Change in the Paleolithic Era Lecture 23
Today, we’re at the end of an interglacial that’s already lasted 10,000 years—and that’s something worth thinking about.
O
ne of the reasons why history texts rarely discuss the Paleolithic era is that things changed so slowly that it is easy to think of this as an era in which nothing happened. Indeed, Paleolithic peoples themselves may have seen history as a cyclical pattern of seasonal and life changes within an essentially unchanging world. This is a view of history that Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade called the “Myth of the Eternal Return.” Yet, with the bene¿t of hindsight and with modern techniques for tracking and dating long-term changes, we can see that this view is illusory. At large scales, a lot happened in the Paleolithic era, so the astonishing adaptability of our species is already evident in the Paleolithic era. Though change was much slower than today (too slow to be observed by the people who lived through it), it was much faster than in any pre-human community. This lecture will describe three main types of long-term change. First, we discuss the dramatic climatic and environmental changes associated with the ice ages. Second, we discuss the migrations that took Paleolithic humans to all parts of the Earth (except for Antarctica and the Paci¿c). Third, we describe the increasing impact of our Paleolithic ancestors on the natural environment. The study of climate history has advanced rapidly in recent decades, driven partly by research into global warming. An example is the analysis of ratios of different oxygen isotopes in bubbles of air from ice cores. These ratios vary depending on the amounts of ice locked up in glaciers, so they can indicate changes in global temperatures. Such techniques have revealed dramatic climatic changes. For 50 million years, global climates have slowly gotten cooler. This has reduced evaporation from the oceans and increased aridity. During the Pleistocene era (the last 2 million years), ice sheets spread in polar regions, generating 103
