...When History Began…

How did the world begin? Where did we come from? People have been puzzling over questions like these for thousands of years.
The Bible tells of the Creation of the world in the Book of Genesis. It tells how God created the world and all living things.
But there are other stories about how the world began that have been told by people from many lands and with many different beliefs. These stories, which are very old, tell us a great deal about the people who first told them and the places where these people lived.
There is also a new story that scientists from different land are still trying to put together. Some people do not agree with this scientific story. But most scientists think it is true.
Scientists tell us the earliest man-like creatures were alive about 14 million years ago. They were more like apes than people, but they did move about on two feet looking for fool.
Some types of early people, like Nutcracker Man, did not survive. Those that did had changed their way of life. They moved out of Africa, into Asia and Europe. They became meat eaters and they learnt to hunt in groups and to share their food. They used sharp flint and stone tools.
About 40,000 years ago, modern people appeared. Their brain was the same size as ours today and they behaved more like us. They were able to make finer tools to help them to hunt; they buried their dead, and painted the walls of the caves where they lived. Prehistoric paintings have been preserved in many parts of France, Spain, North Africa and Australia. Some of them are as much as 30,000 years old. They have been preserved in the caves, where there is no wind, rain or sunlight to wear them away, for all those thousands of years. Most of the paintings are of prehistoric animals like woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, and of bison, horses and deer. Very few show people. No one knows exactly why these pictures were made. Some scientists think the prehistoric people used the paintings to make magic - magic they believed could help them when they went hunting. Others think the animals were meant to stand for something else, like spirits of gods.
Later, about 10,000 years ago, people began to farm. They stayed in one place and began to live in groups called communities.
Think about all the things you’ve been doing lately. Have you been reading? Writing? Studying? Praying? Playing? You are sure to have done some of these things. Most people’s lives today are filled with such activities. They are the activities of a civilization. But it hasn’t always been like this.
At first, (as I said) people were only hunters or farmers. Then, as time passed, farming began to solve the fool problem. People grew more food than was needed each day. So they could store some away. Now there was time for new activities and skills to be learnt.
The next big step was for people to get together and work out laws to live by and ways of sharing and recording their knowledge. This was the beginning of civilization.
The first civilization grew up about 6,000 years ago in Sumer. Today this area is called Iraq. Other early civilizations followed in India, Egypt and China. The Sumerians developed farming machines and skills. Cities developed and here the earliest forms of metal work, brick building, writing and money began.
In India the Indus Valley civilization developed along the banks of the rivers in western India and Pakistan. Later civilizations also spread along the River Ganges.
The Egyptians believed in everlasting life. The Egyptian kings, called pharaohs, built tombs inside enormous stone pyramids. The records of their lives are still being unearthed today from these burial places.
The great area of the Far East had been divided by wars. Now the Ch’in tribe succeeded in uniting everyone into one vast empire called China.
All these places had something in common- they all had great rivers, which made the land good for farming. The easier it was for people to farm land and get food, the more time they had left for other things.
People have certainly made an impact on this earth. We’ve been around for a long time, but in the history of the earth we’re really late arrivals.
Imagine all of earth’s history squeezed into one day. On this scale the tiniest living things probably first appeared at about 4 am. But the first animals with backbones – fishes – don’t appear until about 9:20 pm. Man-like apes appear one minute before midnight – and modern people less than one second before midnight strikes.