to Turkey. This big-brained branch of the family arose about 150,000 years ago in Europe. After swapping some genes with our species, Neanderthals died out perhaps as recently as 28,000 years ago.
While Neanderthals were still in their prime, glaciers receded, and anatomically modern folks migrated into the Neanderthal part of the world. The two kinds of humans coexisted for thousands of years, both leaving evidence of their camps among the same hills, valleys, and caves. It’s perhaps inevitable that they interbred, but nobody knows how well they got along. Did modern humans wipe out their Neanderthal cousins over centuries of brutal genocide? Did the newcomers have better survival skills?
If it bothers you that Neanderthals mated with people like us, it shouldn’t. They had big brains — maybe bigger than ours — and they did some rather modern things, such as burying their dead with flowers and ochre (a reddish clay used like body paint). They made tools and art, too, although some researchers argue that they may have borrowed ideas from their more “modern” neighbors.
Neanderthals lived over a wide geographical area, but not as wide as that inhabited in a relatively short time by their successors. Our kind evolved in Africa, where earlier hominids also originated. Then they migrated on their two spindly legs not just into the Mideast and Europe, where the Neanderthals had been coping with ice ages, but over all the other continents except Antarctica.
Talking like no one had before
Before creating counting devices and pictures on rocks, human beings accomplished a more remarkable feat: They talked. Other species communicate with noises, and some (birds and certain monkeys, for example) have complex vocabularies. But no other creature has anything as versatile or expressive as human language.
Scientists don’t know when language happened. No one can tell whether the first anatomically modern humans were able to make all the sounds that their descendants do, because soft tissues such as the tongue and larynx rot away, even when bones fossilize. We don’t know how well, or even whether, Neanderthals and Denovisans talked. It seems likely that they did. Yet whenever it came about, nuanced language brought huge change. As people gave specific meanings to combinations of vocal sounds, they were devising sound symbols. As with some other species, a noise stood for a thing, an action, or an emotion. But humans got fancy with their noisemaking. They went beyond warning about predators and calling the children to dinner and progressed to sharing more complicated information.
People began to amass knowledge— not just as individuals, but as societies. They could always learn by watching and doing; now they could also understand by being told. The how-to genre was born.
Through language, early humans benefited from the experiences of tribe members who were no longer living. After tribes built lore (a body of shared knowledge), they could embellish it, spinning hunting stories that did more than help successive generations find and kill large prey, for example. Within several generations, tribes surely had more fanciful folktales about ancestors, heroes, creation, spirits, and gods who commanded the stars and the Earth. After writing developed, it was possible for cultures to leave a permanent record of events.
Herodotus the Greek, credited as the father of history, took his subject to the level of intellectual inquiry in the fifth century BC as he gathered 1,000-year-old stories from around the Mediterranean. As the body of oral and written history grew, there came a need to organize it.
Making sense of AD, BC, CE, and BCE
In 1854, scientists studying fossil skulls that were discovered in European caves, decided to name their subject Homo Neanderthalensis. Like 1492, when Columbus sailed, 1854 is AD, just like this year. AD stands for Anno Domini. That’s Latin for “Year of the Lord,” referring to the Christian era, or the time since Jesus was thought to have been born. Before that, years are designated as BC, or Before Christ. Historians now prefer CE (for Common Era) instead of AD and BCE (for Before the Common Era) instead of BC, for the obvious reason that a lot of non-Christians and non-Christian nations use the system. AD and BC, however, are what most people are used to. They’re widely understood and deeply ingrained, so I stick with them.
The years BC are figured by counting backward. That’s why the year when 32-year-old Alexander the Great died, 323 BC, is a smaller number than the year when he was born, 356 BC.
Yet Alexander never thought of himself as living in backward-counting years three centuries before Jesus. Our system of counting years didn’t come about until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII decreed it. Popes had that kind of power back then. Gregory’s system, called the Gregorian calendar, gradually became the one that most of the world uses to track appointments, supplanting older traditional calendars (and there have been many of them) for civil business, if not religious observances. The Gregorian system revised an earlier one named for Roman statesman and general Julius Caesar, which in turn replaced an even older Roman calendar.
In this book, you can assume that a four-digit year without two capital letters following it is AD. So, I may tell you that William the Conqueror, who ruled the kingdom of Normandy, successfully invaded England in 1066. For the years 1–999 AD, I use AD — for example, Norsemen invaded Ireland and began building the city of Dublin around 831 AD. I also include the initials for all the BC years. Examples: Saul was anointed the first king of the Israelites in about 1050 BC, and Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, the year before the calendar named for him took effect. (The reason why I say around and about for the dates of Dublin’s founding and King Saul’s coronation is that nobody knows the dates for sure.)
Another thing that may be confusing is the way centuries are named and numbered. When you see a reference to the 1900s, it doesn’t mean the same thing as the 19th century. The 1900s are the 20th century. The 20th century was the one in which four-digit year numbers started with 19; the 19th century was the one in which years started with 18, and so on.
You may wonder why this century, the one with 20 starting every year, isn’t called the 20th. That’s because theoretically, the first century (according to Pope Gregory and his advisers, anyway) began in the year 1. When the numbers got up to 100 (or, technically, 101), we were in the second century, and so on. Figuring the centuries BC works the same way (in reverse, of course): The 21st century BC is the one with years starting with 20, just like the 21st century AD.
Dividing Time into Eras … and Giving Them Names
If history teachers told you that medieval means the period between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Renaissance (the 14th century), you could have thrown the author H.G. Wells at them.
Not literally, of course. (Let Mr. Wells rest in peace.) Yet it may surprise students of history and certain teachers to find out that historians disagree about when the period called medieval began. Wells (1866–1946) is better remembered today as a pioneering science-fiction writer, author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds (1898), but he also wrote a three-volume Outline of History (1920). He begins the second volume of this major history of the world, called Medieval History, at 300 BC with the rise, not the fall, of Rome’s empire.
So what? That’s my point. Wells’s work is just one illustration of the fact that history is full of periods divided by arbitrary lines etched in the shifting sands of time.
Sorting ancient from modern
“That’s ancient history, Pops.” In American movies from the 1930s through the 1950s, a teenage character often says something like that to an adult, thus dismissing an event that the adult remembers as being too long ago to matter. Ancient is another relative term, like recent, modern, and medieval. To a person