Look past the urban centers, the Internet, bullet trains, cars, and tall ships to a time before civilization – to the Stone Age, about two and a half million years ago. Pause, look around, and get ready to move forward. For kids studying pre-historic times, this issue follows humanlike species and Homo sapiens from the Stone Age through the Agricultural Revolution, and chronicles major changes in the development of tools, modes of survival, and culture.
Kids fascinated by survival in pre-historic times will enjoy reading about the Neanderthals, about how fire developed, and about how Homo sapiens changed from scavengers to hunter-gatherers able to hunt mammoths many times their size. Visually oriented kids will enjoy the maps showing human migration and captions describing the people on different continents.
Kids who want to know details about how we come by our knowledge of early people will enjoy taking in images and text that depict researchers at work collecting samples for carbon-dating and DNA analysis. For kids curious about the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers, they can read about how the change led to the growth of villages and towns, to the domestication of sheep and goats, even to a change in the clothing people wore, and the beginnings of a class system.
8 Topics in this unit
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Meet the Hunter-Gatherers
Imagine that winter is nearly here, and your clan has collected and eaten all the edible p ...
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Here Comes Homo Sapiens
Homo sapiens (“wise person”) first came on the scene about 200,000 years ago, ...
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Who Lived in the Stone Age?
When you think of something “old,” you might think about last year's shoes ...
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The Mystery of Prehistory
Analyzing evidence isn’t just the secret to solving crimes on TV. Archaeologists ana ...
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The Stone Age Toolbox
It’s hard to believe that these simple tools represented the first technological rev ...
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The Agricultural Revolution
If you lived 10,000 years ago, you might have never traveled. Sitting around the fire pit, ...
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From Farm to Village
People had time for a lot of new things once they didn’t have to spend all their tim ...
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The First Towns
Eventually, many farming communities that did well grew into larger communities, expanding ...
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