Introduction to the World's First People

After reading the sections Out of Africa and The Ways We Were, I thought it was very interesting to learn how hominids and early homo sapiens were able to travel to different places all over the world. It's amazing how far homo sapiens were able to travel without modern technology: no maps, compass, or ships. Traveling across large land masses and oceans was impressive, but the fact that these early people adapted and thrived in different types of places for quite some time is mind-blowing as well. The world's first people inhabited any climate that they discovered. Starting from the continent of Africa, they migrated into the Middle East, Eurasia, Australia and islands in the Pacific. Knowing this, I can assume humans even back then were highly intelligent. I was surprised to learn that early people gathered food much more than they hunted. "Gender roles" were pretty much non-existent back then as well. It was also interesting that scholars and historians were able to learn so much from early homo sapiens from interpreting caves, cave drawings, their bones, and artifacts like clothing, pottery, statues and tools. Being in school when I was younger, I was taught that the first people ever to grace our planet were not very intelligent. Even though these human are no where near as advanced as today's humans, they were pretty smart in their own right with all that they had accomplished. Today we depend on so much technology in order to survive, and before early homo sapiens were able to survive without it. We can learn a thing or a two from them.