Technology and Aspects of

Early Society
Objects of trade over relatively long
distances include:

Flint

Salt (usually traded in the form

of bricks)
Hard stones
for tools

Semi-precious stones
(which the prehistoric
tribesmen admired)

Seashells from the

East

Through the discovery of the treasure and

merchandise of peddlers who, when threatened
by danger, buried their possessions and often
never recovered them, they traced trade routes.

 Early food-gatherers and hunters devised a full

range of tools directed toward their foraging,
hunting, and fishing; these tools have been
classified as "crushers, "piercers," and
"entanglers."

 Included among these were:

Spear

Simple and composite

bow

Spear-thrower

Arrowhead

Harpoon

Blow-gun

Lasso and
bolas

Fish hooks and

traps

 The insecurity of daily subsistence didnt

prevent early man from creating and
cultivating graphic and plastic arts.
This was partly because primitive superstition
(itself a form of technology) believed that one
would be more successful in hunting and fishing if
one could draw pictures of the objects for which
one hunted and fished.
Using natural pigments crushed in a mortar with
pestle (and mixed with animal fats or waterin
most cases), primitive man painted with his finger
tips, brushes, or dry-point crayons.

 He engraved tools and weapons on the walls of

his caves with incised lines or pecking. He also
sculpted.
Rock or mud were modeled in the round or in
relief, and he used ivory, antler, and stone as well.

The Domestication of Animals

Mangraduallytamedsuchanimalsasroamedabo
uthis
settlementsorcampsandwhich
sometimes may havebeen scavenging.
ByMagdalenian times (thelate period, 17,0008000 B.C., of the Old Stone Age) the dog was
already domesticated, and probably man had
already tamed the first reindeer, goats, and
sheep.
During the Neolithic Age (Late Stone Age) pigs
and cattle joined the range of domestic animals,
the horse and the onager (wild ass) being tamed
toward the end of that period.

 The last phase of domestication was characterized

by the dominance of such economic purpose.
Animals were bred because of their meat, hides,
or milk, and man gradually acquired sufficient
biological experience to be able to produce more
"specialized" animals, the products of which were
refined by various techniques.

The Beginnings of Agriculture

Similar needs led to man's attempts to free
himself from the limitations of vegetable food
supplied by nature in the wild state.
Man did not want to be dependent on roots and
fruit only, but wanted regularsupplies of green
vegetables, nuts and oilseeds, cereals, and
condiments.

 From 8000 B.C. onwards, the Fertile Crescent

played its role asthe center of agriculture,
whence the knowledge of growing such improved
foodstuffs spread to the Mediterranean region and
Western Europe.

 The advent of agriculture brought more or less

permanent settlements and tended to displace
the earliernomadic way of life.
But specialization was still uncommon. Everyone
had to be a jack-of-all-trades.

 Agriculture stimulated technology in various ways.

New tools were needed: the hoe, plow, harrow to
prepare and till the soil.

 But albeit the progression of technology, the

pacing of advancement was rather slow.
The is demonstrated by the late invention of such
a simple agricultural tool as the flail, a device for
threshing grain.

 After the birth of agriculture, prehistoric man was

faced with the problem of detaching the grains
from the dried heads of the wild grasses he
cultivated and improved.
He solved this problem by beating sheaves of
grain against the compacted mud floor or by
spreading it out on the floor and beating it with
sticks.

 It was not until the fourth century in Gaul that the

ingenious combination of two hinged sticks
produced the flail; yet the technical elements and
the need for an effective threshing device had
already existed for millennia.

Building
The coming of permanent settlements led to early
forms of building.
Earlier men had been satisfied with simple
windbreaks, seeking more permanent shelters
such as caves only for longer stays.

 The earliest European houses were tent-like

constructions, often little more than roofed-over
pits and hollows.
Gradually pole or frame constructions were
developed, which led to more solid constructions
made of planks, turf, mud, and adobe.

 The introduction of metal tools in the Bronze Age

made possible the building of log houses in the
forest regions;
while in the south the types of houses with a
roofed front porch and a room with a central
fireplace prevailed.
And then, long houses and religious buildings of
various forms were also erected, involving a more
developed wood-work technology.

 Building construction depended on the local

materials available. Reed (stem) huts were
constructed in the lower river valleys, wooden
houses where timber was available.
In Jarmo by 6500 B.C. compacted mud-walls were
used and at Jericho we find mud-bricks.

Urban Revolution
Technological developments during the Neolithic
Age gradually led to a regular production of
surplus foodstuffs, which supported what has
been called the "Urban Revolution."

 In the Near East after 600 B.C. some farming

villages slowly developed into urban centers,
dominating an agricultural area.
Trade was no longer in luxuries alone; the farmers
brought their surplus grain and food to the city,
where skilled, full-time craftsmen traded the
articles which they had produced for the food they
needed.

Transport
Despite an increase in trade, transport was still
very primitive.
On the water, apart from rafts and inflated skins
carrying a timber deck (the keleks of
Mesopotamia), there were baskets with a high rim
and the coracle (Arabic, quffa), a sort of raft
made water-tight by a hide covering (in Assyria,
by a coat of bituminous mastic).

 Ships made of bundles of reeds (stems) were

typical for the Nile Valley civilization.
The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, like those of
prehistoric Europe, also used the dug-out canoe,
the prototype of later plank-built ships.
Despite these early adventurers, most early
shipping was merely river transport and seldom
risked the dangers even of sailing along the
coasts of the open seas.

 The technological improvements of land

transport was even slower.
Early overland trade never involved large volumes
of goods, but for a very long time was limited to
what men or pack animals could carry on their
backs.
From 7000 B.C. onward, sleds were in use for
heavy loads such as the stones used for later
prehistoric (Neolithic, the Late Stone Age, period
monuments.

 Archaeologists have reasoned that heavy stones

must have been moved or transported on sledges
placed on rollers, and that the idea of the wheel
probably derived from these rollers.
It is doubtful, however, if wheels evolved from
rollers, and we still do not know where, when, and
how the wheel was invented.

 On early tablets found at Uruk in Mesopotamia

(3500 B.C.) we see pictures of sledges on four
wheels; a set of solid wheels with their axle were
carved from a tree trunk, and the sledge was
attached to two such units.
True wheeled vehicles, with the wheel rotating
about the axle instead of being solidly affixed to
it, are not found until the days of the Sumerian
royal tombs (after 3000 B.C.)

Man at the Dawn of History

At the beginning, man possessed certain
biological prerequisites for technical progress:
the capacity to manipulate with his hands and fingers,
the ability to develop speech for communication, and,
somehow,
a capacity for abstract thought.

These had enabled him to develop tools, which in

turn enabled him to evolve further.

 Human prehistory is divided among the Stone

Ages (Eolithic, Paleolithic, and Neolithic)
Only stone tools have survived the ravages of
time, with these tools improving in quality and
usability over a long period of time.

Mans discoveries, achievements, and

inventions:

Fire,
crude weapons,
beginnings of agriculture,
which allowed for settled communities,
man changed from a nomadic hunter and dependent
upon nature to become an active partner with
nature,
domesticated animals
developed agricultural tools
made textiles and produced pottery,
invented the wheel and the sail to improve
transportation,
learned how to use and produce copper.

 Then came the most astonishing invention

of pre-history, an invention that divided
the very epochs of ancient man:
The development of writing

 The development of writing took place about 3500

B.C.
The earliest documents were cuneiform clay
tablets, forming the archives of the
administration of early Mesopotamian (Sumerian)
temples.
Language and its earliest written expression,
pictographs (that is, ideas expressed in the form
of visual pictures), developed.

 The "naming" of all natural things and phenomena

now finds its expression in the word lists
(onomastica) in which words for all kinds of
animals, plants, minerals, and so forth, are
arranged in groups which are supposed to be
related in some way.
Such lists, often designating the objects by their
external characteristics which had been observed,
led to the "discovery" of the "natural order of
things"

 They also aided budding scientists and craftsmen,

for the lists were used in teaching pupils how to
read and write.
The craftsmen used them to set down their
experience and to formulate the recipes and
instructions they were gradually producing for
technology, new terms being formed and read
with ease.

 Cuneiform writing consisted of wedge-shaped

marks incised on wet clay, a material in which the
Tigris-Euphrates Valley abounded. When dried in
the sun or baked in a fire, the clay tablets
hardened, and a permanent record was left.

 Almost at the same time, the Nile Valley also

witnessed the beginnings of writing by brush
dipped in ink or dye on papyrus formed by
pressing and drying pithy reeds (sharp stems)
growing near the Nile delta.

 Man and its progress:

settled communities made possible through
agricultural advance,
a wide variety of tools,
domesticated animals,
means of transportation such as the wheel and
sail,
the beginnings of some division of labor,
invention of writing and the beginning of
metallurgy,
and the accompanying change from the Stone
Ages of man to the Copper Age and the Bronze
Age in the third millennium B.C.

 With the beginnings of metallurgy, the Stone Age

of man comes to an end; with the beginnings of
writing, prehistory comes to an end; with the
beginnings of agriculture, man's parasitism on
nature gives way to co-operation with nature.
Technology thus made possible the beginnings of
civilization in the great river valleys of the Near
East, in Mesopotamia and Egypt.