In this activity, you’ll become more familiar with the nuances (slight differences) of authority. This is a challenging but worthy claim tester because authority can either be earned or granted—and is deeply connected to our personal biases. The reasons we choose to believe people are varied, and it’s not always because someone has authority on the topic at hand. Understanding how and why we decide what to believe is a critical skill not just in history, but in our everyday assessment of claims. You will dig into the specifics of authority and understand how to identify, assess, and use authority when evaluating and making claims.

Reading, sourcing
At this point, you’ve had multiple opportunities to practice your reading skills for a variety of media (articles, videos, and graphic biographies). However, in this activity, you will be pushed to think about what and how you read. As historians and critical thinkers, you should be curious about where you are getting your information, and you should be equipped with the skills to evaluate a source’s claims. This lends itself to the historical thinking practice of sourcing—which is necessary in all subjects and in life. You need to develop your claim testing skills so that you can make, evaluate, defend, and refute claims as well as the claims of others.

In the last activity on claim testing, you had the opportunity to discuss and explore the practice. In this series of activities, you will do a deep dive into claim testers so that you feel comfortable applying each when you read, write, do research, and speak.

Think about the following scenario:

Leading up to the November 6, 2018 midterm elections, Taylor Swift, a famous musician, took to social media to promote voter registration. After her post, Vote.org saw 155,940 unique visitors within 24 hours (up from the average daily number of 14,078). Further, over 2,100 new voters registered in Tennessee the day after her post, which nearly matches the typical monthly number of registrations (about 2,800). Her short post on social media had a real impact on the number of registered voters—and likely, actual voter turnout—in both Tennessee and the nation.

Now, take out the Claim Testing – Authority worksheet, and respond to the questions in Part 1. Be ready to discuss your answers with the class.

Authority comes in all shapes and sizes, and it often helps us decide not only what to believe—but whom to believe. Some authority is earned based on merit, such as licensure or education (doctors, teachers, estheticians, electricians, lawyers, and so on); some is given due to popularity. Our biases are deeply embedded in whom we believe. We may be biased based on our religious beliefs, where we grew up, or what our family believes. We can also be biased based on the popularity (or lack of popularity) of a claim or the person making the claim.

So, what do we do when two authorities disagree? There are long-standing debates among historians, scientists, and other scholars about what really happened in the past, and we’ll encounter those disagreements frequently in this course, as we do in life all the time. Let’s dig into a historical debate about early humans to see if we can start to figure out what to do when authorities disagree. Your teacher will collect your completed worksheets at the end of the activity and provide feedback to help you refine your claim testing skills.

Homo sapiens spent many years as foraging nomads within Africa, living alongside other human species. Eventually, due to many possible factors like climate changes, curiosity or conflict between communities, our ancestors began to migrate out of the continent. This movement impacted both communities themselves as well as the new environments they encountered. It is through the migration of early humans that we see the stage set for larger communities and expanded networks to come.

How did humans end up populating the Earth? Why did they decide to leave Africa in the first place? This article will present evidence that will help you to evaluate the narratives for all three frames, and in particular the networks frame. It may also lead you to ask questions about how societies in various regions might begin to develop different cultures and types of organization.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. According to the article, what were the similarities and differences between different human species on Earth approximately 300,000 to 200,000 years ago?
2. Why did human communities begin to migrate outside of Africa? Were the causes short-term or long-term?
3. How did humans change as they moved, and what caused these changes?
4. Why might human communities during the Paleolithic Era have kept their populations intentionally small?
5. What is collective learning, and what role did it play in human evolution?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following question:

1. In what ways does the migration of homo sapiens out of Africa support, extend or challenge our networks frame?

This article explores how humans began creating various forms of art as a result of the cognitive revolution in the Paleolithic Era. You will explore different theories around when and how the cognitive revolution truly began, and whether homo sapiens were the only human species that it transformed.

This article will help you understand how art, in all its varying forms, transformed life in human communities and spread ideas through networks. It will help you to understand the impact of the cognitive revolution and collective learning, a key idea for this unit.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. According to the author, what are the limitations to understanding how and when humans first developed the ability to create art?
2. What is the “Paleolithic Cognitive Revolution?”
3. Why do you think archaeologists divide the Paleolithic into periods like the Upper and Middle Paleolithic?
4. Why does the author state we should consider pushing back the timeline of the cognitive revolution to include the Middle Paleolithic era?
5. Why is it so difficult for historians to put an exact date on when the cognitive revolution began, and decide whether it should apply to other human species?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following question:

1. In what ways did the creation and spread of artwork in the Paleolithic period impact human communities?

This activity asks you to analyze and evaluate art and artifacts from some of the earliest human communities. By doing so, you’ll understand how scholars use these as evidence for how early humans expressed themselves but also as windows into early human culture. In addition, you’ll develop skills to analyze art from a historical perspective, which is an important skill for you to master.

Art is not only viewed as a means of self-expression, it can also be used as a way to study the culture of early humans. Before humans began using writing to record transactions, events, and stories, they created art. Historians and archaeologists can use these early forms of human expression as evidence for what certain cultures held as important or sacred. You’ll build on your reading of “Art of the Paleolithic” by analyzing some of the artwork from early human communities around the world to determine what else we can learn from the items these cultures left behind.

Your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Importance of Art as Historical Evidence Worksheet. Then, you’ll work in groups to look at the images in the worksheet and write your initial thoughts about what each of these pieces might represent. Next, you’ll perform an OPTIC analysis of each image. “OPTIC” is an acronym for overview/organization, parts, title/time, interrelationships, and conclusion/context. You’ll use this format and the questions in the worksheet to look at the image first as a whole and then in parts to help explain how these parts interrelate with one another so that you can then draw conclusions about the image.

Next, your group will answer the follow-up questions at the end of the worksheet. Then, you’ll have a class discussion about each group’s analysis and conclusions. All groups may not agree on every category of analysis, but that’s what will make the discussion interesting!

Historians rely on chronology to break history into periods (periodization) and tell the story of past events more accurately. The invention of writing helped to provide a more fully developed history of events, but it’s still not the complete picture. Technologies developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have helped significantly in getting more accurate chronologies.

This article will help you understand the connection between chronology and history. In addition, you will learn about the tools that historians and scientists use that provide us with a more accurate understanding of our past. Understanding the connection between chronology and history will help you comprehend and use the historical thinking practice of periodization.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Why is chronology essential to the study of history?
2. How is chronology different from history?
3. How did humans record history before they invented writing? How does writing give us a more complete picture of history and why doesn’t it give us a fully complete history?
4. What early twentieth-century discovery helped historians to get a better idea of history and chronology?
5. What are some other scientific discoveries that give us data about time?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. How do all the inventions you learned about in this article help historians write more accurate histories? What might be some of the limitations that remain in our quest for fully accurate histories?
2. How does this article help you understand the limitations of historical sources? How do you think historians have attempted to overcome these limitations?

What counts as a written source? Historians tend to prefer written sources as evidence. Many societies, including the Ancestral Pueblo of the American Southwest, are often said to have left behind no written sources. Yet, at sites across the Southwest, hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs stand out from the basalt rock as stark reminders that history is complicated and there are many types of evidence. In this video, Matthew Martinez gives us a tour of the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project, explaining how the stories embedded in Pueblo oral traditions come alive in this special place.

In Eras 2 and 3, you will be learning about the rise of complex agricultural societies. This video provides evidence to extend and challenge the narratives you will encounter about the development of agricultural societies. Though the Ancestral Pueblo—and many other Indigenous American societies—never developed a written language, they did develop complex societies and used other methods to pass down scientific and historical information across thousands of years. Through the process of collective learning, these communities learned, improved on, and passed down their knowledge about the environment, developing increasingly complex methods of astronomical tracking and recording.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Remember to open and skim the transcript, and then read the questions below before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch this video.

1. What are petroglyphs and how are they made?
2. What does Dr. Martinez mean when he says, “these are our libraries”?
3. What are some common types of petroglyphs and what does Dr. Martinez say is their meaning?
4. Why were astronomical knowledge and markers important to Pueblo society? What were some images used for astronomy?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. Dr. Martinez makes the claim that petroglyphs are a kind of writing and are part of a larger oral tradition through which Pueblo people pass on their learning through generations. Can you think of any other types of historical evidence you’ve encountered in this course that come from nonwritten sources?

This activity asks you to evaluate a number of theories about when humans first migrated to the Americas. As you evaluate these theories, you’ll begin to understand that there are many details that we have yet to discover about the history of early humans. This will allow you to see how history is much like a mystery. The story of early human history, in particular, is one that is filled with unanswered questions, and requires research from multiple disciplines to uncover answers. In addition, this activity will help you see how collective learning is a continuous process whereby previous studies illuminate and inspire the research of current investigations. Our knowledge of human history has benefited from those who came before us and current research will become a stepping stone for future discoveries.

In this activity, you’ll be presented with a number of theories about when humans first arrived in the Americas. You’ll then use your claim testing abilities to decide which of these theories is the most plausible (credible).

Beginning in the 1960s, it was thought that the mystery of when humans arrived in the Americas had been solved. But new evidence found in the past few decades has challenged the accepted theory of these early human migrations. First, your teacher will break the class into groups of 3-4 students and provide each group with a set of theory cards.

Read each of the theories and the evidence used to support them, and then work together to determine which of these seems to be the most plausible explanation for these early human migrations. Once your group has decided on the “best” theory, your teacher will ask you to present the one that you think is most credible to the class, including your reasoning for choosing that theory, and your reasons for rejecting the other theories.

After the presentations, you’ll have a discussion about the pros and cons of each theory and vote on which of these theories is the best explanation to answer the question: When did humans get to the Americas?