First Things First

     After reading the first three chapters, I was really surprised by all the new things that I learned. Honestly, I am not a history fanatic, most of the time it is hard for me to remember a lot of the things I read in history books, but this time it was different. It was really easy for me to understand the readings and I also enjoyed it. It is important for everyone to have an idea of where we come from or how everything started. We sometimes don't realize, that it was not always easy for people to survive and how hard they had it back then, it kind of makes you appreciate more what we have and the times we are living at.
     The first chapter, explains in detail the Paleolithic Era or "Old Stone Age", it talks about how often history books neglect this long phase of the human journey and instead choose to begin the story with the coming of agriculture, because its people did not write. But the Paleolithic era was really important for human history, because I feel it explains the evolution of us, and how everything started. Africa, is considered the place where the human revolution occurred, where culture, defined as learned or invented ways of living, became more important than biology in shaping behavior.From Africa, human migration led first to the Middle East and from there westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.Like all human cultures, the Paleolithic societies also had rules and structures. One thing that really surprised me was that relationships between women and men usually were far more equal, as they were the primary food gatherers; women provided the bulk of family income. There life expectancy was low, it was around 35 years on average, which is kind of sad, but I think it was mainly due to their living styles. It's amazing to discover how these civilizations created methods of survival, in order to continue the growth of population, they were the ones that started civilizations they shaped and formed in various different ways.
    The second chapter is focused on the Neolithic or Agricultural revolution, and the new relationship between humankind and other living things.The neolithic age was summed up with the term "intensification" that means getting more for less, in this case more food and resources, way more from a much smaller area of land than it was possible with a gathering and hunting technology like in the Paleolithic era. The most amazing feature of this era is that it happened, separately and independently, in many widely scattered parts of the world, and all of this took place at roughly the same time.The agricultural revolution took shape in different ways in different parts of the world. The Fertile Crescent was one of the most favored areas and the first one to experience a full agricultural revolution,this area consist of Iraq, Syria, Israel/palestine, and southern Turkey, nowadays.As we can see Agriculture was a really important part of human history, because it made possible ansd increase in population far beyond what a hunting and gathering economy could support, and it enabled human beings to manipulate both plants and animals for their own purposes far more than ever before.
      The third chapter talks about civilizations, as described in the chapter by Strayer humans began to become unequal.  By this time there was more technology, more productive economies and greater wealth.  When  I started reading about this I started to understand where it all started, I wish that the Paleolithic era of equality would have trascended to now a days, but unfortunately we where not that lucky.It also makes me think about the origination of prejudice, which it is more commonly related to more modern times.Since the early civilizations we can  clearly see how the development of societies has also lead to the negative attribute of humans to mistreat each other but we can also see the positive developments such as language, accounting and social structure. It is amazing to learn from our past and how it influenced what we are now.