Stages of settlement of ancient Paleolithic people. The settlement of peoples on Earth - travel, migration or the way home? When did the settlement of ancient people begin?

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Elabuga Institute of Kazan Federal University

on the topic "The origin of Homo sapiens and the ancient settlement of people"

Work completed

1st year student 474 groups

Nuzhina V. N.

Checked Salimgarayeva E.M.

Elabuga 2015

Introduction

Every person, as soon as he began to realize himself as an individual, was visited by the question “where did we come from?” Although the question sounds very simple, there is no single answer to it. Nevertheless, this problem - the problem of the emergence and development of man - is dealt with by a number of sciences. In particular, in the science of anthropology, there is even such a concept as anthropogenesis, that is, the process of separating man from the animal world. Other aspects of human origins are studied by philosophy, theology, history, and paleontology. In this regard, there are a number of different theories explaining the emergence of man on Earth, but the main ones are the following:

Evolutionary theory;

Theory of Creation;

External intervention theory;

Theory of spatial anomalies.

1. Evolutionary theory

Evolutionary theory suggests that humans evolved from higher primates - great apes - through gradual modification under the influence of external factors and natural selection.

The evolutionary theory of anthropogenesis has an extensive range of diverse evidence - paleontological, archaeological, biological, genetic, cultural, psychological and others. However, much of this evidence can be interpreted ambiguously, allowing opponents of evolutionary theory to challenge it.

According to this theory, the following main stages of human evolution take place:

Time of successive existence of anthropoid ancestors of humans (Australopithecus);

The existence of the most ancient people: Pithecanthropus (the most ancient man, or Proteranthropus or Archanthropus);

The stage of the Neanderthal, that is, ancient man or paleoanthrope.

Development of modern people (neoanthropes).

Origin of Homo sapiens

1. Time of occurrence

If we discard the biblical legend about the creation of man, then the question of the time of the appearance of modern man on our planet began to occupy the minds of scientists relatively recently - some 40-50 years ago, since before that the antiquity of the human race in general was discussed mainly. Even in serious scientific literature, the trend of increasing the geological age of Homo sapiens prevailed for a very long time and, in accordance with this, anthropological finds with unclear or insufficiently clear geological dating were used. The list of such finds is quite long, it gradually changed - new finds took the place of discredited finds, but all subsequent studies did not confirm the extreme antiquity of those bone remains that can be attributed to modern humans. The presapien hypothesis reflects the same trend, but does not receive morphological support; the finds on which she relies, although dated impeccably and are truly ancient, their attribution to modern people and not paleoanthropes raises the most serious doubts.

All the oldest finds in the Upper Paleolithic layers are dated in absolute numbers to 25,000-28,000, and sometimes 40,000 years, i.e., practically synchronous or almost synchronous with the finds of the latest paleoanthropes. The only convincing exception is the one made in 1953. A.A. Formozov found in Staroselye near Bakhchisarai. The modern appearance of a 1.5-year-old baby discovered in the Mousterian layer does not raise the slightest doubt, although Ya.Ya., who examined it. Roginsky noted several primitive features on the skull: moderate development of the chin protrusion, developed frontal tubercles, large teeth. The dating of this find in absolute terms is not clear, but the inventory found with it shows that it is significantly older than the Upper Paleolethic sites with bone remains of modern people. This fact firmly establishes the synchronicity of the most ancient forms of modern man and the latest groups of paleoanthropes, their existence over a fairly significant period of time. At first glance, this circumstance seems somewhat unexpected, but it’s worth thinking about how it loses its apparent paradox: the restructuring of morphology is a long process, as soon as we accept the presence of the Neanderthal phase in human evolution, we must conclude that the distinctive morphological features of Homo sapiens were formed within groups paleoanthropes, and if so, then the existence of paleoanthropes and modern man at some point in time seems theoretically inevitable. Within the framework of this view, the explanation noted by Ya.Ya easily finds itself. Roginsky, the similarity of the skull from Staroselye with a child’s skull from the Skhul cave in Palestine, where morphologically progressive Neanderthal skeletons were found. By the way, the coexistence of ancient primitive and later morphological progressive forms was a characteristic feature of the evolution of hominids at almost all stages of their history.

So, the formation of Homo sapiens on the basis of paleoanthropus led to the coexistence of late progressive forms of Neanderthals and emerging small groups of modern humans for several thousand years. The process of replacing an old species with a new one was quite lengthy and, therefore, complex.

2. Formation factors

What are the driving forces, those factors that caused the restructuring of the morphology of the paleoanthropus in this particular direction, and not in any other direction, created the preconditions for the displacement of the paleoanthropus by modern man and determined the success of this process? Since anthropologists began to think about this process, and this happened relatively recently, a variety of reasons have been cited for the change in the morphology of paleoanthropus and its approach to the morphology of modern humans.

Sinanthropus researcher F. Weindenreich considered the most significant difference between modern man and paleoanthropus to be the perfect brain in its structure - with more developed hemispheres, increased in height, with a reduced occipital region. In general, the correctness of this view of F. Weidenreich is beyond doubt. But from this correct statement, he could not move on to revealing its cause and answer the question: why does the brain itself improve, changing its structure. F. Weidenreich believed that it was characterized by a tendency of linear progressive development, that is, it stood in the position of orthogenesis. Meanwhile, the orthogenetic theory does not explain anything. Close to the point of view of F. Weindenreich is the concept of P. Teilhard de Charder, who considered the brain and developed thinking to be the main properties of Homo sapiens and believed that it was their evolution that caused the replacement of paleoanthropus by modern man, but could not name the reasons for this evolution.

In Soviet anthropological literature of the 30s and later, in connection with the development of the labor theory of anthropogenesis, great attention was paid to the formation of the hand in the process of anthropogenesis, especially in its later stages. Great excitement in this area was caused by the discovery of G.A. Bonch-Osmolovsky in 1924, the bone remains of a paleoanthropus in the Kiik-Koba grotto. The skeleton and hands were not preserved, but the bones of the foot and hand were found. A detailed study showed that it differed in relative width and originality in structure compared to the hand of a modern person. On this basis, the opinion was expressed and repeatedly repeated that the most characteristic feature of modern man is a perfect hand, capable of a wide variety of labor operations. All other features of the morphology of modern humans have developed in connection with the transformation of the hand and are connected with it by a close morphological correlation. One might think, although this was not stated by the supporters of this theory, that the brain improved under the influence of numerous irritations coming from the hand, and the number of these irritations constantly increased in the process of labor and mastery of new labor operations. But this hypothesis also encounters objections of both factual and theoretical nature. The main cardinal changes in the hand occur in earlier stages of anthropogenesis than the transition from paleoanthropus to modern man. In addition, if we consider the restructuring of the brain only as a consequence of the evolution of the hand in the process of adaptation to labor operations, then it should have been reflected mainly in the development of the motor areas of the cerebral cortex, and not in the growth of the frontal lobes - the centers of associative thinking. And the morphological differences between Homo sapiens and paleoanthropus lie not only in the structure of the brain. It is unclear, for example, how the gracefulness of the skeleton or the change in the proportions of the body of a modern person compared to a Neanderthal are related to the restructuring of the hand. Thus, the hypothesis that connects the uniqueness of Homo sapiens primarily with the development of the hand in the process of mastering labor operations also cannot be accepted, just like the hypothesis stated above, which sees the main reason for this uniqueness in the development and improvement of the brain.

3. Local variants within the Neanderthal species

The solution to the problem of the centers of origin of modern man is inextricably linked with the systematics of the Neanderthal species, with the number of local variants within it, and most importantly, with their systematic position and relationship to the direct line of human evolution. All these issues have received wide coverage in the anthropological literature.

Within the Neanderthal species, in our understanding, several groups can be distinguished that have morphological, geographical and chronological specificity. European Neanderthals, forming a compact geographical group, are divided, according to popular opinion, into two types, unique morphologically and existing at different times. The literary tradition connects the identification of these types with the name of F. Vandenreich, who wrote an article on this topic in 1940, but M.A. Gremyatsky carried it out earlier in a report given at the Institute of Anthropology of Moscow State University in 1937. Unfortunately, the text of this report was published only 10 years later and remained little known to Western European and American science. The identified types are called by various researchers “classical” or “typical” and “atypical” Neanderthals, the “Chappelle and Ferassi group” and the “Ehringsdorf group” after the names of the places of the most important finds, etc. The second group, according to established tradition, is supposedly earlier; it dates back to the period of the Rissian glaciation (about 110-250 thousand years ago) and the Riss-Würm interglacial. The first group belongs to a later period and dates from the beginning and middle of the Würm glaciation (from 70 to 110 thousand years ago). Chronological differences are accompanied by morphological ones, but the latter, paradoxically, do not correspond to the expected ones and characterize both groups in the reverse order compared to geological age: later Neanderthals turn out to be more primitive, earlier ones - progressive. The brain of the latter, however, is somewhat smaller in volume than that of the late Neanderthals, but more progressive in structure, the skull is higher, the relief of the skull is less (with the exception of the mastoid processes, which are more developed - a typical human feature), a mental triangle is visible on the lower jaw, the size of the facial skeleton is smaller.

The origins and genealogical relationships of these two groups of European Neanderthals have been discussed many times from a variety of angles. It has been hypothesized that late Neanderthals acquired their distinctive characteristics under the influence of the very cold, harsh glacial climate of Central Europe. Their role in the formation of modern man was less than that of earlier, more progressive forms, which were the direct and main ancestors of modern people. However, against such an interpretation of the morphology and genealogical relationships of chronological groups within European Neanderthals, the consideration was put forward that they were geographically distributed in the same territory and the early forms could also be exposed to the cold climate in the periglacial regions, like the later ones. General theoretical objections were also raised against the attempt to consider the later paleoanthropes as a side branch that did not take part at all or took little part in the formation of the physical type of Homo sapiens. Thus, the question of the degree of participation of both groups of European paleoanthropes in the process of formation of Homo sapiens remains open; rather, it should be expected that the late Neanderthals could also have been the direct basis for the formation of the physical type of modern man in Europe.

It is interesting to note that the differences listed above were stated by different authors mainly when comparing individual skulls “by eye”, while ignoring the obvious circumstance that classical Neanderthals are represented predominantly by male skulls, and atypical ones by female skulls. If we take this circumstance into account and calculate the averages for the groups, then with an insignificant number of observations to which each group is represented, it is impossible to confirm the given list of differences by comparing the averages: the differences are random and multidirectional. Their assessment using simple statistical techniques showed that the total differences are approximately equal to those that separate modern racial branches, and, therefore, there is no reason to talk about two groups of different levels of evolutionary development within the Neanderthal species from a morphological point of view. There are no more reasons for this in the geography of the finds (the areoles of both groups approximately coincide) and their chronology (the time of their existence also more or less coincides within wide limits).

Of course, local variants could exist within European Neanderthals, confined to individual populations and their groups, but in general the Neanderthal population of Europe formed a fairly homogeneous group. The geography of this group does not fully correspond to the geographical framework of Europe, and for this reason we can only conditionally call it European. Calculations and comparative comparisons have demonstrated similarities with this group of North African finds also known to us from Jebel Irhud and one of the skulls found during excavations of the Skhul cave in Palestine, the skull that is designated in the scientific literature as Skhul IX. Thus, the European group territorially covered North Africa and some coastal part of the territory of the eastern Mediterranean already within the Asian continent.

However, even on the territory of Europe, in its southernmost regions, there lived forms that, based on morphological characteristics, could not be included in the European group. We are talking about a skull from Petralona in Greece. The skull was found in 1959 by one of the workers who took part in the excavations of the Petralona Cave, and therefore its stratigraphic position, and therefore its chronological dating, is not entirely clear. The originality of its morphology was reflected in estimates of its position within the Neanderthal species. The authors of the first descriptions and measurements, P. Kokkoros, A. Kanellis and A. Savvas, as always happens in such cases, limited themselves to only the most preliminary diagnosis and attributed the skull to the group of classical Neanderthals of Europe. It is quite obvious that this was due to the hypnosis of the undoubtedly primitive features of the structure of the skull in comparison with the modern one, its undoubtedly Neanderthal features. However, who reviewed the works of Greek scientists M.I. Uryson did not agree with their diagnosis and was the first to note the presence of signs that brought the Petralona skull closer to African forms. The final conclusion of M.I. Urysona: The Petralonian skull represents an intermediate form between African and classical European Neanderthals. E. Breitinger, in a report at the VIII International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences in Moscow in August 1964, specially emphasized what M.I. Urynson similarity with African forms.

A. Poulianos, who later became involved in the study of the Petralona skull, using first previous and then independent measurements of the skull, challenged this point of view and first brought the skull closer to European Neanderthals, emphasizing, however, its originality. In a number of his works, devoted not so much to a detailed comparative morphological study of the skull, but to a thorough characterization of the circumstances of its discovery, including geological and paleontological study of the cave, the chronological age of the skull is determined to be 700,000 years old and it is assumed that it belonged to a representative of an independent species within the genus Archanthropus or Pithecanthropus - Archantropus europeus petraloniensis. The issue of the Greek journal "Anthropus", in which these works of A. Poulianos were published, contains a large number of paleontological, stratigraphic and geophysical data, generally confirming this version. Both the dating and the taxonomic diagnosis, if correct, place the find in an outstanding place in the paleoanthropology of Europe, making it one of the oldest. Also dated using the paleomagnetic method are stalactites that fell from the ceiling of the cave; a skull was found on one of them. Without being personally familiar with the cave and the circumstances of the excavations, it is difficult to oppose anything definite to these conclusions, but, logically speaking, without special evidence it is difficult to accept the point of view about the complete synchronicity of the age of the stalactites that fell from the ceiling of the cave and the skull. N. Xirotiris, in a report at a symposium on problems of anthropogenesis, held in May 1981 in Weimar in the GDR, raised very convincing doubts about such an ancient age of the Petralona find, which, in his opinion, is one of the oldest Neanderthal finds in Europe, but the geological antiquity of which , according to the most wasteful estimates, does not exceed 150,000-200,000 years.

The morphology of the find also does not indicate the exceptional primitiveness of the Petralona skull. After mineral deposits were removed from almost all the bones of the skull, it was subjected to repeated and very detailed measurements in 1979-1980, which finally gives a fairly complete summary of dimensions without conditional corrections for the calcareous coating of the bones of the facial skeleton and cranial vault. Based on a comparative analysis of these measurements, the researchers come to the conclusion that the find has a number of primitive characteristics, but still, like all American authors using Emir’s taxonometric scheme, they include it in the taxometric category Homo sapiens. K. Stinger had previously confirmed this diagnosis using summary statistical comparisons. Both statistical and geographical comparisons of the Petralona skull with other forms showed that it bears the greatest similarities to African Neanderthals, most notably the Broken Hill skull. Certain similarities with European finds also exist, but they should not particularly surprise us: it is very likely that on the outskirts of the ranges of European and African paleoanthropes, a crossbreeding process took place, leading to the appearance of intermediate forms. In general, the Petralona skull, to which we have devoted much attention in connection with the ongoing debate surrounding its dating and taxonomic placement, should be included in the second African local group within the Neanderthal species, to the characterization of which we now proceed.

The morphology of African Neanderthals is extremely distinctive. The reconstruction of the so-called Afrikanthropus, carried out by G. Weinert, is highly problematic, since it is based on a large number of fragments that are not completely or not at all in contact with each other. The structure of skulls from Broken Hill (Zambia), Saldanha (South Africa) and Afar (Ethiopia) can be characterized much more fully. They are characterized by a combination of highly primitive features, a relatively small volume of the brain and its primitive structure, exceptionally powerful development of the relief of the skull, in the Rhodesian (as the skull from Broken Hill is usually called in paleoanthropological literature after the old name of the city of Kabwe in Zambia) - also huge facial skeleton with some progressive features. M.A. Gremyatsky was, it seems, the first to note the similarity of African Neanderthals with the skulls from Ngandong. But the latter, as we saw above, should be classified not as a Neanderthal group, but as a group of archanthropes. Some similarity with the skulls from Broken Hill and Saldanha is reflected only in the structure of the skull (strong development of the skull relief, powerful sagittal ridge), since the facial skeleton was preserved only in the skull from Broken Hill. Another find with a facial skeleton is a completely new discovery of an incompletely preserved skull, reconstructed from many fragments, at the Bodo site in Afar, Ethiopia. The dating of the skull is the Middle Pleistocene, that is, according to the authors of the find, approximately within the range of 150,000-600,000 years. Although measurements of the skull have not yet been published, judging by its structure, it gives the impression of a Neanderthal skull, generally similar to other representatives of this species. The interest in this find is that it confirms the group nature of the structure of the facial skeleton in the Rhodesian. G. Conroy writes that “the dominant characteristic of the face... is its exceptional massiveness.” The originality of the African group, as already emphasized, is undoubtedly, and it can be identified as the second local variant of paleoanthropes. Previously, one might have thought that chronologically this was a late variant, apparently partially synchronous with the latest finds of European Neanderthals. But now that new data have been published on the geological age of the Broken Hill skull, which allows it to be removed from modern times by 125,000 years, and now that we have the Middle Pleistocene and Neanderthal-type skull from Bodo, the geological age of the entire group should be increased. In this regard, certain morphological observations on the structure of the skull of African Pithecanthropus, in particular the skull of Olduvai II, acquire special significance; the exceptional massiveness of the cranial relief in this case is complemented by the presence of a significant sagittal ridge, which is extremely pronounced on the skulls from Broken Hill and Saldanha. Perhaps this is a morphological hint at some specific genetic connection between African Pithecanthropus and African Neanderthals within the same continent.

The third quite clearly defined variant in the composition of paleoanthropes is the Skhul group (Mugaret es-Skhul cave in Palestine, excavated by D. Garrot in 1931-1932). Several skeletons from this cave, apparently synchronous with later finds of European Neanderthals, immediately attracted attention with their extremely progressive structure. Skull Skhul IX, as we remember, is excluded from this group and included in the group of European Neanderthals. But the skulls of adult individuals, designated as Skhul IV and Skhul V, are typical of this group and are precisely distinguished by their progressive morphology, approaching the sapient type. There is also a high cranial vault with a relatively slightly sloping frontal bone and a large brain volume.

Until 1871, when Charles Darwin’s work “The Origin of Species” was published, there was even a debate about “who are you and where are you from?” Not only was it not supposed to, but it was also very dangerous. Subsequently, many other hypotheses about the origin of people appeared, but interest in this problem especially increased at the end of the last century, when the inconsistency of Charles Darwin’s theory specifically in relation to the origin and evolution of man became obvious. Being a highly educated scientist, Charles Darwin, pointing out in his work that each species must have been preceded by a parent species almost identical to it, at the same time noted: “If it can be proven that at least one complex organ did not arise as a result of numerous successive minor changes , then my theory will fail completely." Darwin's assumption turned out to be prophetic: modern research confirms that most species replaced each other unexpectedly abruptly, hardly changing during their existence and just as unexpectedly disappearing. One such example is the Neanderthals, who, according to scientists, did not progress at all as they developed, but, on the contrary, degraded.

Thus, the question of the origin of man still remains open, but, from the point of view of the totality of existing hypotheses, it comes down to either the earthly or cosmic origin of man. In any case, there is a connection with the latter, because the Earth is an integral part of the Universe, which was formed about 15 billion years ago and, in addition, blue-green algae, which are widely represented on our planet, were found in meteorites.

In the totality of hypotheses of the “earthly” origin of man, there are almost no discrepancies in two aspects: man “came out” of Africa; The first intelligent people appeared on the planet about 40 thousand years ago. The African trace also does not have a continuous chain of stages of human evolution, but, unlike other continents, the most ancient remains of creatures have been found that could, under certain conditions, become the ancestors of man. Of greatest interest from this point of view are the finds of English father and son archaeologists Louis Leakey and Richard Leakey, made by them in the 1960s-1970s in the eastern regions of Africa. The age of the oldest of these remains of ancient people that they found was about 4 million years old, and Louis Leakey called the creatures to which these remains belonged Homo habilis (handy man), since primitive artificial tools made made of stone.

The American scientist A. Wilson, experts from the Vatican and a number of others also adhere to the African trace in the origin of people, and most often determine the time period of its evolution to be approximately 200 thousand years. Along with this, American geneticists, based on the extreme complexity of genes in people of all races, claim that all of humanity descended from one woman.

The most likely area of initial settlement of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens) is considered to be a vast area adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea. From here he began to quickly settle in various directions, which subsequently became the main reason for the emergence of races. It has been fully proven that one of the ways for the first people to get to America about 30 thousand years ago was the Bering Isthmus, which existed at that time. The main evidence of this is the great similarity of the culture and life of people during this period of time in the northeastern regions of Eurasia and northwestern North America. The first settlements in the southern regions of Latin America appeared about 10 thousand years ago. Thus, it took man approximately 20 thousand years to cross the American continents from north to south. Along with the above, many experts do not reject the possibility of people getting to America, before its official discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1498, also by water. However, there are no specific documents for this yet.

Man came to Australia by water about 20 thousand years ago and, thus, this became the final date from which human society began to explore all parts of the world, with the exception of Antarctica.

Along with supporters of the existence of a single vast area of origin of Homo sapiens, who are called “monocentrists,” there is a group of scientists who are of the opinion that there is a possibility of the existence of several similar areas separated from each other. Representatives of this trend, called “polycentrists,” most often proceed from the presence of four such areas. They are based on the existence on Earth of four species of apes, although Charles Darwin already proved the impossibility of the origin of Homo sapiens from them. The weakest link of polycentrism is the biological similarity of people of different racial groups, as a result of which, when mixed, they have offspring with new racial characteristics that are capable of reproducing themselves. This is precisely the main proof of the unity of origin of Homo sapiens.

The appearance of Homo sapiens in the history of earthly life was both accidental and not accidental. Swimming worms with a rod-shaped intestinal outgrowth (notochord) were not the most advanced Cambrian animals. They became easy prey for more complex arthropods and anomalocaridids. However, the internal support that arose in them predetermined the possibilities for further growth (and an increase in brain size). And phosphate reserves deposited in the internal skeleton eventually turned out to be in demand to maintain a constant body temperature.

On the contrary, arthropods found themselves hostage to their own exoskeleton. Devonian lobefingers were inferior in jaw strength and speed to sharks, and possibly to plate-skinned fish. But, pressed to the shore, they produced descendants who came onto land. The beast-like animals were forced to hide in the forests and only crawl out of their holes at night, where they were driven by agile and powerful dinosaurs. As a result, warm-bloodedness arose, which ultimately helped them survive the Late Cretaceous crisis. The replacement of eggs by placenta and viviparity was another important step on the path to brainy mammals. Arboreal "rodents" - primates hid in the trees from rapidly developing predators, but acquired not only a grasping limb - a hand, but also the perception of colors, and with it - a perfect brain.

All these gradual, sometimes almost accidental acquisitions were superimposed by general patterns of animal development. Like all Cenozoic mammals, primates increased in size, speed of movement, and increased independence from external conditions. Essentially, only man and his “cousin” the Neanderthal were able to take root in almost eternal snow and frost. But the Neanderthal achieved this due to physiology - a long and at the same time wide nose, in which cold air warmed up, and body mass, which better retained heat. These temporary advantages apparently ruined him with the onset of the thaw.

Transitions from unicellularity to multicellularity and from cold-bloodedness to warm-bloodedness required a 10-fold increase in energy expenditure. In the first case, such an increase was associated with the transition to oxygen respiration, which required 14 times more food per unit of energy expenditure. Industrial man has become the same threshold phenomenon.

All previous lines of development have converged in man. In many of its indicators it surpassed almost all other species. It has the largest brain relative to the weight of its entire body. Brain volume increases in a line from chimpanzees (300 - 400 cm3) to australopithecus (380 - 450 cm3) and humans (460 - 2000 cm3 in different successive species).

The total mass of the human race has been continuously increasing since at least the middle of the Neogene period (4 million years ago). The number of Australopithecus remains ranges from 120 to 160 individuals. It can be assumed that their number was approximately the same as that of modern anthropoids - 10-20 thousand individuals. Mastery of fire and means of driven hunting could serve as a prerequisite for increasing the number of individuals in the settlement. In the Early Paleolithic (Stone Age) there were about 125 thousand human individuals on Earth. In the Middle Paleolithic, an increase in population density and the level of technical equipment made it possible to begin the development of mountainous and high-mountain regions. The number of Neanderthals was 300 thousand people, or 1 person per 8 km 2. With the retreat of the glacier, “Homo sapiens” appeared. In the Late Paleolithic, people entered the Arctic Circle and settled down in the Arctic tundra. By the end of the Paleolithic, all land was inhabited by humans. The number reached 3.3 - 5.3 million people, and the density was 1 person per 2.5 km 2. At the same time, “trade” began: local stone tools and preparations for them began to be exchanged for others from distant centers of culture.

Since then, “homo sapiens” has become one of the most widespread species on our planet. At the beginning of the 21st century, the world's population exceeded 6 billion. This means that for each person there was 0.02 km2 of land left, including Antarctica.

In terms of average life expectancy, humans have also surpassed all species except some plants, sponges and reptiles. Australopithecines lived on average 17.2 - 22.2 years, Paleolithic Neanderthals - 31.3 - 37.5, Mesolithic people - 26.5 - 44.3, Neolithic and Bronze Age people - 27.0 - 49.9. Currently, there is quite a significant variation in this indicator across countries. In general, life expectancy is increasing, especially in economically developed countries. Not long ago, a historical experiment conducted with Germany showed that in its more prosperous western part (Germany), men lived 2.5 years and women 7 years longer than in its less fortunate eastern neighbor (GDR). This unintentional experience showed that the duration of human life now directly depends on the share of energy expenditure attributable to it.

Man is the only species that consumes more energy than its physiology requires. Each person uses between 8,400 and 17,000 kilojoules per day. The gods deservedly punished the fire thief - Prometheus. The uncontrolled consumption of energy by man began with the fire that broke out in the cave. Already Pithecanthropus and his contemporaries (1.42 million years ago) learned to use fire. 400 thousand years ago, in the north-west of what is now France, rhinoceroses were roasted on the fire, and whole carcasses. (So the famous art of French chefs has very ancient roots.) In the Middle Ages, almost the entire population was engaged in agriculture (now 3 - 5%). Already by that time, the cultivation of rice fields and keeping livestock increased the flow of methane, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere. The flow of anthropogenic gases especially increased during the combustion of sulfur-containing coals, oil and lignites.

Being just one of the animal species, man himself has become a powerful geological factor. It extracts from the earth's crust everything that has accumulated in it over 4 billion years thanks to the activity of the biosphere, and sprays it back into the atmosphere and hydrosphere. Perhaps this is its purpose as a species? Having undermined its own resources, it will disappear from the face of the Earth, but will give rise to a new round in the history of earthly life.

Ancient settlement of people. Migration processes in ancient times. A little theory about anthropogenesis

For many reasons, theoretical developments in the field of evolutionary anthropology are constantly ahead of the current level of evidence. Having developed in the 19th century. Under the direct influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and having finally taken shape in the first half of the 20th century, the stage theory of anthropogenesis reigned supreme for quite a long time. Its essence boils down to the following: man in his biological development has gone through several stages, separated from each other by evolutionary leaps.

· first stage - archanthropes (pithecanthropus, synanthropus, atlantropus),

· second stage - paleoanthropes (Neanderthals, whose name comes from the first find near the city of Neanderthal),

· the third stage - neoanthropus (a modern human), or Cro-Magnon (named after the location of the first fossils of modern humans, made in the Cro-Magnon Grotto).

It should be noted that this is not a biological classification, but a stage scheme, which did not accommodate the entire morphological diversity of paleoanthropological finds already in the 50s. XX century Note that the classification scheme of the hominid family is still an area of heated scientific debate.

The last half century, and especially the last decade of research, have brought a large number of discoveries that have qualitatively changed the general approach to solving the question of the immediate ancestors of humans, understanding the nature and paths of the process of sapientation.

According to modern concepts, evolution is not a linear process accompanied by several leaps, but a continuous, multi-level process, the essence of which can be graphically represented not in the form of a tree with a single trunk, but in the form of a bush. Thus, we are talking about network-like evolution, the essence of which is this. that at the same time evolutionarily unequal human beings, who morphologically and culturally stood at different levels of sapientation, could exist and interact.

Dispersal of Homo erectus and Neanderthals

Africa is most likely the only region in which representatives of the species Homo erectus lived in the first half a million years of their existence, although they undoubtedly could have visited neighboring regions during their migrations - Arabia, the Middle East and even the Caucasus. Paleoanthropological finds in Israel (Ubeidiya site) and in the Central Caucasus (Dmanisi site) allow us to speak about this with confidence. As for the territories of Southeast and East Asia, as well as southern Europe, the appearance of representatives of the genus Homo erectus there dates back no earlier than 1.1-0.8 million years ago, and any significant settlement of them can be attributed to the end of the Lower Pleistocene, i.e. about 500 thousand years ago.

At the later stages of its history (about 300 thousand years ago), Homo erectus (archanthropes) populated all of Africa, southern Europe and began to spread widely throughout Asia. Although their populations may have been separated by natural barriers, morphologically they represented a relatively homogeneous group.

The era of the existence of “archanthropes” gave way to the appearance about half a million years ago of another group of hominids, which are often, in accordance with the previous scheme, called paleoanthropes and whose early species, regardless of the location of discovery of bone remains, are classified in the modern scheme as Homo Heidelbergensis (Heidelberg man). This species existed approximately from 600 to 150 thousand years ago.

In Europe and Western Asia, the descendants of N. heidelbergensis were the so-called “classical” Neanderthals - Homo neandertalensis, who appeared no later than 130 thousand years ago and existed for at least 100 thousand years. Their last representatives lived in the mountainous regions of Eurasia 30 thousand years ago, if not longer.

Dispersal of modern humans

The debate about the origins of Homo sapiens is still very heated, modern solutions are very different from the views even twenty years ago. In modern science, two opposing points of view are clearly distinguished - polycentric and monocentric. According to the first, the evolutionary transformation of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens occurred everywhere - in Africa, Asia, Europe with a continuous exchange of genetic material between the population of these territories. According to another, the place of formation of neoanthropes was a very specific region from where their settlement took place, associated with the destruction or assimilation of autochthonous hominid populations. Such a region, according to scientists, is South and East Africa, where the remains of Homo sapiens are of the greatest antiquity (the Omo 1 skull, discovered near the northern coast of Lake Turkana in Ethiopia and dating back to about 130 thousand years, the remains of neoanthropes from the Klasies and Beder caves on southern Africa, dating back about 100 thousand years). In addition, a number of other East African sites contain finds comparable in age to those mentioned above. In northern Africa, such early remains of neoanthropes have not yet been discovered, although there are a number of finds of very advanced individuals in the anthropological sense, which date back to an age significantly exceeding 50 thousand years.

Outside of Africa, Homo sapiens finds similar in age to those from Southern and East Africa were found in the Middle East; they come from the Israeli caves of Skhul and Qafzeh and date back to 70 to 100 thousand years ago.

In other regions of the globe, finds of Homo sapiens older than 40-36 thousand years are still unknown. There are a number of reports of earlier finds in China, Indonesia and Australia, but all of them either do not have reliable dates or come from poorly stratified sites.

Thus, today the hypothesis about the African ancestral home of our species seems most likely, because it is there that there is the maximum number of finds that make it possible to trace in sufficient detail the transformation of local archanthropes into paleoanthropes, and the latter into neoanthropes. Genetic studies and molecular biology data, according to most researchers, also point to Africa as the original center of the emergence of Homo sapiens. Calculations by geneticists aimed at determining the likely time of the appearance of our species say that this event could have occurred in the period from 90 to 160 thousand years ago, although earlier dates sometimes appear.

If we leave the controversy aside about the exact time of the appearance of modern people, it should be said that wide spread beyond Africa and the Middle East began, judging by anthropological data, no earlier than 50-60 thousand years ago, when they colonized the southern regions of Asia and Australia. Modern people entered Europe 35-40 thousand years ago, where they then coexisted with Neanderthals for almost 10 thousand years. In the process of their settlement by different populations of Homo sapiens, they had to adapt to a variety of natural conditions, which resulted in the accumulation of more or less clear biological differences between them, which led to the formation of modern races. It cannot be ruled out that contacts with the local population of the developed regions, which, apparently, was quite diverse in anthropological terms, could have had a certain influence on the latter process.

The place of primary settlement of ancient people was a vast territory that included Africa, Western Asia, and Southern Europe. The best conditions for human life were found in the Mediterranean Sea region. Here he is noticeably different in his physical appearance from the seemingly developmentally inhibited southern Europeans, forced to adapt to the difficult conditions of the periglacial zone. It is not for nothing that the Mediterranean became the cradle of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world.

It seems possible to state with sufficient certainty that the high mountain areas were not inhabited in the Lower Paleolithic: all finds of bone remains of Australopithecus and Pithecanthropus are concentrated in the foothills at moderate altitudes above sea level. Only in the Middle Paleolithic, during the Mousterian era, the highlands were developed by human populations, for which there is direct evidence in the form of sites discovered at an altitude of over 2000 m above sea level.

It must be assumed that the dense forests of the tropical zone were also not available to humans as a regular habitat due to weak technical equipment in the Lower Paleolithic time and were developed later. In the central regions of vast deserts of the subtropical zone, for example in the Gobi Desert, there are many kilometers of areas within which no monuments have been discovered even with the most thorough exploration. The lack of water completely excluded such areas not only from the boundaries of ancient settlement, but also from a possible hunting area.

All this leads us to believe that the unevenness of settlement from the very beginning of human history was its essential characteristic: the area of ancient humanity in Paleolithic times was not continuous, it was, as they say in biogeography, lacy. The question of the ancestral home of humanity, the place where the separation of man from the animal world took place, is still, despite the abundance of works devoted to it, far from being resolved.

A huge number of Paleolithic monuments, including those of an archaic appearance, discovered on the territory of Mongolia in recent years, once again forced researchers to turn their attention to Central Asia. No less number of paleoanthropological finds on the African continent, illustrating the early stages of anthropogenesis, attracts the attention of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists to Africa, and many of them consider it the ancestral home of humanity. However, we must not forget that the Siwalik Hills, in addition to an exceptionally rich Tertiary and early Quaternary fauna, yielded bone remains of forms more ancient than australopithecines—those forms of apes that stand at the beginning of the human ancestry and directly (both morphologically and chronologically) preceded australopithecines. Thanks to these finds, the hypothesis of the South Asian ancestral home of humanity is also gaining supporters. But despite the importance of research and discussion of the problem of the ancestral home of mankind, it is only indirectly related to the topic under consideration about the ancient settlement of mankind. The only important thing is that all the supposed areas of the ancestral home are located in the tropical zone or in the adjacent subtropical zones. Apparently, this is the only zone that was mastered by man in the Lower Paleolithic, but it was mastered “inter-band”, excluding areas of high mountains, arid spaces, tropical forests, etc.

During the Middle Paleolithic era, further human exploration of the tropical zone and subtropics continued due to, so to speak, internal migrations. An increase in population density and an increase in the level of technical equipment made it possible to begin the development of mountainous areas up to the settlement of the highlands. In parallel with this, there was a process of expansion of the ecumene, an increasingly intensive spread of Middle Paleolithic groups. The geography of Middle Paleolithic sites provides indisputable evidence of the settlement of carriers of early variants of the Middle Paleolithic culture throughout Africa and Eurasia, with the possible exception of only areas beyond the Arctic Circle.

A number of indirect observations have led some researchers to the conclusion that the settlement of America was carried out in the Middle Paleolithic by groups of Neanderthals and, therefore, the Asian and American Arctic were developed by humans several tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. But all theoretical developments of this kind still require factual evidence.

The transition to the Upper Paleolithic was marked by a major milestone in the history of primitive mankind - the exploration of new continents: America and Australia. Their settlement was carried out along land bridges, the outlines of which have now been restored with a greater or lesser degree of detail using multi-stage paleogeographic reconstruction. Judging by the radiocarbon dates obtained in America and Australia, their exploration by man had already become a historical fact by the end of the Upper Paleolithic era. And it follows from this that the Upper Paleolithic people not only went beyond the Arctic Circle, but also became accustomed to the difficult conditions of the polar tundra, managing to culturally and biologically adapt to these conditions. The discovery of Paleolithic sites in the polar regions confirms what has been said.

Thus, by the end of the Paleolithic era, all the land in its more or less suitable areas for human life had been developed, and the boundaries of the ecumene coincided with the boundaries of the land. Of course, in later eras there were significant internal migrations, settlement and cultural use of previously empty territories; increasing the technical potential of society made it possible to exploit those biocenoses that could not be used before. But the fact remains: at the turn of the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the entire land within its borders was inhabited by people, and before man entered space, the historical arena of human life did not expand any significantly.

What are the consequences of the spread of humanity throughout the landmass of our planet and the settlement of a wide variety of ecological niches, including extreme ones? These consequences are revealed both in the sphere of human biology and in the sphere of human culture. Adaptation to the geographical conditions of various ecological niches, so to speak, to various anthropotopes, has led to a pronounced expansion of the range of variability of almost the entire complex of traits in modern humans, compared even with other zoological ubiquist species (species with panocumane dispersal). But the point is not only in expanding the range of variability, but also in local combinations of morphological characters, which from the very beginning of their formation had adaptive significance. These local morphophysiological complexes have been identified in the modern population and are called adaptive types. Each of these types corresponds to any landscape or geomorphological zone - arctic, temperate, continental zone and highland zone - and reveals a sum of genetically determined adaptations to the landscape-geographical, biotic and climatic conditions of this zone, expressed in physiological characteristics favorable in thermoregulatory terms combinations of sizes, etc.

A comparison of the historical stages of human settlement on the earth's surface and functional-adaptive complexes of characteristics, called adaptive types, allows us to approach the determination of the chronological antiquity of these types and the sequence of their formation. With a significant degree of certainty, we can assume that the complex of morphophysiological adaptations to the tropical zone is original, since it was formed in the areas of the original ancestral home. The Middle Paleolithic era dates back to the development of complexes of adaptations to temperate and continental climates and the highland zone. Finally, a complex of Arctic adaptations apparently developed during the Upper Paleolithic era.

The spread of humanity across the earth's surface was of great importance not only for the formation of the biology of modern man. In the context of the preconditions for the emergence of civilization that interests us, its cultural consequences look even more impressive. The settlement of new areas confronted ancient people with new, unusual hunting prey, stimulated the search for other, more advanced methods of hunting, expanded the range of edible plants, introduced them to new types of stone material suitable for tools, and forced them to invent more progressive methods of processing it.

Settlement and numbers of ancient man

The clarification of many problems is also facilitated by the intensive research work ongoing in a number of countries on the morphology of already known finds, their comparison with geological dating and the historical and cultural interpretation of accompanying archaeological equipment. As a result, we can formulate several theses that reflect the modification of our knowledge in the field of anthropogenesis over the past decades and our modern ideas.

1. The paleogeographic interpretation of the ecological niche of the Pliocene anthropoid primates in the Siwalik Hills in the southern foothills of the Himalayas, together with the expansion of knowledge of their morphology, made it possible, with fairly reliable grounds, to express the idea of an upright body position and bipedal locomotion in these primates, which many researchers believe are the immediate ancestors of humans. When walking upright, the forelimbs were free, which created a locomotor and morphological prerequisite for labor activity.

2. The dating of the most ancient finds of australopithecines in Africa is causing heated debate. If we do not follow the most extreme points of view and rely not on single dates, but on a series of dates, then in this case the antiquity of the earliest australopithecines should be determined at 4-5 million years. Geological studies in Indonesia indicate a much greater antiquity of Pithecanthropus than previously thought and bring the age of the most archaic of them to 2 million years. Approximately the same, if not more venerable, age are found in Africa, which can conditionally be classified as a group of Pithecanthropus.

3. The question of the beginning of human history is closely related to the solution to the problem of the place of Australopithecus in the taxonomic system. If they belong to the family of hominids, or humans, then the date given for their earliest geological age actually marks the beginning of human history; if not, this beginning cannot be delayed from modern times by more than 2-2.5 million years, i.e., by the age of the most ancient finds of Pithecanthropus. The boom raised in the scientific literature around the so-called Homo habilis did not receive support from a morphological point of view: it turned out to be possible to include the find in the group of Australopithecus. But the traces of purposeful activity discovered along with it, the finds of tools in layers with bone remains of australopithecines, the osteodontokeratic, or bone, industry of the southern group of African australopithecines, the morphology of the australopithecines themselves - fully mastered bipedal locomotion and a noticeably larger brain than that of apes - allow to positively resolve the issue of including Australopithecus among the hominids, and therefore date the appearance of the first people 4-5 million years ago.

4. The long-term debate in biological taxonomy between splitters (splitters) and lampers (combiners) also affected the development of the classification of fossil hominids, leading to the emergence of a scheme in which the entire family of hominids was reduced to one genus with three species - Homo australopithecus, Homo erectus (early hominids - Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus) and a person of a modern physical type (late hominids - Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic people). The scheme became widespread and began to be used in many paleoanthropological works. But a thorough and objective assessment of the scale of morphological differences between individual groups of fossil hominids forces us to reject it and preserve the generic status of Pithecanthropus, on the one hand, Neanderthals and modern humans, on the other, while identifying several species within the genus Pithecanthropus, as well as distinguishing Neanderthals and modern humans in as independent species. This approach is also supported by a comparison of the magnitude of the differences between fossil hominids and generic and species forms in the animal world: the differences between individual forms of fossil hominids are closer to generic than to species.

5. The more paleoanthropological finds of fossil humans accumulate (although their number is still negligible), the more obvious it becomes that ancient humanity from the very beginning existed in many local forms, a number of which may have turned out to be dead ends in evolutionary development and did not take part in the formation of more late and progressive variants. The multilinearity of the evolution of fossil hominids throughout their history is proven with sufficient certainty by this.

6. The manifestation of multilinear evolution does not cancel the stage principle, but the accumulation of information about specific forms of fossil people and increasingly sophisticated methods for estimating their chronological age limit the too straightforward use of this principle. In contrast to the views of previous decades, according to which the transition from an earlier to a later and progressive stage of morphological development was carried out panocumenically, the concept according to which there were constant delays and accelerations of evolutionary development, due to the degree of territorial isolation, the nature of settlement, the level of economic development of a particular group of hominids, its numbers and other reasons of geographical and socio-historical order. The coexistence over a number of millennia of forms belonging to different levels of developmental stages can now be considered proven in the history of the hominid family.

7. The stages and multilinearity of evolution are clearly reflected in the process of formation of modern man. After the discovery of Neanderthal skeletons in East Asia, the entire Old World entered the range of the Neanderthal species, which once again confirmed the existence of the Neanderthal phase in human evolution. The ongoing debate between supporters of the monocentric and polycentric hypotheses of the origin of mankind has largely lost its urgency, since the arguments in favor of one or another point of view, based on old finds, seem to be exhausted, and new finds of fossil humans appear extremely rarely. The idea of the predominant position of the Mediterranean basin, especially its eastern part, and Western Asia in the formation of the modern type of man, is perhaps legitimate for Caucasians and African Negroids; in East Asia, a complex of morphological correspondences is found between aboriginal modern and fossil man, which was also confirmed in relation to Southeast Asia and Australia. The classical formulations of the polycentric and monocentric hypotheses now look outdated, and the modern concept of multilinear evolution in relation to the process of the origin of modern man requires a flexible approach in the interpretation of the listed facts and should be freed from extremes in favor of only monocentrism.

The above theses are an attempt to summarize the main trends in the development of the theory of anthropogenesis over the past two or three decades. In addition to the enormous archaeological work, which has had many discoveries to its credit and has shown an earlier than hitherto assumed formation of many social institutions and social phenomena (for example, art), paleoanthropological research demonstrates the complexity and tortuousness of the paths of social progress and leaves us with everything there is less right to contrast prehistory, or protohistory, and history itself. In practice, history begins and appears in diverse local forms with the appearance of the first australopithecus, and what we are used to calling civilization in the narrow sense of the word - agriculture with stalled livestock breeding, the emergence of cities with handicraft production and the concentration of political power, the emergence of writing to serve the functionally more complex social life was preceded by a path of several million years.

The first of these moments reflects the interaction of society with the natural environment, the nature of this interaction and its improvement by the forces of society itself - in other words, a certain level of knowledge of nature and the geographical environment and their subordination to the needs of society, the reverse influence of the geographical environment on society, especially in its extreme forms. The second point is the most important demographic characteristic, accumulating fundamental biological and socio-economic parameters. In the 20-30s. in our geographical, archaeological, ethnological and economic sciences, great attention was paid to the problem of man as a productive force, and demographic approaches occupied a significant place in the consideration and solution of this problem. Historical materialism places the study of productive forces at the forefront; a person is part of the productive forces of any society, and the number of people is included in the characteristics of the productive forces as a component that marks, so to speak, the volume of productive forces that any ancient society had at its disposal.

However, we must not forget that the Siwalik hills, in addition to an exceptionally rich Tertiary and early Quaternary fauna, yielded bone remains of forms more ancient than australopithecines - those forms of apes that stand at the beginning of the human ancestry and directly (both morphologically and chronologically) preceded australopithecines. Thanks to these finds, the hypothesis of the South Asian ancestral home of humanity is also gaining supporters. But despite the importance of research and discussion of the problem of the ancestral home of mankind, it is only indirectly related to the topic under consideration about the ancient settlement of mankind. The only important thing is that all the supposed areas of the ancestral home are located in the tropical zone or in the adjacent subtropical zones. Apparently, this is the only zone that was mastered by man in the Lower Paleolithic, but it was mastered “alternately,” excluding areas of high mountains, arid spaces, tropical forests, etc.

The transition to the Upper Paleolithic was marked by a major milestone in the history of primitive mankind - the exploration of new continents: America and Australia. Their settlement was carried out along land bridges, the outlines of which have now been restored with a greater or lesser degree of detail using multi-stage paleogeographic reconstruction. Judging by the radiocarbon dates obtained in America and Australia, their exploration by man had already become a historical fact by the end of the Upper Paleolithic era. And it follows from this that Upper Paleolithic people not only went beyond the Arctic Circle, but also became accustomed to the difficult conditions of the polar tundra, managing to culturally and biologically adapt to these conditions. The discovery of Paleolithic sites in the polar regions confirms what has been said.

What are the consequences of the spread of humanity throughout the landmass of our planet and the settlement of a wide variety of ecological niches, including extreme ones? These consequences are revealed both in the sphere of human biology and in the sphere of human culture. Adaptation to the geographical conditions of various ecological niches, so to speak, to various anthropotopes, has led to a pronounced expansion of the range of variability of almost the entire complex of traits in modern humans, compared even with other zoological ubiquist species (species with panocumane dispersal). But the point is not only in expanding the range of variability, but also in local combinations of morphological characters, which from the very beginning of their formation had adaptive significance. These local morphophysiological complexes have been identified in the modern population and are called adaptive types. Each of these types corresponds to any landscape or geomorphological zone - arctic, temperate, continental zone and highland zone - and reveals a sum of genetically determined adaptations to the landscape-geographical, biotic and climatic conditions of this zone, expressed in physiological characteristics, favorable thermoregulatory combinations sizes, etc.

During the course of human settlement on the earth's surface, material culture ceased to develop in a single stream. Within it, separate independent variants were formed, occupying more or less extensive areas, demonstrating cultural adaptation to certain conditions of the geographical environment, developing at a greater or lesser speed. Hence the lag in cultural development in isolated areas, its acceleration in areas of intense cultural contacts, etc.

During the settlement of the ecumene, the cultural diversity of humanity became even more significant than its biological diversity.

All of the above is based on the results of hundreds of paleoanthropological and archaeological studies. What will be discussed below, namely the determination of the size of ancient humanity, is the subject of isolated works, which are based on highly fragmentary material that does not lend itself to unambiguous interpretation. In general, paleodemography as a whole is only taking its first steps; research approaches are not fully summarized and are often based on significantly different initial premises. The state of the factual data is such that the presence of significant gaps in them is obvious in advance, but they cannot be filled: until now, both the most ancient sites of primitive groups and the bone remains of ancient people are discovered mainly by chance, the method of systematic search is still very far from perfect.

The American demographer E. Deevy determined the number of Lower Paleolithic humanity at 125 thousand people. Chronologically, this number refers - in accordance with the dating of the process of anthropogenesis that was in circulation at that time - to 1 million years from the present; we are talking only about the territory of Africa, which alone was inhabited by primitive people in accordance with the views of the author, who shared the hypothesis of the African ancestral home of mankind; The population density was 1 person per 23-24 square meters. km. This calculation seems overestimated, but it can be accepted for the later stage of the Lower Paleolithic era, represented by Acheulean monuments and the next group of fossil hominids - Pithecanthropus.

There is a paleodemographic work about them by the German paleoanthropologist F. Weidenreich, based on the results of the study of human skeletons from the well-known location of Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, but it contains data only on individual and group age. Deevy gives a population figure of 1 million people for Neanderthals and dates it to 300 thousand years ago; The population density within Africa and Eurasia was, in his opinion, equal to 1 person per 8 square meters. km. These estimates look plausible, although, strictly speaking, they can neither be proven in any certain way nor refuted in the same way.

Thousands of articles and hundreds of books are devoted to the spiritual life of Paleolithic humanity, Paleolithic art and attempts to reconstruct social relations. And only a few works touch on the issue of positive knowledge in groups of people in the era of a consumer economy. Currently, this question is interestingly posed and discussed in a series of works by V. E. Larichev. In particular, he presented noteworthy considerations about the impossibility of imagining the development of even a hunting and gathering society without some kind of calendar and the use of astronomical landmarks in everyday life. The stock of knowledge that humanity accumulated during its settlement on the earth's surface over 4-5 million years played an important role in mastering the skills of a productive economy and the transition to civilization.

On this day:

Birthdays
Days of death

The flow of information coming from Africa about various forms of fossil humans forces us to take a fresh look at the process of isolating the most ancient ancestors of man from the animal world and at the main stages of the formation of humanity.

The clarification of many problems is also facilitated by the intensive research work carried out in a number of countries on the morphology of already known finds, their comparison with geological dating and the historical and cultural interpretation of the accompanying archaeological inventory. As a result, we can formulate several theses that reflect the modification of our knowledge in the field of anthropogenesis over the past decades and our modern ideas.

The paleogeographic interpretation of the ecological niche of the Pliocene great apes in the Siwalik Hills in the southern foothills of the Himalayas, together with the expansion of knowledge of their morphology, made it possible, with fairly reliable grounds, to express the idea of an upright body position and bipedal locomotion in these primates - as many researchers believe, the immediate ancestors of humans. When walking upright, the forelimbs were free, which created the locomotor and morphological prerequisites for labor activity.
The dating of the most ancient finds of australopithecines in Africa is causing heated debate. If we do not follow the most extreme points of view and rely not on single dates, but on a series of dates, then in this case the antiquity of the earliest australopithecines should be determined at 4-5 million years. Geological studies in Indonesia indicate a much greater antiquity of Pithecanthropus than previously thought and bring the age of the most archaic of them to 2 million years. Approximately the same, if not more venerable, age are found in Africa, which can conditionally be classified as a group of Pithecanthropus.
The question of the beginning of human history is closely related to the solution to the problem of the place of australopithecines in the taxonomic system. If they belong to the family of hominids, or humans, then the date given for their earliest geological age actually marks the beginning of human history; if not, this beginning cannot be delayed from modern times by more than 2-2.5 million years, i.e., by the age of the most ancient finds of Pithecanthropus. The boom raised in the scientific literature around the so-called Homo habilis did not receive support from a morphological point of view: it turned out to be possible to include the find in the group of Australopithecus. But the traces of purposeful activity discovered along with it, the finds of tools in layers with bone remains of australopithecines, the osteodontokeratic, or bone, industry of the southern group of African australopithecines, the morphology of the australopithecines themselves - fully mastered bipedal locomotion and a brain noticeably larger than that of apes - allow to positively resolve the issue of including Australopithecus among the hominids, and therefore date the appearance of the first people 4-5 million years ago.
The long-term discussion in biological taxonomy between splitters (splitters) and lampers (combiners) also affected the development of the classification of fossil hominids, leading to the emergence of a scheme in which the entire family of hominids was reduced to one genus with three species - Homo Australopithecus, Homo erectus (early hominids - Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus) and a person of a modern physical type (late hominids - Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic people). The scheme became widespread and began to be used in many paleoanthropological works. But a thorough and objective assessment of the scale of morphological differences between individual groups of fossil hominids forces us to reject it and preserve the generic status of Pithecanthropus, on the one hand, Neanderthals and modern humans, on the other, while identifying several species within the genus Pithecanthropus, as well as distinguishing Neanderthals and modern humans in as independent species. This approach is also supported by a comparison of the magnitude of the differences between fossil hominids and generic and species forms in the animal world: the differences between individual forms of fossil hominids are closer to generic than to species.
The more paleoanthropological finds of fossil humans accumulate (although their number is still negligible), the more obvious it becomes that ancient humanity from the very beginning existed in many local forms, a number of which may have turned out to be dead ends in evolutionary development and did not take part in the formation of later and progressive options. The multilinearity of the evolution of fossil hominids throughout their history is proven with sufficient certainty by this.
The manifestation of multilinear evolution does not cancel the stage principle, but the accumulation of information about specific forms of fossil people and increasingly sophisticated methods for estimating their chronological age limit the too straightforward use of this principle. In contrast to the views of previous decades, according to which the transition from an earlier to a later and progressive stage of morphological development was carried out panocumenically (everywhere in the inhabited territory), the concept according to which there were constant delays and accelerations of evolutionary development, due to the degree of territorial isolation, the nature of settlement, the level of economic development of a particular group of hominids, its numbers and other reasons of a geographical and socio-historical order. The coexistence over a number of millennia of forms belonging to different levels of developmental stages can now be considered proven in the history of the hominid family.
The stages and multilinearity of evolution are clearly reflected in the process of formation of modern man. After the discovery of Neanderthal skeletons in East Asia, the entire Old World entered the range of the Neanderthal species, which once again confirmed the existence of the Neanderthal phase in human evolution. The ongoing debate between supporters of the monocentric and polycentric hypotheses of the origin of mankind has largely lost its urgency, since the arguments in favor of one or another point of view, based on old finds, seem to be exhausted, and new finds of fossil humans appear extremely rarely. The idea of the predominant position of the Mediterranean basin, especially its eastern part, and Western Asia in the formation of the modern type of man, is perhaps legitimate for Caucasians and African Negroids; in East Asia, a complex of morphological correspondences is found between aboriginal modern and fossil man, which was also confirmed in relation to Southeast Asia and Australia. The classical formulations of the polycentric and monocentric hypotheses now look outdated, and the modern concept of multilinear evolution in relation to the process of the origin of modern man requires a flexible approach in the interpretation of the listed facts and should be freed from extremes in favor of only monocentrism.

The above theses are an attempt to summarize the main trends in the development of the theory of anthropogenesis over the past two or three decades. In addition to the enormous archaeological work, which has had many discoveries to its credit and which has shown an earlier than hitherto assumed formation of many social institutions and social phenomena (for example, art), paleoanthropological research demonstrates the complexity and tortuousness of the paths of social progress and leaves us with everything there is less right to contrast prehistory, or protohistory, and history itself. In practice, history begins and appears in diverse local forms with the appearance of the first australopithecus, and what we are accustomed to calling civilization in the narrow sense of the word - agricultural farming with stalled livestock breeding, the emergence of cities with handicraft production and concentration of political power, the emergence of writing to serve the functionally more complex social life was preceded by a path of several million years.

To date, enormous, almost boundless archaeological material has been accumulated, depicting the main stages of flint processing, showing the main lines of development of Paleolithic stone technology, allowing us to establish technological continuity between chronologically different groups of the Paleolithic population, and finally, generally demonstrating the powerful forward movement of mankind, starting with fairly primitive tools Olduvai culture in Africa and ending with the sophisticated stone and bone industry of the Upper Paleolithic era. However, unfortunately, when analyzing the factors of the progressive development of human society on the path to a productive economy and civilization, two important points remain beyond consideration - the resettlement of humanity from the areas of the supposed ancestral home, i.e., the stages and sequence of development of the ecumene with its various ecological niches, and growth of its numbers.

The first of these moments reflects the interaction of society with the natural environment, the nature of this interaction and its improvement by the forces of society itself - in other words, a certain level of knowledge of nature and the geographical environment and their subordination to the needs of society, the reverse influence of the geographical environment on society, especially in its extreme forms. The second point is the most important demographic characteristic, accumulating fundamental biological and socio-economic parameters. In the 20-30s. XX century In Soviet geographical, archaeological, ethnological and economic sciences, great attention was paid to the problem of man as a productive force, and demographic approaches occupied a significant place in the consideration and solution of this problem. Historical materialism placed the study of productive forces at the forefront; a person is part of the productive forces of any society, and the number of people is included in the characteristics of the productive forces as a component that marks, so to speak, the volume of productive forces that any ancient society had at its disposal.

Settlement of ancient people

No matter how great the achievements in the paleogeographic reconstruction of the events of Quaternary history, our specific knowledge is not sufficient to, using these reconstructions, reconstruct in detail the nature of the settlement of human groups in the Paleolithic era, especially in its early stages. Let us therefore limit ourselves to some general considerations.

The problem of the ancestral home of man

The question of the ancestral home of humanity, the place where the separation of man from the animal world took place, is still, despite the abundance of works devoted to it, far from being resolved. A huge number of Paleolithic monuments, including those of an archaic appearance, discovered on the territory of Mongolia in recent years, once again forced researchers to turn their attention to Central Asia. No less number of paleoanthropological finds on the African continent, illustrating the early stages of anthropogenesis, attracts the attention of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists to Africa, and many of them consider it the ancestral home of humanity. However, we must not forget that the Siwalik hills, in addition to an exceptionally rich Tertiary and early Quaternary fauna, yielded bone remains of forms more ancient than australopithecines - those forms of apes that stand at the beginning of the human ancestry and directly (both morphologically and chronologically) preceded australopithecines. Thanks to these finds, the hypothesis of the South Asian ancestral home of humanity is also gaining supporters. But despite the importance of research and discussion of the problem of the ancestral home of mankind, it is only indirectly related to the topic under consideration about the ancient settlement of mankind. The only important thing is that all the supposed areas of the ancestral home are located in the tropical zone or in the adjacent subtropical zones. Apparently, this is the only zone that was mastered by man in the Lower Paleolithic, but it was mastered “alternately,” excluding areas of high mountains, arid spaces, tropical forests, etc.

Migration processes in Africa, Europe, Asia, America, Australia

In parallel with this, there was a process of expansion of the ecumene (see the article Settlement and migration of people in ancient times), an increasingly intensive spread of Middle Paleolithic groups. The geography of Middle Paleolithic sites provides indisputable evidence of the settlement of carriers of early variants of the Middle Paleolithic culture throughout Africa and Eurasia, with the possible exception of only areas beyond the Arctic Circle.

Thus, by the end of the Paleolithic era, all the land in its more or less suitable areas for human life had been developed, and the boundaries of the ecumene coincided with the boundaries of the land. Of course, in later eras there were significant internal migrations, settlement and cultural use of previously empty territories: the increase in the technical potential of society made it possible to exploit those biocenoses that could not be used before. But the fact remains: at the turn of the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the entire land within its borders was inhabited by people, and before man entered space, the historical arena of human life did not expand any significantly.

Adaptation of ancient people to natural conditions

With a significant degree of certainty, we can assume that the complex of morphophysiological adaptations to the tropical zone is original, since it was formed in the areas of the original ancestral home. The Middle Paleolithic era dates back to the development of complexes of adaptations to temperate and continental climates and the highland zone. Finally, a complex of Arctic adaptations apparently developed during the Upper Paleolithic era.

The question of the time of the emergence of local differences in culture has not yet been resolved by science, heated debates around it do not subside, but already the material culture of the Middle Paleolithic appears before us in a wide variety of forms and provides examples of individual unique monuments that do not find any close analogies. During the course of human settlement on the earth's surface, material culture ceased to develop in a single stream. Within it, separate independent variants were formed, occupying more or less extensive areas, demonstrating cultural adaptation to certain conditions of the geographical environment, developing at a greater or lesser speed. Hence the lag in cultural development in isolated areas, its acceleration in areas of intense cultural contacts, etc. The cultural diversity of humanity during the settlement of the ecumene became even more significant than its biological diversity.

Number of first people

All of the above is based on the results of hundreds of paleoanthropological and archaeological studies. What will be discussed below, namely the determination of the size of ancient humanity, is the subject of isolated works based on highly fragmentary material that does not lend itself to unambiguous interpretation. In general, paleodemography as a whole is only taking its first steps; research approaches are not fully summarized and are often based on significantly different initial premises. The state of the factual data is such that the presence of significant gaps in them is obvious in advance, but they cannot be filled: until now, both the most ancient sites of primitive groups and the bone remains of ancient people are discovered mainly by chance, the method of systematic search is still very far from perfect.

The number of each of the living species of apes does not exceed several thousand individuals. This figure must be used to determine the number of individuals in populations that have emerged from the animal world. The paleodemography of australopithecines was the subject of a major study by the American paleoanthropologist A. Mann, who used all the bone material accumulated by 1973. Fragmentary skeletons of australopithecines were found in cemented deposits of caves. The condition of the bones is such that it has led a number of researchers to assume the artificial origin of their accumulations: these are the remains of individuals killed by leopards and brought to the caves by them. Indirect evidence of this assumption is the predominance of immature individuals, which predators prefer to hunt. Since the bone conglomerates at our disposal do not represent natural samples, the numbers of individuals related to them have only approximate value. The estimated number of individuals originating from the five main localities in South Africa varies according to different counting criteria from 121 to 157 individuals. If we consider that we still know only an insignificant number of locations out of their total number, then we can assume that the order of these numbers more or less corresponds to the number of modern apes. Thus, the human population began, presumably, with 10-20 thousand individuals.

Due to the settlement of America and Australia by humans in the Upper Paleolithic, the ecumene expanded significantly. E. Divi suggests that the population density was 1 person per 2.5 square meters. km (25-10 thousand years from the present), and its number gradually increased and was equal to approximately 3.3 and 5.3 million people, respectively. If we extrapolate the figures obtained for the population of Siberia before the Russians arrived there, we will get a more modest number for the historical moment of transition to a productive economy - 2.5 million people. This figure seems to be extreme. Such demographic potential, apparently, was already sufficient to ensure the formation of civilization in the narrow sense of the word: the concentration of economic activity in certain, locally clearly defined areas, the emergence of urban-type settlements, the separation of crafts from agriculture, the accumulation of information, etc.

The last point is worth special mention. The settlement of ancient humanity across the earth's surface confronted it, as already noted, with a variety of environmental conditions and a diverse world of hunting prey. The development of new niches was impossible without observing the course of natural processes and natural phenomena; hunting - without knowledge of the habits of animals; gathering could not be effective without a supply of information about useful plants.

Thousands of articles and hundreds of books are devoted to the spiritual life of Paleolithic humanity, Paleolithic art and attempts to reconstruct social relations. And only a few works touch on the issue of positive knowledge in groups of people in the era of a consumer economy. This question is interestingly posed and discussed in a series of works by V. E. Larichev. In particular, he presented noteworthy considerations about the impossibility of imagining the development of even a hunting and gathering society without some kind of calendar and the use of astronomical landmarks in everyday life. The stock of knowledge that humanity accumulated during its settlement on the earth's surface for 4-5 million years played an important role in mastering the skills of a productive economy and the transition to civilization.

Initial settlement of humanity

During the late, or upper, Paleolithic (ancient Stone Age), which lasted several tens of thousands of years and ended approximately 16 - 15 thousand years ago, modern people had already firmly mastered a significant part of Asia (with the exception of the far north and high mountain regions), all of Africa and almost all of Europe (except for the northern regions, then still covered with glaciers). During the same era, Australia was settled from Indonesia, as well as America, where the first people entered from Northeast Asia through the Bering Strait or the isthmus that existed in its place. We do not have any direct data about the ethnicity of human groups of the Late Paleolithic era.

The question of the time of formation of language families is very important for the problems of ethnogenesis. Some researchers - archaeologists and ethnographers - admit that the formation of these families could have begun already at the end of the Late Paleolithic or in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), 13 - 7 thousand years before the present day. During this era, in the process of human settlement, groups of related languages, and possibly the languages of some of the largest ethnic communities, could spread over very vast territories.

Other scientists, especially linguists, believe that the most likely time for the formation of language families is the late periods of history, corresponding to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and the Bronze Age of archaeological periodization (VIII - II millennium BC). The formation of the most ancient language families at this time was associated with the identification of mobile, mainly pastoral, tribes and their intensive migrations, which intensified the processes of linguistic differentiation and assimilation. It should be noted that the real differences between both points of view are not so great, since the formation of different language families did not occur simultaneously and was a very long process.

Ethnic communities probably formed earlier than others, speaking languages that are currently preserved among small peoples living on the periphery of the primitive ecumene - the territory of land inhabited by people (Greek “eikeo” - to inhabit). These languages are distinguished by a great variety of phonetic composition and grammar, often forming imperceptible transitions between themselves, perhaps dating back to the era of primitive linguistic continuity. Such languages, which are very difficult to classify genealogically, include the already known languages of the American Indians, the “Paleo-Asians of Siberia,” the Australians, the Papuans of New Guinea, the Bushmen and Hottentots, and some peoples of West Africa.

Closer to the central regions of the ecumene, large language families developed, developing both through the differentiation of the original foundation languages and through the assimilation of languages of other origins. In Western Asia, East and North Africa at least from the 4th millennium BC. e. Semitic-Hamitic languages became widespread, which included the language of the ancient Egyptians in the Nile Valley, the Babylonians and Assyrians in Mesopotamia, the ancient Jews and Phoenicians on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, as well as the later languages of the North African Berbers, East African Cushites, Alehara and other Semites of Ethiopia and , finally, the Arabs, who in the Middle Ages played a huge role in the socio-economic, cultural and ethnic history of the Mediterranean, North Africa, Western and partly South Asia. The Semito-Hamitic neighbors in Africa were peoples who spoke Niger-Congo languages (including Bantu), which gradually spread throughout the southern half of the African continent. To the north of the Semitic-Hamitic languages, the Caucasian languages developed, which were spoken by the population of Georgia and other countries of Transcaucasia and the North Caucasus from ancient times.

In the steppe and forest-steppe zone of the Black Sea region, especially in the Danube basin and on the Balkan Peninsula, as well as in Asia Minor, there were areas of formation of Indo-European languages, which in the 3rd - 2nd millennium BC. e. spread throughout Europe to the shores of the Atlantic, North and Baltic seas. To the east, peoples speaking the languages of this family settled vast areas in the south of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Southern Siberia, as well as Iran, reaching at the turn of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. e. the Indus basin and subsequently spreading throughout the north of Hindustan. In addition to the languages that exist today, many languages that have fallen out of use belonged to the Indo-European family, including Italic (including Latin), the already mentioned Illyrian-Frankish, etc.

In Eastern Europe, the ancient Indo-Europeans already in the 3rd - 2nd millennium BC. e. came into contact with tribes who spoke Finno-Ugric languages, which, together with the related languages of the Samoyeds, are united in the Uralic family. The area of its formation, according to many linguists, was located in Western Siberia, from where speakers of these languages settled in the European North up to Scandinavia and the Baltic states. Some linguists included the Uralic languages in a larger linguistic community - the Ural-Altai, to which they also included the Altai languages that developed in Central Asia. From here, the Tungus peoples, in connection with the development of reindeer husbandry, spread far to the north, right up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and Turkic and Mongolian nomadic herders made long migrations both to the west, up to Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, and to the southeast, up to Northern China.

The neighbors of the ancient Turks, Mongols and Tungus-Manchus in Central and East Asia were the ancestors of the peoples of the Sino-Tibetan family, who most likely originally lived in Western and Central China. From the 3rd millennium BC e. Various tribes of this family began to settle south and gradually developed the territory of Tibet, Southern China and parts of Indochina. Even further south lived the Austroasiatic and Austronesian tribes. The former probably first occupied the southwest of China and the extreme north of Indochina, while the latter lived to the east, off the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Already in the 2nd millennium BC. e. Austroasiats spread throughout Indochina and reached Eastern India, and Austronesians settled Taiwan, the Philippines and all of Indonesia, where they assimilated older tribes. From Indonesia back in the 1st millennium BC. e. Madagascar was apparently inhabited. At the same time, the settlement of Austronesians began across the countless islands of Oceania.

On this day:

Birthdays
1846 Gaston Maspero was born - French Egyptologist, commander of the Legion of Honor, researcher of the cache with royal mummies in Deir el-Bahri.
Days of death
1887 Ludolf Eduardovich Stefani, Russian philologist and archaeologist, curator of the Hermitage Department of Classical Antiquities, died.
1958 Mikhail Yakovlevich Rudinsky, Ukrainian and Soviet archaeologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, founder of the Poltava Museum of Local Lore, died.

6. Migration of primitive man. Population of the Earth. Factors that influenced the migrations of ancient people.

According to recent archaeological discoveries, Neanderthals settled Europe between 200 and 100 thousand years ago. During the cold phases (glacial advance), Neanderthals in their movements reached the territories of modern Iraq, as well as the Eastern Mediterranean. About 80 thousand years ago, in the Middle East, a meeting took place between Neanderthals - immigrants from Europe - and Homo sapiens, who migrated from Africa. The second migration wave of Homo sapiens began its movement 60-50 thousand years ago again to the north: towards the Red Sea, and further, to the Hindustan region, and from there, possibly to Australia. The third wave of Homo sapiens - settlers - only 10-20 thousand years later moved again to Europe, where they settled. This is confirmed by finds in caves in Swabia and in the upper reaches of the Danube. The primitive “maps” that indicated the safest and most convenient routes could not survive until modern times, but such maps undoubtedly existed. The settlement of all continents (except Antarctica) occurred between 40 and 10 thousand years ago. It is obvious that getting to Australia, for example, was only possible by water. The first settlers appeared on the territory of modern New Guinea and Australia about 40 thousand years ago. By the time Europeans arrived in America, it was inhabited by a large number of Indian tribes. But to this day, not a single Lower Paleolithic site has been found on the territory of both Americas: North and South. Therefore, America cannot claim to be the cradle of humanity. People appear here later as a result of migrations. Perhaps the settlement of this continent by people began about 40 - 30 thousand years ago, as evidenced by the finds of ancient tools discovered in California, Texas and Nevada. Their age, according to the radiocarbon dating method, is 35-40 thousand years. At that time, the ocean level was 60 m lower than today. Therefore, in place of the Bering Strait, there was an isthmus - Beringia, which connected Asia and America during the Ice Age. The evolution of the genus Homo mainly took place in Africa. The first to leave Africa and populate Eurasia was Homo erectus, whose migrations began about 2 million years ago. The expansion of Homo erectus was followed by the expansion of Homo sapiens. Modern man entered the Middle East about 70 thousand years ago. From here, people first headed east and settled in South Asia about 50 thousand years ago, reaching Australia about 40 thousand years ago. This was their first penetration into lands where man had never been before, even if we are talking about the almost ubiquitous Homo erectus. The Far East of Europe was inhabited by H. sapiens about 30 thousand years ago. There is still controversy regarding the dates of the first human settlement of America. According to some estimates, this also happened about 30 thousand years ago, and according to others - 14 thousand years ago. The islands of the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic remained uninhabited until the beginning of the new era. Since the 1980s, advances in archaeogenetics have contributed to the study of early human migrations.

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Human settlement and natural background of the Late Paleolithic

The Late or Upper Paleolithic is referred to as the Würm glaciation. The Würm glaciers occupied a smaller area than the Rissian glaciers (in Europe they were found only in the Baltic Sea basin and its adjacent areas). But with their arrival it became sharply colder.

The climate in Northern Europe, Asia and America became very cold. The climate was most severe during the Madeleine era.

The further progressive development of mankind is characterized by the fact that at this time some unique cultural features appear, which are characteristic of certain areas of settlement of primitive man.

The first such area is in Western and Eastern Europe. It also occupies the Russian Plain, famous for its open-air Paleolithic settlements. When the advance of glaciers intensified in northern Europe during the last, Würm, or Valdai, stage of glaciation, this area was periglacial.

The second region covers the non-glacial zone in southern Europe, Africa, the Caucasus, Western and Central Asia and partly in India.

The third region is found in Equatorial and Southern Africa.

The fourth region covers East and Northeast Asia, Siberia and Northern China.

The fifth region occupies Southeast Asia.

Each of these regions, which together cover almost the entire territory of settlement of primitive man, has separate areas that differ from each other in certain cultural features, which, however, have not yet been fully established.

The Late Paleolithic is best studied in periglacial Europe and northern Asia. The periglacial regions in the Atlantic part of Europe are represented by three successive archaeological cultures: Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian. Simultaneously with the Aurignacian culture, there existed the Perigordian (found in grottoes on the Périgord plateau in France), Grimaldian (Grimaldi Cave in Italy) and Kostenki (village of Kostenki near Voronezh) cultures. In the Sahara, on the Tassili plateau, harpoons similar to Magdalenian ones were found. Southeast Asia did not have the Late Paleolithic succession of cultures as in Western Europe. There, right up to the Neolithic, there were cultures of the Early Paleolithic appearance.

The Aurignacian and Solutrean cultures do not differ in the types of tools. The only differences are in their processing:

Thus, in the era of Solutre, squeezing retouching reached perfection. Proof of this are the laurel and willow spear tips, which were retouched not only along the edges, but also over the entire surface.

The Magdalenian culture is characterized by the disappearance of press retouch, the predominance of bone tools, and the widespread distribution of small incisors and harpoons.

The latest discoveries indicate that the Upper Paleolithic time begins in the east of periglacial Europe very early on a geological scale, much earlier than previously thought. After the huge ice sheet began to melt, new major changes in climate and geographic conditions began to occur. The level of the world's oceans has risen, the sea has begun to attack the land.

At the same time, thanks to a more favorable warm climate, heat-loving vegetation appeared. If at first only pine and spruce forests grew on the ice-free expanses, then later oak appeared, which soon reached the Arctic Circle, beech, hornbeam, and linden.

A zone of broad-leaved forests has spread in the middle part of the Russian Plain. To the north of it there were mixed coniferous-deciduous forests, and further north, right up to the Arctic Ocean, there were coniferous forests.

Thanks to these new conditions, the fauna also underwent important changes. Arctic foxes, lemmings and other typical Arctic animals have disappeared. The diversity of steppe species has decreased and forest species have increased. However, mammoths continued to live in their former places, and other representatives of the “mammoth fauna” lived with them.

During the next, Valdai stage of the revival of glacial activity, the continuous ice mass was much smaller in size. It was closely adjacent to a zone of peculiar periglacial vegetation, which consisted of mountain-tundra, forest and steppe species. Somewhat to the south there was a forest-steppe zone, and behind it there was a steppe zone.

At this time, representatives of the “mammoth fauna” became widespread - mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, arctic foxes, Ob lemmings, saiga, and bobak.

This was the natural background against which the history of Upper Paleolithic man unfolded in the periglacial region of Europe.

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At the end of November last year, the All-Russian scientific conference “Ways of Evolutionary Geography” was held in Moscow, dedicated to the memory of Professor Andrei Alekseevich Velichko, the founder of the scientific school of evolutionary geography and paleoclimatology. The conference was interdisciplinary in nature, many reports were devoted to the study of geographical factors of human settlement on the planet, its adaptation to various natural conditions, the influence of these conditions on the nature of settlements and the migration routes of ancient man. We present a brief overview of some of these interdisciplinary reports.

The role of the Caucasus in human settlement

Report of the corresponding member. RAS Kh.A.Amirkhanova(Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences) was dedicated to the archaeological monuments of the North Caucasus in the context of the problem of initial human settlement (long before the appearance Homo sapiens and their exit from Africa). For a long time, there were two monuments of the Oldowan type in the Caucasus, one of them, the Dmanisi site (1 million 800 thousand years old) in Georgia, became widely known. 10-15 years ago, 15 monuments were discovered in the Caucasus, the Stavropol Upland and the Southern Azov region, which date back to the same time - the Early Pleistocene. This is the largest concentration of monuments of Oldowan culture. Nowadays, North Caucasian monuments of this type are confined to plateaus and midlands, but during the time people lived there they were located on the sea coast.

Monuments of Oldowan of the Caucasus and Ciscaucasia. 1 - monuments of the Armenian Highlands (Kurtan: points near the Nurnus paleolake; 2 - Dmanisi; 3 - monuments of Central Dagestan (Ainikab, Mukhai, Gegalashur); 4 - Zhukovskoe; 5 - monuments of the southern Azov region (Bogatyri, Rodniki, Kermek). From presentation X .A.Amirkhanov.

North Caucasian Early Pleistocene monuments are directly related to the problem of the time and routes of initial human settlement in Eurasia. Their study made it possible to obtain unique materials (archaeological, geological, paleobotanical, paleontological) and draw the following conclusions:

1 – The initial settlement of the North Caucasus occurred approximately 2.3 – 2.1 million years ago;

2 – The picture of the routes of human settlement into the space of Eurasia was supplemented by a new direction – along the western coast of the Caspian Sea.

Paths of initial human settlement. Solid lines indicate migration routes confirmed by discovered monuments; dotted lines are estimated migration routes. From the presentation of Kh.A. Amirkhanov.

About the settlement of America

Doctor of History. sciences S.A. Vasiliev(Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in his speech presented a picture of the settlement of North America, based on the latest paleogeographical and archaeological data.

In the late Pleistocene era, the Beringian land existed in the interval from 27 to 14.0-13.8 thousand years. In Beringia, people were attracted by the commercial fauna, noted S.A. Vasiliev, although people no longer found mammoths here; they hunted bison, reindeer and red deer. It is believed that humans remained on the territory of Beringia for several tens of thousands of years; at the end of the Pleistocene, groups settled to the east and their numbers rapidly grew. The oldest reliable traces of human habitation in the American part of Beringia date back to about 14.8-14.7 thousand years ago (the lower cultural layer of the Swan Point site). The microblade industry of the site reflects the first migration wave. In Alaska, there were three different groups of cultures: the Denali complex belonging to the Beringian province, the Nenana complex, and Paleoindian cultures with different types of points. The Nenana complex includes the Little John site on the Alaska-Yukon border. Monuments of the Denali type are similar to monuments of the Dyuktai culture in Yakutia, but these are not copies of it: rather, we are talking about a community of microblade industries that covered eastern Asia and the American part of Beringia. Finds with grooved tips are very interesting.

Two migration routes suggested by archaeological and paleoclimatic evidence are the Mackenzie Interglacial Corridor and the ice-free route along the Pacific coast. However, some facts, for example, finds of grooved tips in Alaska, indicate that, apparently, at the end of the Pleistocene there was a reverse migration - not from the northwest to the southeast, but vice versa - along the Mackenzie corridor in the opposite direction; it was associated with the northward migration of the bison, followed by the Paleo-Indians.

Unfortunately, the Pacific Route was flooded by the post-glacial rise in sea levels, and most of the sites now lie on the seabed. Archaeologists are left with only more recent data: shell middens, traces of fishing, and petiole tips were found on the Channel Islands off the coast of California.

The Mackenzie corridor, which becomes accessible after the partial melting of the ice sheets, 14 thousand years ago, according to new data, was more favorable for habitation than previously thought. Unfortunately, traces of human activity were found only in the southern part of the corridor, dating back 11 thousand years, these are traces of the Clovis culture.

Discoveries in recent years have revealed monuments in different parts of North America that are older than the Clovis culture, most of them concentrated in the east and south of the continent. One of the main ones is Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania, a complex of points dating back to 14 thousand years ago. In particular, there are points in the Great Lakes region where skeletal remains of a mammoth are found, accompanied by stone tools. In the west, the discovery of the Paisley Caves, where a pre-Clovis culture of petiolate points was found, was a sensation; later these cultures coexisted. At the Manis site, a mastodon rib with an inserted bone tip was found, about 14 thousand years old. Thus, it was shown that Clovis is not the first crop to appear in North America.

But Clovis is the first culture to demonstrate complete human occupation of the continent. In the west it dates back to a very short interval for a Paleolithic culture, from 13,400 to 12,700 years ago, and in the east it existed until 11,900 years ago. The Clovis culture is characterized by grooved points that have no analogues among Old World artifacts. The Clovis industry is based on the use of high quality raw material sources -. flint was transported over distances of hundreds of kilometers in the form of bifaces, which were later used for the production of points. And sites, mainly in the west, are associated not with rivers, but with ponds and small reservoirs, while in the Old World the Paleolithic is most often confined to river valleys.

To summarize, S.A. Vasiliev outlined a more complex picture of the settlement of North America than was imagined until recently. Instead of a single migration wave from Beringia, directed from the northwest to the southeast, there were most likely several migrations at different times and in different directions along the Mackenzie corridor. Apparently, the first wave of migration from Beringia went along the Pacific coast, followed by settlement to the east. The advance along the Mackenzie Corridor probably occurred at a later date, with the corridor being a "two-way street" with some groups coming from the north and others from the south. The Clovis culture arose in the southeastern United States, which then spread north and west across the continent. Finally, the end of the Pleistocene was marked by the “reverse” migration of a group of Paleo-Indians to the north, along the Mackenzie corridor, to Beringia. However, all these ideas, S.A. Vasiliev emphasized, are based on extremely limited material, incomparable with what is available in Eurasia.

1 – migration route from Beringia along the Pacific coast; 2 – migration route to the southeast along the Mackenzie corridor; 3 – spread of the Clovis culture throughout North America; 4 - spread of ancient people to South America; 5 – return migrations to Beringia. Source: S.A. Vasiliev, Yu.E. Berezkin, A.G. Kozintsev, I.I. Peiros, S.B. Slobodin, A.V. Tabarev. Human settlement of the New World: experience of interdisciplinary research. St. Petersburg: Nestor-history, 2015. P. 561, insert.

He wasn't afraid to take the first step

E.I. Kurenkova(Candidate of Geographical Sciences, Leading Researcher at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke about the problem of interaction between nature and human society in the works of A.A. Velichko - a problem that, according to her, was his “first love” in paleogeography. As emphasized by E.I. Kurenkova, now some things seem obvious to archaeologists and paleogeographers, but someone always said this first, and in many matters it was Andrei Alekseevich, who was not afraid and knew how to take the first step.

Thus, in the 50s of the last century, while still a graduate student, he questioned the then dominant idea of an earlier age of the Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe. He sharply rejuvenated the Upper Paleolithic and suggested that it corresponds to the time of the Valdai (Würm) glaciation. This conclusion was made based on a detailed study of Paleolithic sites on the East European Plain. He refuted the authoritative opinion about the famous “dugouts” of the Kostenki site - a detailed analysis showed that these are permafrost wedges - natural traces of permafrost that cover cultural layers with finds.

A.A. Velichko was one of the first to attempt to determine the role of natural changes in human settlement on the planet. He emphasized that man was the only creature who was able to leave the ecological niche where he appeared and master completely different environmental conditions. He tried to understand the motivation of human groups that change their usual living conditions to the opposite. And the wide adaptive capabilities of man, which allowed him to settle all the way to the Arctic. A.A. Velichko initiated the study of human settlement of high latitudes - the goal of this project was to create a holistic picture of the history of people’s penetration into the North, their incentives and motivations, and to identify the possibilities of Paleolithic society to develop the circumpolar spaces. According to E.I. Kurenkova, he became the soul of the collective Atlas-monograph “Initial human settlement of the Arctic in a changing natural environment” (Moscow, GEOS, 2014).

In recent years, A.A. Velichko wrote about the anthroposphere, which was formed and separated from the biosphere, has its own development mechanisms and in the twentieth century is leaving the control of the biosphere. He writes about the collision of two trends - the general trend towards cooling and anthropogenic global warming. He emphasized that we do not sufficiently understand the mechanisms of this interaction, so we need to be on our guard. A.A. Velichko was one of the first to collaborate with geneticists, while now the interaction of paleogeographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists has become absolutely necessary. A.A. Velichko was also one of the first to establish international contacts: he organized the Soviet-French long-term work on the interaction between man and nature. This was very important and rare international cooperation for those years in scale (and even with a capitalist country).

His position in science, noted E.I. Kurenkova, was sometimes controversial, but was never uninteresting, and was never not advanced.

Path to the North

The report of Dr. Geogr. has something in common with the previous speech. sciences A.L.Chepalygi(Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences) entitled “The Path to the North: the most ancient migrations of the Oldowan culture and the primary settlement of Europe through the south of Russia.” The path to the North - this is how A.A. Velichko called the process of human exploration of the space of Eurasia. The exit from Africa was to the north, and then this path continued into the vastness of Eurasia. It allows us to trace the latest discoveries of sites of the Oldowan culture: in the North Caucasus, in Transcaucasia, in the Crimea, along the Dniester, along the Danube.

A.L. Chepalyga focused on the study of terraces on the southern coast of Crimea, between Sudak and Karadag, which were previously considered continental, but after a thorough examination were recognized as marine. Multi-layered human sites with Oldowan-type artifacts have been discovered, confined to these Eopleistocene terraces. Their age is determined and the connection with climatic cycles and fluctuations in the Black Sea basin is shown. This indicates a littoral, coastal-marine adaptation of Oldowan man.

Archaeological and geomorphological materials have made it possible to reconstruct human migrations during the initial exit from Africa, which dates back to about 2 million years ago. After moving to the Middle East, man's path followed strictly north through Arabia, Central Asia and the Caucasus up to 45°N. (Manych Strait). At this latitude, a sharp turn in migration to the west is recorded - this is the North Black Sea passage, a corridor of migration to Europe. It ended in the territory of modern Spain and France, almost reaching the Atlantic Ocean. The reason for this turn is not clear, there are only working hypotheses, emphasized A.L. Chepalyga.

Source: “Ways of Evolutionary Geography”, Proceedings of the All-Russian Scientific Conference dedicated to the memory of Professor A.A. Velichko, Moscow, November 23-25, 2016.

Human settlement in the Siberian Arctic

The report was devoted to the study of the first wave of Paleolithic human settlement in the north E.Yu. Pavlova(Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg) and Ph.D. ist. sciences V.V. Pitulko(Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg). This settlement could have begun about 45 thousand years ago, when the entire territory of northeastern Europe was free of glacier. The most attractive areas for human habitation were areas with a mosaic landscape - low mountains, foothills, plains and rivers - such a landscape is characteristic of the Urals, it provides an abundance of stone raw materials. For a long time, the population remained low, then began to increase, as evidenced by the Upper and Late Paleolithic monuments discovered in recent years in the Yana-Indigirka Lowland.

The report presented the results of a study of the Yanskaya Paleolithic site - this is the oldest complex of archaeological sites documenting the early settlement of humans in the Arctic. Its dating is 28.5 - 27 thousand years ago. Three categories of artifacts were found in the cultural layers of the Yanskaya site: stone macrotools (scrapers, peaks, bifaces) and microtools; utilitarian objects made of horn and bone (weapons, promises, needles, awls) and non-utilitarian objects (tiaras, bracelets, jewelry, beads, etc.). Nearby is the largest Yanskoe mammoth cemetery - dating from 37,000 to 8,000 years ago.

To reconstruct the living conditions of ancient man in the Arctic at the Yanskaya site, studies were carried out on carbon dating, spore-pollen analysis and analysis of plant macrofossils of Quaternary deposits for the period 37 - 10 thousand years ago. It was possible to carry out a paleoclimatic reconstruction, which showed alternating periods of warming and cooling in the area of the Yana-Indigirka Lowland. A sharp transition to cooling occurred 25 thousand years ago, marking the onset of the Sartan cryochron; maximum cooling was noted 21-19 thousand years ago, and then warming began. 15 thousand years ago, average temperatures reached modern values and even exceeded them, and 13.5 thousand years ago they returned to maximum cooling. 12.6-12.1 thousand years ago there was a noticeable warming, reflected in the spore-pollen spectra; the Middle Dryas cooling 12.1-11.9 thousand years ago was short and was replaced by warming 11.9 thousand years ago; This was followed by a cooling of the Younger Dryas - 11.0-10.5 thousand years ago and warming about 10 thousand years ago.

The authors of the study conclude that, in general, the natural and climatic conditions in the Yana-Indigirka Lowland, as well as throughout the Siberian Arctic, were acceptable for human settlement and habitation. Probably, after the first wave of settlement, depopulation followed the cooling, since in the period from 27 to 18 thousand years ago there are no archaeological sites in this territory. But the second wave of settlement, about 18 thousand years ago, was successful. 18 thousand years ago, a permanent population appeared in the Urals, which then, as the glacier retreated, moved to the northwest. Interestingly, in general, the second wave of colonization took place in a colder climate. But man has increased the level of adaptation, which allowed him to survive in harsh conditions.

Unique Paleolithic complex Kostenki

A separate section at the conference was devoted to studies of one of the most famous complexes of Paleolithic sites in Kostenki (on the Don River, Voronezh region). A.A. Velichko began working in Kostenki in 1952, and the result of his participation was the replacement of the stage concept with the concept of archaeological cultures. Cand. historian of sciences A.A. Sinitsyn(Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg) characterized the Kostenki-14 site (Markina Gora) as a reference section of the cultural variability of the Paleolithic of Eastern Europe against the background of climatic variability. The section contains 8 cultural layers and 3 paleontological layers.

Cultural layer I (27.0-28.0 thousand years ago) contains typical tips of the Kostenki-Avdeevka culture and “Kostenki-type knives,” as well as a powerful accumulation of mammoth bones. Cultural layer II (33.0-34.0 thousand years ago) contains artifacts of the Gorodtsov archaeological culture (tools of the Mousterian type). The identity of the III cultural layer (33.8-35.2 thousand years ago) remains debatable due to the lack of specific items belonging to the culture. Under cultural layer III, a burial was discovered in 1954, which is currently the most ancient burial of a modern person (36.9-38.8 thousand years ago according to calibrated dating).

The spread of man on the planet is one of the most exciting detective stories in history. Deciphering migrations is one of the keys to understanding historical processes. By the way, you can see the main routes on this interactive map. Recently, many discoveries have been made -Scientists have learned to read genetic mutations, and methods have been found in linguistics according to which it is possible to restore proto-languages and the relationships between them. New ways of dating archaeological finds are emerging. The history of climate change explains many routes - man went on a long journey around the Earth in search of a better life, and this process continues to this day.

The possibility of movement was determined by sea levels and the melting of glaciers, which closed or opened up opportunities for further advancement. Sometimes people have had to adapt to climate change, and sometimes it seems to have worked out for the better. In a word, I reinvented the wheel a little here and sketched out a brief outline on the settlement of the earth, although I am most interested in Eurasia, in general.

This is what the first migrants may have looked like

The fact that Homo sapiens came out of Africa is today recognized by most scientists. This event took place plus or minus 70 thousand years ago, according to the latest data it is from 62 to 130 thousand years. The figures more or less coincide with the determination of the age of the skeletons in Israeli caves at 100 thousand years. That is, this event still happened over a considerable period of time, but let’s not pay attention to the little things.

So, man left southern Africa, settled across the continent, crossed the narrow part of the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula - the modern width of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is 20 km, and in the Ice Age the sea level was much lower - perhaps it was possible to cross it almost ford The level of the world's seas rose as glaciers melted.

From there, some people went to the Persian Gulf and to the territory of approximately Mesopotamia,part further to Europe,part along the coast to India and further to Indonesia and Australia. Another part - approximately in the direction of China, settled Siberia, partly also moved to Europe, and another part - through the Bering Strait to America. This is how Homo sapiens settled throughout the world, and several large and very ancient centers of human settlements formed in Eurasia.Africa, where it all began, is by far the least studied. It is assumed that archaeological sites can be well preserved in sand, so interesting discoveries are also possible there.

The origin of Homo sapiens from Africa is also confirmed by the data of geneticists, who discovered that all people on earth have the same first gene (marker) (African). Even earlier, homoerectus migrated from the same Africa (2 million years ago), which reached China, Eurasia and other parts of the planet, but then died out. Neanderthals most likely came to Eurasia along approximately the same routes as homosapiens, 200 thousand years ago; they became extinct relatively recently, about 20 thousand years ago. Apparently, the territory approximately in the Mesopotamia region is generally a passageway for all migrants.

In Europe The age of the oldest Homo sapiens skull is determined to be 40 thousand years old (found in a Romanian cave). Apparently, people came here for animals, moving along the Dnieper. About the same age is the Cro-Magnon man from the French caves, who is considered in all respects the same person as us, only he did not have a washing machine.

The Lion Man is the oldest figurine in the world, 40 thousand years old. Rebuilt from micro-parts over a period of 70 years, finally restored in 2012, stored in the British Museum. Found in an ancient settlement in southern Germany, the first flute of the same age was discovered there. True, the figurine does not fit into my understanding of the processes. In theory, it should at least be female.

Kostenki, a large archaeological site 400 km south of Moscow in the Voronezh region, whose age was previously determined to be 35 thousand years, also belongs to the same time period. However, there is reason to ancientize the time of human appearance in these places. For example, archaeologists discovered layers of ash there -trace of volcanic eruptions in Italy 40 thousand years ago. Under this layer, numerous traces of human activity were found, thus, the man in Kostenki is more than 40 thousand years old, at least.

Kostenki was very densely populated, the remains of more than 60 ancient settlements were preserved there, and people lived here for a long time, not leaving it even during the Ice Age, for tens of thousands of years. In Kostenki they find tools made of stone, which could have been taken no closer than 150 km, and shells for beads had to be brought from the sea coasts. This is at least 500 km. There are figurines made from mammoth ivory.

Tiara with an ornament made of mammoth ivory. Kostenki-1, 22-23 thousand years old, size 20x3.7 cm

Perhaps people left approximately simultaneously from their common transit ancestral home along both the Danube and the Don (and other rivers, of course).Homosapiens in Eurasia encountered the local population that had been living here for a long time - the Neanderthals, who pretty much ruined their lives and then died out.

Most likely, the process of resettlement continued to one degree or another continuously. For example, one of the monuments of this period is Dolni Vestonice (South Moravia, Mikulov, the nearest large city is Brno), the age of the settlement is 25 and a half thousand years.

Vestonice Venus (Paleolithic Venus), found in Moravia in 1925, age 25 thousand years, but some scientists consider it older. Height 111 cm, kept in the Moravian Museum in Brno (Czech Republic).

Most of the Neolithic monuments of Europe are sometimes combined with the term "Old Europe". These include Trypillia, Vinca, Lendel, and the Funnel Beaker culture. Pre-Indo-European European peoples are considered to be the Minoans, Sicans, Iberians, Basques, Leleges, and Pelasgians. Unlike the later Indo-Europeans, who settled in fortified cities on the hills, the older Europeans lived in small settlements on the plains and had no defensive fortifications. They did not know the potter's wheel or wheel. On the Balkan Peninsula there were settlements of up to 3-4 thousand inhabitants. Baskonia is considered a relict old European region.

In the Neolithic, which begins approximately 10 thousand years ago, migrations begin to occur more actively. The development of transport played a major role. Migrations of peoples occur both by sea and with the help of a new revolutionary means of transport - a horse and cart. The largest migrations of Indo-Europeans date back to the Neolithic. Regarding the Indo-European ancestral home, the same region in the territory around the Persian Gulf, Asia Minor (Turkey), etc. is almost unanimously named. Actually, it was always known that the next resettlement of people was taking place from the territory near Mount Ararat after a catastrophic flood. Now this theory is increasingly being confirmed by science. The version needs proof, so the study of the Black Sea is of particular importance now - it is known that it was a small freshwater lake, and as a result of an ancient disaster, water from the Mediterranean Sea flooded nearby areas, possibly actively populated by Proto-Indo-Europeans. People from the flooded area rushed in different directions - theoretically, this could serve as an impetus for a new wave of migrations.

Linguists confirm that a single linguistic Proto-Indo-European ancestor came from the same place where migrations into Europe took place in earlier times - approximately from the north of Mesopotamia, that is, roughly speaking, all from the same area near Ararat. A large migration wave began around the 6th millennium in almost all directions, moving in the directions of India, China and Europe. In earlier times, migrations also took place from these same places; in any case, it is logical, as in more ancient times, that people entered Europe along rivers approximately from the territory of the modern Black Sea region. People are also actively populating Europe from the Mediterranean, including along sea routes.

During the Neolithic, several types of archaeological cultures developed. Among them are a large number of megalithic monuments(megaliths are large stones). In Europe, they are distributed mostly in coastal areas and belong to the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age - 3 - 2 thousand BC. To an earlier period, the Neolithic - in the British Isles, Portugal and France. They are found in Brittany, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, Portugal, France, as well as in the west of England, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden. The most common are dolmens - in Wales they are called cromlech, in Portugal anta, in Sardinia stazzone, in the Caucasus ispun. Another common type of them is corridor tombs (Ireland, Wales, Brittany, etc.). Another type is galleries. Also common are menhirs (individual large stones), groups of menhirs and stone circles, which include Stonehenge. It is assumed that the latter were astronomical devices and they are not as ancient as megalithic burials; such monuments are associated with migrations by sea. The complex and intricate relationships between sedentary and nomadic peoples are a separate story; by year zero, a very definite picture of the world is emerging.

Quite a lot is known about the great migration of peoples in the 1st millennium AD thanks to literary sources - these processes were complex and diverse. Finally, over the course of the second millennium, a modern map of the world gradually took shape. However, the history of migrations does not end there, and today it takes on no less global proportions than in ancient times. By the way, there is an interesting BBC series “The Great Migration of Nations”.

In general, the conclusion and the bottom line is this: the settlement of people is a living and natural process that has never stopped. Migrations occur for certain and understandable reasons - it’s good where we are not. Most often, people are forced to move on by worsening climatic conditions, hunger, in a word - the desire to survive.

Passionarity - a term introduced by N. Gumilyov, means the ability of peoples to move and characterizes their “age”. A high level of passionarity is a characteristic of young peoples. Passionarity, in general, benefited the people, although this path was never easy. It seems to me that it would be better for an individual person to be quicker and not sit still :))) Readiness to travel is one of two things: either complete hopelessness and compulsion, or youth of soul.... Do you agree with me?

Dispersal of modern humans

The American demographer E. Deevy determined the number of Lower Paleolithic humanity at 125 thousand people. Chronologically, this number refers - in accordance with the dating of the process of anthropogenesis that was in circulation at that time - to 1 million years from the present; we are talking only about the territory of Africa, which alone was inhabited by primitive people in accordance with the views of the author, who shared the hypothesis of the African ancestral home of mankind; The population density was 1 person per 23 - 24 square meters. km. This calculation seems overestimated, but it can be accepted for the later stage of the Lower Paleolithic era, represented by Acheulean monuments and the next group of fossil hominids - Pithecanthropus.

There is a paleodemographic work by the German paleoanthropologist F. Weidenreich, based on the results of the study of human skeletons from the famous location of Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, but it contains data only on individual and group ages. Deevy gives a population figure of 1 million people for Neanderthals and dates it to 300 thousand years ago; The population density within Africa and Eurasia was, in his opinion, equal to 1 person per 8 square meters. km. These estimates look plausible, although, strictly speaking, they can neither be proven in any certain way nor refuted in the same way.

Due to the settlement of America and Australia by humans in the Upper Paleolithic, the ecumene expanded significantly. E. Divi suggests that the population density was 1 person per 2.5 square meters. km (25 - 10 thousand years from the present), and its number gradually increased and was equal to approximately 3.3 and 5.3 million people, respectively. If we extrapolate the figures obtained for the population of Siberia before the Russians arrived there, we will get a more modest number for the historical moment of transition to a productive economy - 2.5 million people. This figure seems to be extreme. Such demographic potential, apparently, was already sufficient to ensure the formation of civilization in the narrow sense of the word: the concentration of economic activity in certain, locally clearly defined areas, the emergence of urban-type settlements, the separation of crafts from agriculture, the accumulation of information, etc.

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