What is a Hominid?
A kind of like monkeys, they could communicate through speech and would walk on both feet. They also had flexible hands.
What are Hominins?
They are the same as Hominids but were smarter, having bigger brains.
What is a Neanderthal?
A Hominid species that is now extinct, they lived in Europe and Western Asia.
What are Homo Sapiens?
The Hominins that we can trace our heritage back to. They became dominant about 30 thousand years ago.
What does Paleolithic mean?
Paleo = Old/ancient, Lithic = pertaining to stone. This period lasted until 9000 BCE.
What is a Hunter-Gatherer?
They moved around and didn’t settle, being nomadic with small community sizes (15-40).
What is a Clovis Point?
Arrowheads in North America used to hunt mammoth and bison.
The culture that used these was called the Clovis culture.
What is the Agricultural Revolution?
A slow transition between Paleolithic and Neolithic, leading to changes like specialization of labor.
What is Gobekli Tepe?
A site in Turkey with evidence of a group that stayed in one area for over a year, historically dated back to the transitional period.
What does Neolithic mean?
New Stone Age, synonymous with the time of the Agricultural Revolution.
What is the Fertile Crescent?
A super fertile area in the northern Middle East, with many rivers including the Jordan, Tigris, and Euphrates.
What is a Pastoral Society?
A society that focuses on herding animals like sheep.
What is a Village Society?
A society that is more crop-based and has a more permanent location.
What is Catal Huyuk?
A Neolithic society in the Fertile Crescent (Turkey) with a community of 10,000, known for its rectangular homes.
Their buildings were built right next to each other, merging walls.
Who is Otzi the Iceman?
Discovered in 1991 in between Italy and Austria, he died 5300 years ago and was a well-preserved Neolithic mummy.
He had a copper axe, snow shoes, and had eaten berries, seeds, and meat.
What is Mesopotamia?
One of the earliest urban societies, meaning ‘land between two rivers’, located in the Fertile Crescent.
What is Uruk?
A city in Berlin estimated to have around 30,000 people living there around 3000 BCE, known as a religious center.
What is a Ziggurat?
A temple-like building in Uruk with a huge base and a temple on top.
It is hypothesized that they buried their dead in the base.
What was the Akkadian Empire?
An empire (2350-2000) that emerged as cities began to fight and have wars, leading to the importance of generals and strategists.
Who was Sargon?
The founder of the Akkadian Empire who performed a coup on the king of Kish.
Who was Hammurabi?
King of Babylon known for a law code inscribed on pillars that we still have access to.
What is Cuneiform?
the First form of Writing. A type of writing that is wedge-shaped, created using a wedge-shaped stylus on clay. Originated in Mespotamia.
What is the Code of Hammurabi?
Hammurabi’s law code that provides insights into the ethics of the time.
‘Eye for an Eye’ was a common principle.
