Stages of the formation of humanity - страница 2

Even in the works of philosophers of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome we find statements that the first people had to lead a hard life, spending all their energy on searching for food. The simplest needs associated with providing themselves with food and warmth pushed the most ancient people to use fire, invent tools, housing, clothing, wrote the ancient Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius Carus in his poem "On the Nature of Things". According to Lucretius, man made his first tools from stone, then found copper and used it for the same purpose, and later began to make tools from iron. Thus, history is divided into the era of stone, copper (bronze) and iron. We will find this division now in any history textbook, but a century and a half ago it remained a hypothesis, a guess, nothing more. True, by the beginning of the 19th century, natural science began to accumulate irrefutable evidence of the long development of nature long before the moment to which the Bible attributed the "creation of the world." But who could dare to extend this conclusion to the "crown of creation," to man? In France, the archaeologist Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868) discovered stones with traces of rough chipping in deep layers of soil and proved that these were the tools of ancient people. In the caves of Belgium, deep underground, the local teacher Schmerling found fossilized bones of people and long-extinct animals side by side. Similar finds are given to researchers by the land of England and other countries. Numerous data and observations of geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists leave no doubt that people lived on Earth tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, using stone as the main material for making their tools. This is the first and longest period of human history, which is divided into the Paleolithic era, or Old Stone Age, when tools were made by chipping stone, and the Neolithic era, or New Stone Age, when stone tools began to be polished. In 1871, Charles Darwin's book "The Descent of Man" was published, where, using a huge amount of factual material (data from anatomy, physiology, zoology, paleontology, archaeology, geography), it was proven that man separated from the animal world and apparently had common ancestors with modern anthropoid apes. This means that both the external appearance of people and their psyche were not always the same as they are now, but changed, went through successive stages in their evolution. Darwin's ideas, like the earlier ideas of Boucher de Perthes, Schmerling and their supporters, met with both fierce opponents and ardent followers. Among the latter was the Dutch physician Eugene Dubois. Inspired by the logical force of Darwin's interpretation of the pedigree of humanity, he decided to look for an intermediate stage between ape and man and on the island of Java at the beginning of In the 1890s, the bones of a fossilized creature that combined features of man and ape, Pithecanthropus, which in Greek means "ape-man", were found. Scientists could judge another stage in the process of human development by the remains of Neanderthal man (named after the town of Neanderthal in Germany, where the first find was made in 1856). Neanderthal man was closer to modern man than Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus (Chinese man), whose bone remains were found in abundance during excavations near Beijing (Zhoukoudian) in the late 1920s. The appearance of primitive people and traces of their labor activity are not enough in themselves to recreate a complete picture of the origin of mankind. It is necessary to know what connections and relationships existed between separate individuals, transforming their totality into a society of people, into a human society. Even ancient thinkers noted the difference between the customs of neighboring ("barbarian") peoples and the way of life that dominated ancient society. In the era of great geographical discoveries, Europeans came into contact with an even more amazing world of tribes and peoples who were lagging behind in their development. The collection and generalization of information about such "primitive" peoples opened up the possibility of reconstructing the social life of ancient humanity. The most successful attempt in this direction was the work of the American ethnographer and historian Lewis Henry Morgan, "Ancient Society" (1877). It shows the important role of collective property both in productive life and in family-marital organization and in other spheres of life in primitive society. The initial and fundamental "cell" of the social structure was the clan, first maternal, then paternal. Thus, in the 19th century, the most important contours of the picture emerged that allow us to imagine the emergence and initial development of mankind. In generalizing the accumulated facts and developing the methodology for further research in the field of primitive history, the most important role belongs to the works of Engels "The Role of Labor in the Process of Transformation of the Ape into Man" (1873-1876) and "The Origin of Private Property and the State" (1884), which provide a consistent dialectical-materialistic interpretation of the processes of the origin of man and society. F. Engels showed that these processes were based on the development of productive forces and production relations. Labor, Engels wrote, is the first basic condition of all human life, and moreover to such an extent that in a certain sense we must say: labor created man himself. Further, Engels emphasizes the stimulating role of articulate speech in anthropogenesis – a specific means of communication between individuals, characteristic only of human society.