Our great motherland has a very long history. According to ancient tradition, there is about four thousand years of history from the legendary Yellow Emperor to the present, which is usually called "the upper and lower five thousand years".
In the five thousand years of history, there are many moving and meaningful stories. Many of them are documented. As for the situation in the ancient times five thousand years ago, there are no written records, but some myths and legends have also been circulated.
For example, where did our human ancestors come from? In ancient times, there was a myth about the creation of the heaven and the earth by Pangu. It said that before the creation of the heaven and the earth, the universe was just a chaotic ball of air with no light or sound in it. At this time, Pangu came out and split the chaos with a big axe. When the light air floats upward, it becomes the sky; when the heavy air sinks, it becomes the earth.
After that, the sky became ten feet taller every day, the earth became ten feet thicker every day, and Pangu himself also grew ten feet taller every day. After 18,000 years of this, the sky became very high and the earth became very thick. Of course, Pangu became a giant who towered over the sky and the earth. Later, Pangu died, and various parts of his body became the sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, vegetation, etc.
This is the epoch-making myth. The
myth is just a myth after all, and no one now believes that such a thing really exists. But people like this myth. When talking about history, they often say that it started from "Pangu opened the world." This is because it symbolizes the great courage and rich creativity of mankind to conquer nature.
So, where should human history begin? Later, as science developed, fossils unearthed from the ground proved that the earliest ancestor of human beings was a kind of ape-man that evolved from the ancient ape .
Peking Man
Chinese scientists have excavated many fossils of the bones and relics of ape-man in various parts of the motherland. It can be seen that the earliest primitive man in our motherland has a history of more than one million years. For example, the Yuanmou Man discovered in Yunnan is about 1.7 million years old; the Lantian Man unearthed in Shaanxi is about 800,000 years old; take the famous Peking Man, for example, it is also 4.5 million years old. .
Here, we will start with Peking Man . Peking Man lives in the Zhoukoudian area. At that time, the climate in northern China was milder and wetter than now. Up and down the mountains, there are woods, shrubs and lush wild grasses. Fierce tigers, leopards, wolves, bears and other wild beasts appear in the woods and mountains. Elephants, rhinoceros (sound xī) cattle and sika deer also grow there.
Ape-men are not as strong as these ferocious beasts, but the fundamental difference between them and any other animals is that apes can make and use tools. This tool is very simple, one is a stick and the other is a stone. There are many wooden sticks in the woods, but they are cut by people; stones are beaten by people. Although they are very rough, they are tools made by people after all.
They used this simple tool to collect fruits and dig out the roots of plants to eat. They also used wooden sticks and stone tools to fight wild animals and hunt for food.
However, this kind of tool is too crude after all. The food they obtain is very limited. They cannot survive on the strength of a single person. They have to live in groups, work together, and deal with the invasion of wild beasts. This kind of people are called primitive people.
Hundreds of thousands of years have passed, and ape-men have evolved through arduous struggle. Another type of primitive human remains were discovered in a cave on the top of Longgu Mountain in Zhoukoudian, Beijing. The appearance of this primitive man is no different from that of modern man. We call them " caveman ".
Top Cave Man
Top Cave Man’s working tools have been greatly improved. Not only can they smash stones into stone axes and stone hammers, but they can also grind the bones of wild beasts into bone needles. Don't look at this small bone needle. At that time, it was not an easy task for people to grind bone needles. With bone needles, people can sew animal skins into clothes, unlike those who were naked during the Peking Man period.
The cavemen also lived in groups.But their social life has been fixed according to blood relations. The members of a collective are all descended from common ancestors, that is, people of the same clan. In this way, human society has entered the clan commune period.
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