How do we know about the lives of early humans? This is a question I continually asked students the past couple of weeks. In a time before Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook--before pictures, writing, or cave paintings, even, how do we know people did stuff? Well, early people did leave some things behind, clues that help us to piece together the puzzle that is our early ancestors. Archaeologists who dig into the past trying to learn more about these early humans, or hominids, are like detectives trying to solve a crime that's a quarter million years old. The skeletal remains themselves are clues. And then there are artifacts--objects made or used by people. Modern dating techniques allow archaeologists to determine the approximate age of artifacts (or skeletons or fossils) and with that information, we can attempt to paint a picture of the lives of the people that used those objects. Students had a chance to participate in an activity in which they acted as archaeologists, examining artifacts in order to learn about the people who used them. By analyzing artifacts such as the toddler toy/puzzle to the right or the others below, we can better understand the people who made or used them.
Because humans only began writing around 5,000 years ago, we don't have narrative accounts of the lives of people living before then. Therefore, the study of artifacts is essential to our understanding of what kind of stuff humans were doing for the hundreds of thousands of years prior to that. Just as detectives develop theories for a crime based on the evidence available, archaeologists and historians have to develop theories and make educated guesses to explain what our distant relatives were up to. It's relatively easy to learn about the people who made and used the artifacts above--we can ask them. But with prehistoric objects such as the hand ax below, an imaginative mind is required, transporting itself back in time so as to think like a Paleolithic scavenger using the tool to scrape meat from the dead carcass of a large mammal killed by a saber-toothed cat.
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