foragers set fire to large areas. They may have done this to drive animals out for killing. Burning land also helps fresh plants grow. Such plants would provide food and attract animals.

In addition, whenever humans migrated into new areas, extinction followed. In North and South America, about 75 percent of the animals weighing more than 100 pounds went extinct within a couple of thousand years after humans arrived. These animals included mastodons, camels, horses, and saber-toothed tigers.

In Australia, humans are thought to have arrived about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Similar extinctions occurred there roughly 30,000 years ago. Giant kangaroos and marsupial lions completely died off. In Eurasia, the extinctions occurred more gradually and included mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elk. The debate continues. Yet, it may be that a combination of changing climate, human hunting, and other changes brought about by humans may have done these large animals in.


Pierre Teilhard de ChardinAs a paleontologist and a Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin created a unique vision bringing together science and religion.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Paleontologist, Mystic & Jesuit Priest (1220L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown

As a paleontologist and a Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin formulated his own unique vision for a synthesis of science and religion.

Youth, vocation, and early thoughts on evolutionPierre Teilhard de Chardin (pronounced tay-YAR-de-shar-DAN) was born on his family’s estate in the countryside of central France. The nearest town, Clermont-Ferrand, was the birthplace of seventeenth-century mathematician and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), best known for inventing a mechanical calculator and for writings that defended the Christian faith. Teilhard was the fourth of 11 children in a minor aristocratic family.

Teilhard’s father was an amateur naturalist who collected rocks, insects, fossils, and plants. His deeply religious mother, the great-grandniece of the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire, instilled in her son a devotion to Jesus. The family lived in the countryside among volcanic mountains and forested hills, and Teilhard grew to embrace both of his parents’ greatest interests: love of the Earth and love of the Christian God.

Shortly before he turned 11, Teilhard went to a Jesuit college to study philosophy and mathematics. Teilhard completed his studies in England in 1905 and was sent to teach chemistry and physics in Cairo, where he was enthralled by Egypt’s natural beauty and collected fossils at every opportunity.

In 1908, Teilhard returned to England to study theology. There, in Henri Bergson’s book Creative Evolution (published 1907), he encountered the idea that evolution is driven, not by natural selection, as Darwin believed, but by an élan vital, or vital force. Teilhard disagreed with Bergson’s main idea (as do nearly all modern scientists), but he was inspired to form his own view that the cosmos itself is evolving. Writing in 1950, he described the effect Bergson’s book had on him:

…I can now see quite clearly that the only effect that brilliant book had upon me was to provide fuel at just the right moment, and very briefly, for a fire that was already consuming my heart and mind. And that fire had been kindled, I imagine, simply by the coincidence in me … of the three inflammable elements that had slowly piled up in the depths of my soul


over a period of thirty years. These were the cult of Matter, the cult of Life, and the cult of Energy. (The Heart of Matter, p. 25)

At 30, Teilhard was ordained a Catholic priest and the next year was sent to study in the paleontology laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. There, he became interested in human paleontology.

During the time of the world warsBefore Teilhard could finish his studies, however, World War I intervened. In December 1914, he became a stretcher-bearer at the front, where he witnessed the terrible carnage of trench warfare. He entered “no-man’s land” to recover the dead and injured in some of the main battles of the war. Teilhard was awarded several medals for bravery. This experience led him to envision a larger meaning of life, with humanity evolving toward something bigger and more spiritual. In his 1918 essay “The Great Monad” he wrote:

The Whole of History teaches us this lesson, that after every revolution and after every war Mankind has always emerged a little more self-cohesive, a little more unified, because the links that hold its organism together are more firmly locked together and hope of a common emancipation has become strengthened.… It will not be long before the human mass closes in upon itself and groups all its members in a definitively realized unity. Respect for one and the same law, one and the same orientation, one and the same spirit, are tending to overlay the permanent diversity of individuals and nations. Wait but a little longer, and we shall form but one solid block. The cement is already setting. (The Heart of Matter, pp. 184–85)

During the war Teilhard wrote 18 essays, formulating some of his most fundamental ideas about the relationship between a Christian God and the natural world. In the “Cosmic Life,” he wrote: “There is a communion with God and a communion with the Earth and a communion with God through the Earth. In this first basic vision we begin to see how the kingdom of God and cosmic love can be reconciled: the bosom of Mother Earth is, in some way, the bosom of God.” He concluded: “To live the cosmic life is to live with the dominating consciousness that each one of us is an atom of the mystical and cosmic body of Christ.”

Teilhard took his final vows as a priest in 1918, and in early 1919 he was demobilized. He lectured in paleontology and geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris and studied at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), writing his doctoral thesis about French mammals from 55 to 48 million years ago. In 1923, he went to China with another priest to study stones and fossils in western Mongolia.

Two years later, Teilhard returned to Paris and resumed teaching at the Catholic Institute, where he was reproached for attempting to establish friendly relations between science and religion. Teilhard’s “Notes on Some Possible Historical Representations of Original Sin,” for example, tried to reconcile the latest discoveries about human origins with the doctrine of original sin. After revoking his license to teach, the Jesuit Curia sent him back to China for research, in effect protecting him from possible harsher measures by the papal authorities.

Teilhard spent most of the next 20 years in China. In early 1929, he joined the National Geological Survey of China and took part in the excavations, in December 1929, that


uncovered a Homo erectus skull, known as Peking Man. As the stratigrapher (a geologist who studies layers of the rock record), Teilhard played a major role in dating the discovery.

While in China, Teilhard wrote what would become his best-known work, The Phenomenon of Man. However, his superiors refused to permit its publication in 1944 and again in 1948. He returned to Paris but was not allowed to teach. He connected with the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City and in 1951 moved there to work as a researcher; under its auspices he made two trips to Africa.

Teilhard’s view of an evolving UniverseTeilhard was both a scientist and a mystic. His views on religion were blended with a visionary fire like that of the poets William Blake (1757–1827), Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844–89), and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950). In Teilhard’s view, the unfolding, evolving Universe is both a physical and a spiritual event. The Universe begins with matter, some of which develops into a new level (life), which develops into human consciousness, which becomes concentrated until it reaches what he called the “Omega Point.” God is implicit from the beginning, but the Universe is gradually making divinity explicit.

Teilhard invented words to express his ideas, including noosphere (from the Greek word noos, for mind), which he used in a 1925 essay called “Hominization” — another word he invented to refer to human reflection/intelligence. The noosphere is a “thinking” sphere circling the Earth above the biosphere, which comprises human reflection, conscious souls, and love.

Teilhard explained that the Universe has a direction of increasing complexity and consciousness. He named the goal toward which the Universe is headed the “Omega Point, a Universe that has become God.” The Omega Point exerts its force on everything; Teilhard describes it thus:

Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature. Accordingly its enormous layers, followed in the right direction, must somewhere ahead become involuted to a point we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself. (The Phenomenon of Man, p. 259)

Final years and posthumous worksTeilhard lived his final years in New York City, residing at the Jesuit church of St. Ignatius and working for the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He died from a heart attack on Easter Sunday in 1955.

Teilhard was prolific: he wrote 11 volumes of scientific work, three books, and 200-plus essays. Many of his scientific papers were published during his lifetime, but the Church would not allow his religious or philosophical essays to be published until after his death. The Phenomenon of Man came out in 1955, and The Divine Milieu appeared in 1957. They were international best sellers and have been translated into 22 languages. In late 1957, the Holy Office withdrew Teilhard’s books from seminary libraries and ordered they not be sold in Catholic bookstores. In 1962, the Vatican claimed that Teilhard’s books


contained “such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine,” without indicating what the errors were.

Now that decree and reprimand are largely forgotten. The Second Vatican Council (1962–68), led by Pope John XXIII and his successor Pope Paul VI, wanted, like Teilhard, to define the relationship of Christ to the Universe. Pope Benedict XVI made a general statement of praise in July 2009 for Teilhard’s “great vision.” Teilhard’s ideas have inspired many Catholics as well as non-Catholics.

Admirers include American writer Flannery O’Connor, who took the title of her last collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), from Teilhard’s essay “Omega Point,” in which he wrote:

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

But Teilhard’s ideas continued to offend some theologians and some scientists as well. Scientists in general do not believe in evolution toward a goal or purpose (an idea known as orthogenesis or teleology). Peter Medawar, a Brazilian/British biologist, objected to Teilhard’s attributing consciousness to matter. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that Teilhard might have been involved in perpetrating the Piltdown hoax, in which bones discovered in Sussex, England, were presented as the so-called “missing link” between humans and apes. (Teilhard made follow-up investigations at the site; the discovery was questioned by a colleague of Teilhard’s and definitively discredited in 1953, when radiometric dating showed the skull and jaw to have come from differing, not to mention relatively recent, times.)

Teilhard and the information ageMore recently Teilhard’s ideas have attracted people in the technology world. To some, the Internet seems to have fulfilled his prophecy of a noosphere. As Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote in Wired magazine in 1995:

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nerve-like constellation of wires. We live in an intertwined world of telephone lines, wireless satellite-based transmissions, and dedicated computer circuits that allow us to travel electronically from Des Moines to Delhi in the blink of an eye. Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.

A movement known as transhumanism wants to apply technology to overcome human limitations. Followers believe that computers and humans may combine to form a “super brain,” or that computers may eventually exceed human brain capacity. Some transhumanists refer to that future time as the “Singularity.” In his 2008 article “Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism,” Eric Steinhart wrote that:


Teilhard de Chardin was among the first to give serious consideration to the future of human evolution.… [He] is almost certainly the first to describe the acceleration of technological progress to a singularity in which human intelligence will become super intelligence.

Teilhard challenged theologians to view their ideas in the perspective of evolution and challenged scientists to examine the ethical and spiritual implications of their knowledge. He fully affirmed cosmic and biological evolution and saw them as part of an even more encompassing spiritual evolution toward the goal of ultra-humans and complete divinity. This hypothesis still resonates for some as a way to place scientific fact within an overarching spiritual view of the cosmos, though most scientists today reject the notion that the Universe is moving toward some clear goal.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Paleontologist, Mystic & Jesuit Priest (1060L)By Cynthia Stokes Brown, adapted by Newsela

As a paleontologist and a Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin created a unique vision bringing together science and religion.

Youth, vocation, and early thoughts on evolutionPierre Teilhard de Chardin (pronounced tay-YAR-de-shar-DAN) was born in the countryside of France. Teilhard was the fourth of 11 children.

Teilhard’s father was an amateur naturalist who collected rocks, insects, fossils, and plants. His deeply religious mother, the great-grandniece of the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire, instilled in her son a devotion to Jesus. The family lived in the countryside among volcanic mountains and forested hills. Teilhard grew to embrace both of his parents’ greatest interests: love of the Earth and love of the Christian God.

Shortly before he turned 11, Teilhard went to a Jesuit college to study philosophy and mathematics. Teilhard completed his studies in England in 1905 and was sent to teach chemistry and physics in Cairo. There he was enthralled by Egypt’s natural beauty and collected fossils at every opportunity.

In 1908, Teilhard returned to England to study theology. There, in Henri Bergson’s book Creative Evolution (published 1907), he encountered the idea that evolution is driven, not by natural selection, as Darwin believed, but by a vital force. Like nearly all modern scientists, Teilhard disagreed with Bergson’s main idea. But Bergson inspired him to form his own view that the cosmos itself is evolving.

At 30, Teilhard became a Catholic priest. The next year he was sent to study at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. There, he became interested in human paleontology, the study of prehistoric man.


During the time of the world warsBefore Teilhard could finish his studies, however, World War I intervened. In December 1914, he became a stretcher-bearer at the front. He witnessed firsthand the terrible violence of trench warfare. He would enter “no-man’s land” to recover the dead and injured in some of the main battles of the war. Teilhard was awarded several medals for bravery. This experience led him to envision a larger meaning of life, with humanity evolving toward something bigger and more spiritual. In his 1918 essay “The Great Monad,” he wrote:

The Whole of History teaches us this lesson, that after every revolution and after every war Mankind has always emerged a little more self-cohesive, a little more unified, because the links that hold its organism together are more firmly locked together and hope of a common emancipation has become strengthened.… It will not be long before the human mass closes in upon itself and groups all its members in a definitively realized unity. Respect for one and the same law, one and the same orientation, one and the same spirit, are tending to overlay the permanent diversity of individuals and nations. Wait but a little longer, and we shall form but one solid block. The cement is already setting. (The Heart of Matter, pp. 184–85)

During the war Teilhard wrote 18 essays. In them he formulated his ideas about the relationship between a Christian God and the natural world. In the “Cosmic Life,” he wrote: “There is a communion with God and a communion with the Earth and a communion with God through the Earth. In this first basic vision we begin to see how the kingdom of God and cosmic love can be reconciled: the bosom of Mother Earth is, in some way, the bosom of God.” He concluded: “To live the cosmic life is to live with the dominating consciousness that each one of us is an atom of the mystical and cosmic body of Christ.”

Teilhard took his final vows as a priest in 1918. He lectured in paleontology and geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris and studied at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). In 1923, he went to China with another priest to study stones and fossils in western Mongolia.

Two years later, Teilhard returned to Paris and resumed teaching at the Catholic Institute, where he was scolded for trying to create friendly relations between science and religion. Teilhard, for example, tried to make the latest discoveries about human origins fit with the Bible's doctrine of original sin. After revoking his license to teach, the Jesuit Curia sent him back to China for research, in effect protecting him from possible harsher measures by Church leaders in Rome.

Teilhard spent most of the next 20 years in China. In early 1929, he joined the National Geological Survey of China and took part in the excavations, in December 1929, that uncovered a Homo erectus skull, known as Peking Man. As the stratigrapher (a geologist who studies layers of the rock record), Teilhard played a major role in dating the discovery.

While in China, Teilhard wrote what would become his best-known work, The Phenomenon of Man. However, his superiors refused to permit its publication. He returned to Paris but was not allowed to teach. He connected with the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City and in 1951 moved there to work as a researcher.


Teilhard’s view of an evolving UniverseTeilhard was both a scientist and a mystic. His views on religion were blended with a visionary fire. In Teilhard’s view, the unfolding, evolving Universe is both a physical and a spiritual event. The Universe begins with matter, some of which develops into a new level (life), which develops into human consciousness. From there it becomes concentrated until it reaches what he called the “Omega Point.” God is implicit from the beginning, but the Universe is gradually making divinity explicit.

Teilhard invented words to express his ideas, including noosphere (from the Greek word noos, for mind), which he used in a 1925 essay called “Hominization” — another word he invented to refer to human reflection/intelligence. The noosphere is a “thinking” sphere circling the Earth above the biosphere. It's made of human reflection, conscious souls, and love.

Teilhard explained that the Universe has a direction of increasing complexity and consciousness. He named the goal toward which the Universe is headed the “Omega Point, a Universe that has become God.” The Omega Point exerts its force on everything; Teilhard describes it thus:

Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature. Accordingly its enormous layers, followed in the right direction, must somewhere ahead become involuted to a point we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself. (The Phenomenon of Man, p. 259)

Final years and posthumous worksTeilhard lived his final years in New York City. He died in 1955.

Teilhard was prolific: he wrote 11 volumes of scientific work, three books, and 200-plus essays. Many of his scientific papers were published during his lifetime, but the Church would not allow his religious or philosophical essays to be published until after his death. The Phenomenon of Man came out in 1955. It became an international best seller. In late 1957, the Holy Office withdrew Teilhard’s books from seminary libraries. In 1962, the Vatican claimed that Teilhard’s books contained “serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine,” without indicating what the errors were.

Now that reprimand is largely forgotten. The Second Vatican Council (1962–68) wanted, like Teilhard, to define the relationship of Christ to the Universe. Pope Benedict XVI praised Teilhard’s “great vision” in July 2009. Teilhard’s ideas have inspired many Catholics as well as non-Catholics.

American writer Flannery O'Connor was one of Teilhard's admirers. She took the title of her last collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge(1965), from Teilhard’s essay “Omega Point,” in which he wrote:



But Teilhard’s ideas continued to offend some theologians and some scientists as well. Scientists in general do not believe in evolution toward a goal or purpose. Biologist Peter Medawar objected to Teilhard’s attributing consciousness to matter.

Teilhard and the information ageMore recently, Teilhard’s ideas have attracted people in the technology world. To some, the Internet seems to have fulfilled his prophecy of a noosphere. As Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote in Wired magazine in 1995:

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires. We live in an intertwined world of telephone lines, wireless satellite-based transmissions, and dedicated computer circuits that allow us to travel electronically from Des Moines to Delhi in the blink of an eye. Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.

A movement known as transhumanism wants to apply technology to overcome human limitations. Followers believe that computers and humans may combine to form a “super brain,” or that computers may eventually exceed human brain capacity. Some transhumanists refer to that future time as the “Singularity.” In his 2008 article “Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism,” Eric Steinhart wrote that:

Teilhard de Chardin was among the first to give serious consideration to the future of human evolution.… [He] is almost certainly the first to describe the acceleration of technological progress to a singularity in which human intelligence will become super intelligence.

Teilhard challenged theologians to view their ideas in the perspective of evolution. He asked scientists to examine the ethical and spiritual meanings of their knowledge. He fully accepted evolution. He saw it as part of a spiritual evolution toward the goal of ultra-humans and complete divinity. This idea still means something to some people. It offers a way to place scientific fact within an larger spiritual view of the cosmos, though most scientists today reject the notion that the Universe is moving toward some clear goal.


As a paleontologist and a Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin created a unique vision bringing together science and religion.

Youth, vocation, and early thoughts on evolutionPierre Teilhard de Chardin (pronounced tay-YAR-de-shar-DAN) was born in the countryside of France. Teilhard was the fourth of 11 children.


Teilhard’s father was an amateur naturalist who collected rocks, insects, fossils, and plants. His deeply religious mother instilled in her son a devotion to Jesus. The family lived in the countryside among volcanic mountains and forested hills. Teilhard grew to embrace both of his parents’ greatest interests: love of the Earth and love of the Christian God.

At 10, Teilhard went to a Jesuit college. Teilhard completed his studies in England in 1905 and was sent to teach chemistry and physics in Cairo. Egypt's natural beauty enthralled him and he collected fossils at every opportunity.

In 1908, Teilhard returned to England to study theology. There, in Henri Bergson’s book Creative Evolution, he encountered the idea that evolution is driven, not by natural selection, as Darwin believed, but by a vital force. Like nearly all modern scientists, Teilhard disagreed with Bergson’s main idea. But Bergson inspired him to form his own view that the cosmos itself is evolving.


During the time of the world warsBefore Teilhard could finish his studies, however, World War I began. In December 1914, he became a stretcher-bearer at the front. He witnessed firsthand the terrible violence of trench warfare. He entered “no-man’s land” to recover the dead and injured in some of the main battles of the war. Teilhard was awarded several medals for bravery. This experience led him to envision a larger meaning of life, with humanity evolving toward something bigger and more spiritual. In his 1918 essay “The Great Monad,” he suggested that following every war, humankind becomes a little more unified, and less divided by nationality, writing:

It will not be long before the human mass closes in upon itself and groups all its members in a definitively realized unity. Respect for one and the same law, one and the same orientation, one and the same spirit, are tending to overlay the permanent diversity of individuals and nations. Wait but a little longer, and we shall form but one solid block. The cement is already setting. (The Heart of Matter, pp. 184–85)

During the war Teilhard wrote 18 essays. In them, he developed his ideas about the relationship between a Christian God and the natural world. In the “Cosmic Life,” he wrote: “There is a communion with God and a communion with the Earth and a communion with God through the Earth. In this first basic vision we begin to see how the kingdom of God and cosmic love can be reconciled: the bosom of Mother Earth is, in some way, the bosom of God.” He concluded: “each one of us is an atom of the mystical and cosmic body of Christ.”

Teilhard took his final vows as a priest in 1918. He lectured in paleontology and geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris and studied at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). In 1923, he went to China to study stones and fossils in western Mongolia.

Two years later, Teilhard returned to Paris. He resumed teaching at the Catholic Institute, where he was scolded for trying to create friendly relations between science and religion. Teilhard, for example, tried to make the latest discoveries about human origins fit with the


Bible's doctrine of original sin. In the Bible, this tale explains how man is doomed to sin after Adam rebels against God in the Garden of Eden. The Jesuits revoked Teilhard's license to teach, and sent him back to China.

Teilhard spent most of the next 20 years in China. In December 1929, he took part in excavations that uncovered a Homo erectus skull, known as Peking Man. As a geologist, Teilhard studied the layers of rock near Peking Man to date the skull.

While in China, Teilhard wrote what would become his best-known work, The Phenomenon of Man. However, his bosses refused to permit its publication. He returned to Paris but was not allowed to teach. In 1951, he moved to New York City to work as a researcher.

Teilhard’s view of an evolving UniverseTeilhard was both a scientist and a mystic. His views on religion were blended with a visionary fire. In Teilhard’s view, the evolving Universe is both a physical and a spiritual event. The Universe begins with matter, some of which develops into a new level (life), which develops into human consciousness. From there it becomes concentrated until it reaches what he called the “Omega Point.” There is a divine force at work from the beginning, but the Universe is gradually revealing God more clearly.

Teilhard invented words to express his ideas, including noosphere (from the Greek word noos, for mind). The noosphere is a “thinking” sphere circling the Earth above the biosphere. It's made of human reflection, conscious souls, and love.

Teilhard explained that the Universe becomes increasingly complex and conscious. He named the goal toward which the Universe is headed the “Omega Point, a Universe that has become God.” The Omega Point exerts its force on everything.


Teilhard was the author of a huge number of works: he wrote 11 volumes of scientific work, three books, and 200-plus essays. Many of his scientific papers were published during his lifetime. However, the Church would not allow his religious or philosophical essays to be published until after his death. The Phenomenon of Man came out in 1955. It became an international best seller. In late 1957, the Vatican withdrew Teilhard’s books from seminary libraries. In 1962, the Vatican claimed that Teilhard’s books contained “serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine,” without indicating what the errors were.

Now that punishment is largely forgotten. Pope Benedict XVI praised Teilhard’s “great vision” in July 2009. Teilhard’s ideas have inspired many Catholics as well as non-Catholics.

His admirers include American writer Flannery O’Connor. She took the title of her book, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), from Teilhard’s essay “Omega Point.” In it he wrote:


Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must come together.

But Teilhard’s ideas continued to offend some theologians and even some scientists. Most scientists today reject the notion that the Universe is moving toward a clear goal. And biologist Peter Medawar has objected to Teilhard’s claim that consciousness arises from matter.

Teilhard and the information ageMore recently, Teilhard’s ideas have attracted people in the technology world. To some, the Internet seems to have fulfilled his prophecy of a noosphere. As Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote in Wired magazine in 1995:

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall. But, think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running through a nerve-like system of wires. We live in an intertwined world of telephone lines, wireless satellite-based transmissions, and dedicated computer circuits that allow us to travel electronically from Des Moines to Delhi in the blink of an eye. Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.

A movement known as transhumanism was inspired by Teilhard. Tranhumanism wants to apply technology to overcome the limits of being human. Followers believe that computers and humans may combine to form a “super brain,” or that computers may eventually exceed human brain capacity.

Teilhard challenged theologians to view religion in light of evolution. He asked scientists to examine the ethical and spiritual implications of science. Teilhard fully accepted evolution. He saw it as part of a spiritual evolution toward the goal of ultra-humans and complete divinity. This hypothesis still resonates for some. It offers a way to place scientific fact within a larger spiritual view of the cosmos.


Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was both a paleontologist and a priest. He brought science and religion together in a unique vision.

Youth, vocation, and early thoughts on evolutionPierre Teilhard de Chardin (pronounced tay-YAR-de-shar-DAN) was born in the countryside of France. He was the fourth of 11 children.

Teilhard’s father collected rocks, insects, fossils, and plants as a hobby. His mother was deeply religious. Early on, she instilled in her son a love for Jesus. The family lived in the


countryside among volcanic mountains and forested hills. Teilhard grew to embrace both of his parents’ greatest interests: love of the Earth and love of the Christian God.

At 10, Teilhard went to a Jesuit Christian college. Teilhard completed his studies in England in 1905. After, he went to teach chemistry and physics in Cairo, Egypt. Egypt’s natural beauty fascinated him and he collected fossils at every opportunity.

In 1908, Teilhard returned to England to study the Bible. Around that time Henri Bergson’s book Creative Evolution had a huge effect on his thinking. Bergson proposed the idea that humans didn't evolve due to natural selection, as Darwin believed. Instead, there was a vital force that drove humans. Like nearly all modern scientists, Teilhard disagreed with Bergson’s main idea. But Bergson inspired him to form his own view that the cosmos itself is evolving.


During the time of the world warsBefore Teilhard could finish his studies, however, World War I began. He joined the war effort in 1914, carrying wounded soldiers by stretcher. He witnessed firsthand the terrible brutality of war. He entered “no-man’s land” to go get the dead and injured. Teilhard was awarded several medals for bravery. This experience led him to envision a larger meaning of life. Humanity, he believed, must be evolving toward something bigger and more spiritual. In his 1918 essay “The Great Monad,” he suggested that humankind draws closer after wars. He believed people would one day no longer group themselves by nationality, but would all live by the same law and the same spirit. He wrote: "Wait but a little longer, and we shall form but one solid block. The cement is already setting."

During the war Teilhard wrote 18 essays. In them, he developed his ideas about the relationship between a Christian God and the natural world. In the “Cosmic Life,” he wrote: “There is a communion with God and a communion with the Earth and a communion with God through the Earth. In this first basic vision we begin to see how the kingdom of God and cosmic love can be reconciled: the bosom of Mother Earth is, in some way, the bosom of God.” He concluded: “each one of us is an atom of the mystical and cosmic body of Christ.”

Teilhard took his final vows as a priest in 1918. He lectured in paleontology and geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris. And he studied at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). In 1923, he went to China to study stones and fossils in western Mongolia.

Two years later, Teilhard returned to Paris. He resumed teaching at the Catholic Institute. There he was scolded for trying to make friendly relations between science and religion. Teilhard, for example, tried to explain how the latest discoveries about human origins fit together with the doctrine of original sin. In the Bible, this tale explains how man is doomed to sin after Adam rebels against God in the Garden of Eden. The Jesuits stripped Teilhard of his license to teach. Teilhard was sent to China for a second time.


Teilhard spent most of the next 20 years in China. In December 1929, he took part in a dig that uncovered a Homo erectus skull. This amazing find is known as Peking Man. As a geologist, Teilhard studied the layers of rock near Peking Man to date the skull.

While in China, Teilhard wrote what would become his best-known work, The Phenomenon of Man. However, his bosses refused to let him print it. He returned to Paris but was not allowed to teach. In 1951, he moved to New York City to work as a researcher.

Teilhard’s view of an evolving UniverseTeilhard was both a scientist and a mystic. His views on religion were blended with a visionary fire. In Teilhard’s view, the evolving Universe is both a physical and a spiritual event. The Universe begins with matter. Some of that matter develops into a new level (life), which develops into human consciousness. From there, it becomes concentrated until it reaches what he called the “Omega Point.” It's the goal toward which the Universe is heading. The Omega Point exerts its force on everything.

There is a god-like power present from the beginning. But as the Universe becomes increasingly complex and conscious, it makes the divine nature of things more clear. The Universe becomes God.

Teilhard invented words to express his ideas, including noosphere (from the Greek word noos, for mind). The noosphere is a “thinking” sphere circling the Earth above the biosphere. It's made of human reflection, conscious souls, and love.


Teilhard wrote a lot: he wrote 11 volumes of scientific work, three books, and 200-plus essays. Many of his scientific papers were published during his lifetime. However, the Church would not allow his religious or philosophical essays to be published until after his death. The Phenomenon of Man came out in 1955. It became an international best seller. In late 1957, the Vatican withdrew Teilhard’s books from seminary libraries. In 1962, the Vatican claimed that Teilhard’s books contained “serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine.” It never indicated what those errors were.

Now that punishment is largely forgotten. Pope Benedict XVI praised Teilhard’s “great vision” in July 2009. Teilhard’s ideas have inspired many Catholics as well as non-Catholics.

His admirers include American writer Flannery O’Connor. She took the title of her book, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), from Teilhard’s essay “Omega Point.” In it he wrote:


But Teilhard’s ideas continued to offend some religious thinkers. Even some scientists object to his ideas. Most scientists today reject the notion that the Universe is moving toward a


clear goal. And biologist Peter Medawar has objected to Teilhard’s claim that consciousness arises from matter.

Teilhard and the information ageMore recently, Teilhard’s ideas have attracted people in the technology world. To some, the Internet seems to have fulfilled his prophecy of a noosphere. Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote in Wired magazine in 1995 that Teilhard imagined the globe would one day be surrounded by a complex layer of information. It would run on human consciousness.

"It sounds a little off-the-wall, but, think about the Net. It's a vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running through a nerve-like system of wires," Cobb Kreisberg wrote. "Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived."

A movement known as transhumanism was inspired by Teilhard. Transhumanism wants to use technology to overcome the limits of being human. Followers believe that computers and humans may combine to form a “super brain.” Some believe that computers may eventually become more powerful than the human brain.

Teilhard challenged religious scholars to view religion in light of evolution. Likewise, he asked scientists to ponder the ethical and spiritual meaning of their work. Teilhard fully accepted evolution. He saw it as part of a spiritual evolution toward the goal of ultra-humans and complete divinity. This hypothesis is still meaningful for some. It offers a way to place scientific fact within a larger spiritual view of the cosmos.


cdn. web viewunit 6—early humans. this word document contains all of the readings from the...

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