I found the opening chapters of Ways of the World to be extremely interesting because I don't remember learning about the very first humans on Earth in any other history class. In high school, every history class that I took focused on later generations of people and written history. It is pretty cool to go back so far and learn about the start of it all. It is almost unfathomable to think about how old the Earth is, and what a tiny speck I am in its history. When I read that the Paleolithic era accounts for 95% of the time that humans have inhabited the Earth, I audibly gasped. It is crazy how long we were in the Old Stone Age.
It is really fascinating to think about the first humans who walked on this earth. When you look at how far the human species has advanced in a relatively short amount of time, it becomes clear that as a whole we are very intelligent and curious beings. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that Homo sapiens possessed an incredible knack for and capacity for "symbolic language", which made learning possible and allowed us to become who we are today. Such a simple trait transformed us in huge ways. The fact that we were using basic stone tools 2.3 million years ago is mind boggling.
It sounds as if the idea of society and community first came about when humans began settling down and living in villages instead of moving in nomadic groups. (As a dog lover, I appreciated the part of the reading that said these societies had separate burial sites for dogs, which suggests that they were the first domesticated pet and have always been "man's best friend.")66 This is also when agriculture really took off and provided the framework for the ideas and techniques that we still use today. I
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