The Beginnings of Human Culture1

The Beginnings of Human Culture
We have seen that man has been on earth approximately 1,000,000 years- There is evidence of his culture for 600,000 years. The first recorded date - in history is generally accepted as 3300 B.C. on pre-Sumerian inscription found in southern Mesopotamia .With this date history proper begins all cultural; evolution preceding this date is considered: to be prehistory. Prehistory therefore comprises about ninety-nine per cent of the time involved in man s cultural development. In order to place modern, civilization, with its complexities and continuous change in proper perspective, it is necessary to understand the halting, glacially slow, first steps made by man away from biological and toward cultural living- The reconstruction of the early stages of cultural evolution is a challenge. The evidence is spotty and still coming in and many of the conclusions are still very tentative. There is, however, a solid structure of useful hypotheses in this field, which are the results of decades of patient labor by specialists from many nations.
The prehistorian borrows his chronology mainly from the geologist (geochronolqgy) and to a much lesser extent from the specialists in fossil animal and plant forms. The solar radiation method of the geologist employs astronomical data to mark the succeeding glaciation and their recessions during the Pleistocene or Great Ice Age which commenced some years ago. For more recent periods—back to 15.000 BC, more or less the use of varved-clay analysts(study of stratification) and the study of the radiation disintegration of Carbon 14 afford a some more precise chronology.
These methods are highly technical and some-what imprecise; the geologists themselves are not in complete agreement.
The students of fossil animal and plant forms Which were both more widely spread and more numerous than prehistoric man and his work have developed a useful chronology. Human cultural remains found in conjunction with plant or animal fossil types can thus be roughly dated. In North America, tree ring analysis has been employed to date findings with considerable precision some 3,000 years. None of these dating systems (with the exception of tree ring analysis) is at all exact and the prehistorians must perforce continually revise their estimates of chronology in the light of further finds and more refined analysis. It is therefore simpler to arrange prehistoric cultures in an approximate series than it is to date each step in the series.