This repeated activity should help you become familiar with a process for understanding unfamiliar words anytime you encounter them in the course.

Take out your vocab tracker and be sure to record new and unfamiliar words on it according to your teacher’s instructions.

This activity presents the driving question for Unit 6. It’s meant to help you stay focused on this question as you learn new material.

Driving question: What makes humans different from other species?

Use the DQ Notebook Worksheet – Unit 6 to write about how you think we are different from other species.

Being an anthropologist is like being a detective who uses clues from both the modern world and the past to learn about our early human ancestors. If you like traveling, seeing new cultures, learning a new language, or searching for clues to solve puzzles, you’ll make a great anthropologist!

In this introduction to anthropology, Professor Kathy Schick describes the study of anthropology and what it means to be an anthropologist. This video will provide you with information on this discipline and possibly inspire you to investigate this field in the future.

Preview

This video will give you an introduction to the field of anthropology and the kinds of questions an anthropologist would ask.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. What is anthropology?
2. How does anthropology inform us about early humans?

Thinking Conceptually

Think about what anthropologists might do if they found evidence of a new culture. What kind of questions would they ask? Why would they ask those questions?

Archaeology informs us about early humans by examining the remains of ancient peoples (fossils) and the items they left behind such as tools and pottery.

Professor Nick Toth describes the study of archaeology, the tools used by archaeologists to study fossils, and the questions that archaeologists ask to uncover clues about the past. The discoveries made by archaeologists are just one of the many ways we know about our early ancestors.

Preview

Hiking and searching to find new dig sites, using pickaxes and shovels to excavate fossils, putting clues together from fossil records to discover long-lost information from the past – these are the types of things an archaeologist does to learn about our early human ancestors.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. What is archaeology?
2. What do archaeologists do?
3. How does archaeology teach us about early humans? What are the different types of archaeology?

Thinking Conceptually

Think about what archaeologists might do if they found fossils from an unknown society. What kind of questions would they ask? Why would they ask those questions?

This activity asks you to decide what kinds of questions scholars from different disciplines might ask about an object or a significant event. The goal is to help you solidify your understanding of the different disciplines, but more important, to get you thinking in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Be sure you have the Disciplines – What Do You Know? What Do You Ask? Worksheet and a blank Disciplines card. Your teacher will assign the event or object that you’ll think about when filling out the worksheet. This activity is going to be harder this time, though. Instead of working in groups, you’ll have to complete this activity on your own. You’ll also have to include a new discipline, one that’s not on your chart! Your teacher will walk through this process with you.

Once you’ve added the discipline, think about how you would assemble a research team to most deeply understand the event or object. Use the worksheet to break down this process. Be prepared to share an explanation of why your team is the best team for this job with the class. Then, think about why understanding this event as an interdisciplinary team is better than doing it from an individual perspective.

Earlier in this lesson, you learned about the fields of archaeology and anthropology. Now you’ll be putting that information to use as you attempt to describe how early humans at a fictional site would have lived. While Historos Cave is fictional, the images in this activity are from a variety of sites in the area around Blombos Cave, South Africa. This activity will allow you to draw on information from earlier in the lesson as well as new research in order to draw conclusions about how early humans lived.

Interdisciplinarity
While this activity has you taking on the roles of different scientists, it also lends itself well to highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. Discuss what would have been missed had all of these different disciplines not taken part in trying to better understand Historos Cave.

Blombos Cave is an archaeological site on the southern coast of South Africa, not far from Cape Town. In 1991, archaeologists began to excavate a wealth of artifacts that gave them new information about the early humans who had lived in the cave off and on starting about 100,000 years ago. Scientists have used the tools, fossils, paintings, and other clues found at Blombos to learn a great deal about the lives of early humans.

Historos Cave is a fictional cave similar in geography and composition to Blombos. You’ll examine the photographs of the objects on the Historos Cave Worksheet, all of which were found at this fictional site, to paint a picture of the daily lives of the people who lived there.

Often, as at Blombos Cave, scientists from different disciplines work together to analyze the objects and other clues found at a site. Together, they’re able to develop a detailed idea of the lives of the people who lived there. Now you’ll have a chance to be part of the interdisciplinary team working at Historos Cave.

Your class will be divided into teams. Each member of a team will assume the role of a scientist. More than one scientist from the same discipline may work together. Choose from the following roles:

• anthropologist
• archaeologist
• geologist
• paleontologist

Describe what each scientist would focus on when investigating the cave, and think about how each discipline would answer the following questions:

• What were some of the physical traits of the early humans living in this cave?
• What were they eating and how did they get their food?
• What was a day in the life of an early human like here?

Use the Disciplines Chart as a reminder of what each scientist does and the types of things they study. Up to this point, you’ve learned a bit more about archaeology and anthropology than the other disciplines. The Disciplines Chart will help you get a better understanding of geology and paleontology before you tackle the questions.

Be prepared to discuss your findings with the class once your teacher brings you back together as a whole group.

This is the official kick-off for your Little Big History project (LBH for short), which is the culminating project in this course. It will give you the opportunity to use all the skills and knowledge you’ve gained so far. For this project, you’ll use a Big History approach to examine a single object and create an LBH.

Remember reading the “Little Big History of Silver” in Unit 3? Now it’s your turn to create your own.

What is a Little Big History? We define an LBH as meeting these three criteria:

• It captures change over time and includes at least three thresholds of increasing complexity.
• Unlike many histories, your chronological account must refer to at least one time period, event, or piece of evidence dating from before the evolution of humans.
• Since Big History uses many approaches to knowledge, such as geology, cosmology, biology, and chemistry, your Little Big History should include at least two approaches to knowledge.

You’ll work on a team to investigate one of the following:

• an object or a commodity (that is, anything that is bought and sold)
• a process or technical innovation
• a social construct or institution
• an activity

Basically, just about anything that interests you and that you can research.

Your teacher will guide you through a series of steps to help you produce a group collaborative paper, an individual paper, and a group presentation of your LBH.

Your teacher will put you into groups of three or four people. You’ll be working with the other students in your group a lot for the remainder of the school year. Before you get into your groups to brainstorm the subject of your LBH, you’ll spend some time brainstorming as a class so that you feel confident that you recognize a good topic versus from a bad one.

Sometimes it’s hard to pick a topic, but remember, you don’t have to make the final decision right now! Choosing a topic may seem like one of the most daunting parts of the Little Big History project, but it’s also the most fun. This is your opportunity to pick something you’re interested in, learn about it, and then share what you’ve learned with your classmates. Think about your favorite products, possessions, or activities. If you like playing baseball, you might consider focusing on a baseball as your topic. If you enjoy cooking, you might think about choosing a particular spice to research. It’s a good idea to choose an item that is tangible rather than an idea or concept. For example, coffee is easier to trace back through the thresholds than a concept like war, which could take you in so many directions you might be overwhelmed by the possibilities.