Humanity’s New Complexity
Teacher Resources
Lesson Guide
Wondering how to implement these materials in your classroom? Find lesson objectives, pacing, vocabulary, and teaching tips in this guide.
Blog: Paleolithic Era: History, Science, or Social Studies?
In this blog post, you’ll investigate the Paleolithic era and learn how our knowledge of early humans has changed in recent years.
Driving Question: How did human evolution lead to new complexity on Earth?
Humans communicate using complex language and pass information down across generations. But how did that happen? And why are we the only species that can do this?
Learning Objectives:
- Describe how our understanding of early humans has changed over time.
- Explain how complexity increased as humans evolved on Earth.
Vocab Terms:
- bipedalism
- collective learning
- evolution
- foraging
- hominin
- symbolic langauge
Prime your students for learning about early humans by tapping into their prior knowledge. Writing informally to explain why they agree or disagree with the statements in the Unit Notebook will prepare them for answering the driving questions at the end of the unit.
There are over 8 billion humans on Earth today. But how did our species, Homo sapiens, win the evolutionary race against other human species, such as Neanderthals?
Help students remember how to spot collective learning in the wild using these points:
- Share it—Was the information/skill/tool shared with others?
- Store it—Was it stored or preserved in some way?
- Pass it on—Was it passed on to the next generation?
- Improve on it—Was it improved upon by others?
People had to start somewhere. Use this comic and activity to find out how early humans learned to use fire, communicate, and adapt to different climates.
Before introducing students to Threshold 6: Collective Learning, have them review Thresholds 1–5 to see how complexity increases as they learn about the ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions for the evolution of early humans and collective learning.
Who were the ancestors of humans? What parts of us changed and what stayed the same as we evolved? This video and activity have answers!
Imagine there was one big book that covered the origin of human language. If you had the job of illustrating it, what would you draw on the cover?
