The Paleolithic era accounts for 95% percent of the time that humans have existed on our planet earth. During this time many great things were accomplished including huge migrations which led to humans settling in every environment and continent on earth except for Antarctica. Our Paleolithic Ancestors were adept at adapting new environments. They had a unique capacity for language which allowed them to learn new things and then pass those new ideas or skills onto to their offspring or other humans. Robert Strayer in his book Ways of the world indicates that from this time our evolution became much more of a revolution and that "'culture' defined as learned or invented ways of living became more important than biology in shaping behavior." Humans at this time lived in small hunter/gatherer societies usually a clan that was related by kinship or large family groups consisting of between 25 to 50 people. They were egalitarian for the most part as people needed to work together to provide enough for the group. They were nomadic and would follow the seasons of ripening fruits and nuts or seeds, sometimes they would follow the larger migrations of animals. They were believed to be a spiritual people with a "rich interior life." Anthropologists now believe that they were the "original affluent society" because of the different social structures that have been studied the hunter gatherers had the most leisure time. In part this was because the need to accrue a lot of excess was counter productive, having many things made a nomadic lifestyle more difficult.
As time went on and they had settled most of the globe the temperature of the earth started to warm as the end of the last Ice Age occurred. The disappearance of the ice took with it many of the large mammals that the early humans had hunted, but rich grasses and other food sources were in abundance and people started to domesticate these resources. They started settling into more permanent locations, this was the beginning of the agricultural revolution. With this new development many things changed for the early humans. They had to work more, they were exposed to more diseases and they had their first epidemics because of their close proximity to other people. They had poorer health and sometimes even died of malnutrition. For the first time they could store what they had harvested and that led to inequalities among their people. New ways of ruling each other came into being and a class system was born.
Websters dictionary defines progress as "the process of improving or developing something over a period of time. For a long time humans have assigned progress as a measure of success. I think when considering our history we need to examine what value we assign to progress and realize that while progress in one direction may not be indicative of over all success.
