ANTHRO XL 112

Instructor:

Matthew Curtis, Ph.D.

Email: mccurtis@ucla.edu

Have you ever wondered how far back into the past the archaeological record stretches? What was life like for the earliest humans? What does it mean to be anatomically modern in anatomy and behavior? When and where did spoken language, stone tool-making, cooking, purposeful burial of the dead, and art first appear in the world? Who were the Neanderthals and why do many people living today possess Neanderthal genes? How did humans survive the Ice Ages? When did the first people arrive in California and how? These are some of the questions we will explore in this course, as we survey more than two million years of the human past, from the makers of the earliest stone tools to the end of the last Ice Age. Along the way we will visit a number of fascinating archaeological sites: from Olduvai Gorge on the edge of the Serengeti Plain in East Africa to the Paleolithic rock art sites of Chauvet and Lascaux in France; from Lake Mungo in Australia to Daisy Cave on San Miguel Island, California; and many other intriguing places in between. In doing so, this course provides an overview of Paleolithic archaeology of the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (from 2.6 million years ago) to the early Holocene epoch (10,000 years ago), tracing the routes, timing, and implications of the peopling of the world by human species, and investigating the cultural, technological, and genetic signatures of crucial events in the distant human past....

This course focuses on the development of Paleolithic (Stone Age) cultural traditions in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and Oceania, and the Americas from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs (from about 2.5 million years ago to about 9,000 years ago). The course explores key events and processes involving human behavior and biological evolution, examining the archaeological record of the Lower Paleolithic (Early Stone Age), Middle Paleolithic (Middle Stone Age), Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age), Mesolithic, and Paleoindian (in the Americas) cultural periods in relation to the fossil, genetic, geological, and paleo-environmental records. The course examines the technological and subsistence traditions of human hunter-gatherer (forager) economies in various world regions up to the advent of food production (agriculture and pastoralism). Where possible, the sociopolitical and ritual traditions of pre-food-producing Paleolithic communities are explored, including study of Paleolithic art. We trace the evolution of the genus Homo, examining the human precursors of Homo sapiens and the first appearance and development of anatomically modern humans. The course takes a comparative perspective, comparing and contrasting the cultural behaviors reconstructed through archaeology, anatomies, and genomes of anatomically modern humans and other earlier and contemporaneous human species of the Plio-Pleistocene, such as Neandertals. In doing so, we consider from an anthropological perspective what it means to be “anatomically and behaviorally modern,” identifying signatures of anatomically modern human behavior visible in the archaeological record in tool production, art, burials, and resource exploitation. In addition, the course traces the routes, timing, and implications of the peopling of the world by human species, investigating the cultural, technological, and genetic signatures of these crucial events in the human past. By the end of the quarter, students will have learned how archaeologists work in interdisciplinary settings to reconstruct aspects of past human cultures and behavior, gaining an understanding of the methods and techniques involved in archaeological, paleoanthropological, and paleo-environmental research.

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