Test: From the Beginning of Time- 1 (Old Syllabus) - UPSC MCQ

Early people used to gather food and lived by hunting animals. Gradually, they came to know about the growth of plants. They then started growing plants and shifted to a settled life. The plants chosen by them gradually transformed and eventually appeared entirely different from the wild ones. Wild animals that were milder in behaviour turned to these settled areas to feed themselves. This led to the beginning of domestication of wild animals. This led to domestication and pastoralism becoming new ways of life.

Man’s ability to maintain knowledge helped him to transform himself from a mere nomad to a pastoral and further to a settled life. He learned to cultivate crops and was thus able to produce more than his requirement. Availability of food helped in the increase of population as more and more people took to settled lives.

The Eastern Hadza people did not assert rights over land and its resources. Any individual may live wherever he likes and may hunt animals, collect roots, berries, and honey and draw water anywhere in Hadza country without any sort of restriction.

Glacials are somewhat better defined, as colder phases during which glaciers advance, separated by relatively warm interglacials. The end of the last glacial period, which was about 10,000 years ago, is often called the end of the ice age, although extensive year-round ice persists in Antarctica and Greenland.

Neander Valley is a gorge in Germany. It is popular for the quarrying of limestone. Here, the evidence of early man was discovered by workers who were quarrying for limestone in August 1856.

The flexibility of the hands increased from one specie of early humans to other specie. Increase in the flexibility allowed them to make tools, to hold tools and hunt animals.

The Fertile Crescent, one of areas for the earliest agricultural and pastoralist activities (around 10,000 years ago), extended from the Mediterranean Coast to the Zagros Mountains in Iran.

Hominids belong to a family known as Hominidae, which includes all forms of human beings. The distinctive characteristics of hominids include a large brain size, upright posture, bipedal locomotion and specialisation of the hand. Later on, hominids came to be divided into branches called genus, whose important types include Australopithecus and Homo.

Hominids probably migrated from East Africa to Southern and Northern Africa, to Southern and North-eastern Asia, and probably to Europe, around between 2 and 1.5 million years ago. It survived for nearly a million years.

The skull of the Neanderthal man, first discovered at Neander Valley in Germany, was initially rejected by scholars. Some of them, dismissing its antiquity, regarded it as 'brutish' or that of a 'pathological idiot'.