Concept
Human history
Related concepts (27)
Axial Age
Axial Age (also Axis Age, from the German Achsenzeit) is a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BC. According to Jaspers, during this period, universalizing modes of thought appeared in Persia, India, China, the Levant, and the Greco-Roman world, in a striking parallel development, without any obvious admixture between these disparate cultures.
Subsistence economy
A subsistence economy is an economy directed to basic subsistence (the provision of food, clothing, shelter) rather than to the market. Henceforth, "subsistence" is understood as supporting oneself at a minimum level. Often, the subsistence economy is moneyless and relies on natural resources to provide for basic needs through hunting, gathering, and agriculture. In a subsistence economy, economic surplus is minimal and only used to trade for basic goods, and there is no industrialization.
Domestication of animals
The domestication of animals is the mutual relationship between non-human animals and the humans who have influence on their care and reproduction. Charles Darwin recognized a small number of traits that made domesticated species different from their wild ancestors. He was also the first to recognize the difference between conscious selective breeding (i.e. artificial selection) in which humans directly select for desirable traits, and unconscious selection where traits evolve as a by-product of natural selection or from selection on other traits.
Proto-city
A proto-city is a large, dense Neolithic settlement that is largely distinguished from a city by its lack of planning and centralized rule. While the precise classification of many sites considered proto-cities is ambiguous and subject to considerable debate, common examples include Jericho, Çatalhöyük and the mega-sites of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture. Sites of the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia have also been classed as proto-cities.
Cultural history
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.
Plastered human skulls
Plastered human skulls are human skulls covered in layers of plaster, typically found in the ancient Levant, most notably around the modern Palestinian city of Jericho, between 8,000 and 6,000 BC (approximately 9000 years ago), in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period. They represent some of the oldest forms of art in the Middle East and demonstrate that the prehistoric population took great care in burying their ancestors below their homes. The skulls denote some of the earliest sculptural examples of portraiture in the history of art.
Nok culture
The Nok culture, also known as the Nok civilization, is a population whose material remains are named after the Ham village of Nok in southern Kaduna State of Nigeria, where their terracotta sculptures were first discovered in 1928. The Nok people and the Gajiganna people may have migrated from the Central Sahara, along with pearl millet and pottery, diverged prior to arriving in the northern region of Nigeria, and thus, settled in their respective locations in the region of Gajiganna and Nok.