Abstract: The formation of man and human society. The emergence of medicine. The emergence of human society. Beginning of sociogenesis

“The dawn of human history is the time of the emergence of human society.”

Society- in the broad sense of the word, it is a combination of all types of interaction and forms of association of people that have developed historically; in a narrow sense - a historically specific type of social system, a certain form of social relations, a group of persons united by common moral and ethical norms (foundations).

The emergence of human society and man is a single process.

Society, as a set of social relations, arises with the advent of man.

The stage of the initial emergence of human society begins when the accidental, unstable use of natural objects as a means of influencing other natural objects gradually becomes necessary, stable.

The process of transformation of a great ape into a man and the emergence of society was very long. The process of anthropogenesis (the formation of man) and sociogenesis (the formation of society), which began 1.5 - 1.6 million years ago, ended 35-40 thousand years ago. However, two stages are clearly distinguished in this process of the emergence of human society. In their course, human society was finally formed and at the same time man was qualitatively constituted as the most perfect being and as a social unit. These two stages are: the process of biological and the process of social humanization. In the process of biological humanization, a person freed himself from the properties inherent in animals, and in the process of social humanization, a social being arises, a being that can develop, live only in society, in a team with other people. Having become a society, a person thus turned out to be subordinate to social relations.

The forms of marital relations within these ancient communities were a direct legacy of the animal past. Judging from what we know about these relations in later human communities, where they were only partially regulated, in this ancient time, marital relations must have had a promiscuous character (the stage of promiscuity), determined only by biological instinct.

But the most basic thing was that within such a primitive group, horde or human primitive herd, the existence of which was due to vital necessity, there was such a powerful force that did not exist and could not exist even in the most tightly knit herd of animals - collective labor activity. in the fight against nature. In development labor activity within the primitive community, social ties grew and strengthened, curbing the former zoological instincts inherited by man from his animal ancestors. In the course of millennia, the new, human, more and more prevailed over the old, bestial. This was expressed, in particular, in the restriction of sexual intercourse between parents and their children.

Joint labor activity, a common dwelling, a common fire that warmed its inhabitants - all this, with natural necessity, rallied and united people. The strengthening of social ties, caused by the need to unite people to fight nature, is clearly evidenced by the whole situation of the Mousterian settlements, all their culture, all traces of their activities, including even such seemingly ordinary and inexpressive finds from this side as “kitchen garbage" in the form of thousands or even tens of thousands of animal bones found in the cave dwellings of Neanderthals and in their open-air camps. They show how man gradually overcame the animal egoism inherited from the prehuman state. Unlike animals, man no longer cared only for himself and not only for his own children, but also for the whole community. Instead of eating the prey at the hunting ground, the Mousterian hunters carried it to the cave, where women, children and the elderly, busy with housekeeping, remained around the blazing fire.

It is very likely that it was at this time that the transition to a new form of social life began. The first rudiments of the most ancient form of tribal society, the maternal tribal community, i.e., a collective bound by ties of kinship, arise.

By this time, the forms of marital relations had already passed a significant path of development, although it is difficult to say with certainty what level they had reached. Initially, relations between the sexes, apparently, were disordered by social rules. The further development of the family went along the line of narrowing the circle of persons participating in marital intercourse, first of all by limiting marital intercourse between the generation of parents and children, then between uterine brothers and sisters, etc.

The common property of the clan and the community begins to be replaced by the separate property of individual households, equal distribution is replaced by labor, community-clan ties are torn and give way to community-neighborhood in their early, primitive form. The initial forms of exploitation appear, along with which the surplus product begins to turn into a surplus product, private property, social classes and statehood are born. The upper limit - the emergence of class societies and states - was crossed by the most advanced societies about 5 thousand years ago, the most backward in their development has not been crossed to this day.

An attempt at a scientific description of the origin of society was made within the framework of the Marxist tool-labor theory, according to which labor, and then articulate speech, created man. Without denying the importance of tools, we nevertheless do not find any intelligible confirmation of this hypothesis in scientific facts. Z. Freud saw the source of the origin of man in his possession of a conscience. This view is not at all supported by ethnographic studies. J. Huizinga sees in the game and gaming activity the fundamental principle of culture, which formulates man. Ernst Cassirer (1875-1945) put forward the symbolic concept of the origin of man and his culture. According to Cassirer, man did not possess natural gifts that would ensure his survival. the chance for survival was given to man in his ability to see the adaptive behavior of other animals and imitate them. This allowed our distant ancestors to go beyond their species program and overcome their species limitations. In turn, imitative behavior became the source of sign symbolism, and then speech.

The emergence of society coincides with the emergence of man. It is assumed, in particular, that man arose as a result of a long evolution from an Australopithecus-type monkey. Evolution, numbering millions of years, ended with the emergence of humanoid creatures (hominid). The period of their existence is approximately 2 million years. it is likely that the most developed representatives of hominids (they received the name "presapiens") in the process of their evolution into marriage relations with less developed humanoid beings, which presumably caused the racial diversity of mankind.

For getting food, equipping a dwelling, making clothes mainly from animal skins, the Presapiens used roughly processed stone tools and wood products. bones. The use of fire markedly distinguished them from animals. They knew how to draw, which testified to a developed communication system. and also mastered the sound speech. These creatures were not fully human, but they were not animals either.

It can be assumed that the most important factor in the transformation of an animal herd into a human community was the formation of the ability to fix in a sign system and pass on the accumulated experience from generation to generation. A show, an example, a system of prohibitions and restrictions were expressed not only in non-verbal, but also in gradually emerging verbal means of communication. Among the most famous are prohibitions related to behavior in relation to food, as well as sexual restrictions, and in the first place - the prohibition of incest. They had far-reaching consequences. This made it possible to streamline the system of marital relations, to establish the exchange of women, and then, by analogy with it, the exchange of food, products, words - signs. These processes contributed to the establishment of norms of communication, behavior and relations between people and the need to comply with them. Having no chance to survive outside the team, each of its members observed the norms of everyday behavior established in it. Thus, society evolved as a system of joint activities and relationships between people, determined by the needs of the production and reproduction of their lives and regulated by customs, norms and values.

Norms apply to all areas of human life and create the prerequisites for the emergence of culture and civilization. Whatever transformation a society experiences, it retains these essential structural elements that emerged with the human race. Buchilo, N.F. Philosophy: Textbook / N.F. Buchilo, A.N. Chumakov. - M.: PER SE, 2001. - S.299-302

If we turn to history, we will find that there are two large types of entities that unite people. The first, primordial, is viewed through the entire depth of historical vision. This is a family, clan, tribe, tribal and tribal unions. They can be united under "the name of traditional or archaic local groups. These communities are a form of coexistence or interaction of people united by a common origin, language, fate, world views. The second type of sociality arises during the formation of the state and civilization and is a "big society", i.e. actually a type of modern society. Its nature, laws, methods, forms of functioning are different. The transition to a large society is a historical process. Obviously, there was an objective need for the transformation of tribal and tribal groups numbering several tens or hundreds of people, into large communities, qualitatively different from local ones Mitroshenkova, OA Philosophy: Textbook / Under the editorship of Prof. OA Mitroshenkov.- M.: Gardariki, 2002.- p.391

The formation of a large society is a long, contradictory process, complicated by zigzags and backward movements. Acquiring new qualities of sociality, people lost their usual living conditions, a sense of security, stability, and spiritual comfort, which, to a certain extent, were provided by the local world. Moreover, the person himself, as well as the surrounding context, changed, became different, because he was forced to master fundamentally different “mechanisms” of being and communicating in a large society. venous elements, the question was about the life and death of a new form of human existence. She did not have the strength to assimilate this element. Therefore, it most often destroyed the localist, pre-state sociality opposing it, often turning inhabited lands into a desert, destroying tribes and peoples. It was, of course, cruel, but it was about the survival of a large society - the prototype of the modern one. Mitroshenkova, O.A. Philosophy: Textbook / Ed. prof. O.A. Mitroshenkov. - M.: Gardariki, 2002. - S. 392

society social structure

Our further task is to acquaint readers with the initial history of the labor activity of people, which led to emergence of society.

In order to study comparatively recent times, a scholar usually turns to the library and archives where written documents are stored. By studying them, one can not only restore the way of life of different peoples, but even resurrect individual events and name their participants.

But the era about which written documents have been preserved is limited to only a few millennia. And even then these documents concern only those peoples who had a written language in the past. The whole history of mankind, as we already know, is hundreds of thousands of years old. It is understandable, therefore, that the library archives are powerless to reveal anything here. They are replaced by earth, in which not only the bone remains of people are buried, but also tools, household items that tell about the life of people who made these tools and used them.

The entire vast period during which human formation from the monkey, that is, from the appearance of the ape-man to the appearance of the "ready-made man" - the Cro-Magnon, it is customary to call the ancient stone era, or the Paleolithic (from the words: "palaios" - ancient, "lithos" - stone). This era is named so because then people used stone and tools made from bones and horns of animals. There is no doubt that people of that time also used wood. But it decayed, rotted and was not preserved. The Paleolithic era is usually divided into two stages: early and late Paleolithic.

Early Paleolithic era

Early Paleolithic people(ape-men and Neanderthals) led a herd life. They did not erect dwellings for themselves and located their camps under rock canopies or in natural caves, which they had to win back from the terrible predators that were common in those days.

In search of food, the emerging people roamed the vast mountainous, steppe and forest spaces. Any larva, edible root, bulb or ground fruit was greedily devoured at the site of their discovery. Of course, our distant ancestors did not disdain carrion either. However, such food was not always available in abundance, and often had to wander for a long time with an empty, rumbling stomach. And yet, our ancient ancestors, with all their weak weapons, managed to hunt large herbivores in the fight against harsh living conditions.

We are convinced of this by the presence in some Neanderthal sites of bones even of such animals as the mammoth. In general, one must think that for the most ancient people hunting for large animals was more accessible than for small ones. To kill a small land animal or bird, you need a bow and arrow, snares, traps, etc. Fishing requires nets and special hooks. Hunting large animals does not require such tools. It could be carried out with the help of raids and driving animals into ravines, the exit from which was locked by a group of hunters. Animals could also be driven to cliffs, from which, if not all, then at least some of them fell off, fell down and broke.

Hunting for large animals could, finally, be carried out with the help of fire raids: the treeless steppe was lit on the leeward side in such a way as to force the herds of animals grazing on it to flee in a certain direction - to steep river banks and ravines, where they became the prey of hunters. Until recently, such hunting techniques have been practiced by culturally backward peoples, for example, by the Australians, Papuans and others, and this indicates the emergence of a society.

It must be said that even those extremely imperfect stone tools that people of the early Paleolithic had were largely adapted for the needs of hunting. These are fragments of flint with sharp and cutting edges. With such weapons, of course, it is impossible to kill any beast. But these flint tools are quite suitable for skinning dead animals, cutting skins and cleaning them from mezdra (remains of meat). There are even larger flint tools, called "hand axes". However, it is impossible to cut or prick anything with them. Some believe that "hand axes" were used to dig up roots, larvae, and other things from the soil that could be used as food.

Animal hunting has played a huge role in the formation of society. Engels was undoubtedly right when he believed that without meat food the “ready man” would not have been formed. Meat food contains all the substances necessary to sustain life. The use of fire made it possible to better digest the meat. Hunting for animals common in all climatic zones made it possible for man to spread widely on the Earth.

But the most important thing is that the hunting of large animals contributed to the development of the social life of the emerging people. Primitive hunting required the presence of a significant number of people, tightly united in teams. In such associations, the wild instincts of primitive savages were humbled, who were forced to subordinate their personal semi-animal impulses to common interests.

To go against the interests and will of the collective meant to be killed. Even if the rebel managed to escape the massacre by flight, then even then he was not guaranteed from death: life alone doomed the savage to deprivation and a half-starved existence and made him defenseless in the fight against predatory animals. Thus, hunting played a large role in the emergence of society.

Primitive association of formed people- the herd - was a transitional step to the proper human society. The latter, as Engels wrote, appeared simultaneously with the appearance on Earth of "ready-made people" - Cro-Magnons, or people of the late Paleolithic era.

Late Paleolithic era

Cro-Magnon guns incomparably more diverse than the Neanderthals, which testifies not only to the emergence of society, but also to its development. Late Paleolithic people were skilled craftsmen of flint, bone, and animal horn. In their inventory we find spearheads (javelins), spear-throwers, awls, as well as pieces of stone and mammoth bone with cup-like depressions hollowed out in them. All scientists agree that these are fatty lamps used to illuminate dark caves.

Cultural remains of the late Paleolithic give grounds to assert that the main occupation of the Cro-Magnons was hunting for a large beast. Of course, the collection of plant products also had some significance. Bone hooks found in rare cases also indicate that the Cro-Magnon people also began to engage in fishing.

At present, scientists have accumulated a huge amount of material, which makes it possible to quite clearly imagine the way of life and work of people of the early and late Paleolithic. Particularly rich material for this is provided by the extensive research carried out by Soviet archaeologists.

Among the Paleolithic sites discovered by Soviet scientists, two especially stand out, where, in addition to tools and animal bones, bone remains of Neanderthals were found.

The first of these sites was discovered in 1924. G. A. Bonch-Osmolovsky v Kiik-Koba cave, in the Crimea, 25 kilometers east of Simferopol. At the bottom of the cave were the bones of the right leg and both feet of an adult Neanderthal and, somewhat to the side, a poorly preserved skeleton of a child about one year old. It was also excavated a large number of roughly crafted flint tools.

A significant number of animal bones were also found in the Kiik-Koba cave - a giant deer, a wild donkey, a wild boar, a saiga, an arctic fox, a wolf. One should think that the Kiik-Koba site is one of the most ancient in Europe.

Of even greater interest is the site discovered by A.P. Okladnikov in 1938 in Teshik-Tash cave in the Baysun region of the Uzbek SSR.

This cave contained a significant amount of bones, including the skull of a nine-year-old Neanderthal child. Roughly processed flint tools and bones of some animals were also found there, and among them there are many horns of mountain goats that were hunted Teshik-Tash Neanderthals.

The Teshik-Tash find is of world scientific importance, since it destroyed the opinion, widespread among some foreign scientists, that Central Asia was not inhabited by Neanderthals.

The Teshik-Tash find is also interesting in another respect. Among anti-Marxist-minded scientists, it is widely believed that not labor, but cold was the main factor in the formation of man. This statement comes from the fact that Neanderthals lived in Europe during the ice age, when the temperature was much lower than now, and the animals that the Neanderthals hunted were different. Without the cold, proponents of the glacial theory say, there would be no man himself.

The Teshik-Tash find overturned this conjecture as well. It turns out that at the time when Neanderthals lived in Central Asia, there was no glaciation and climate and animal world were almost the same as now. It turns out that in Europe and Asia in different natural conditions lived the same type of people who made the same type of tool. Consequently, not climate, but labor, as Engels wrote, was the main factor in human evolution.

The first data on the Teshik-Tash find were published by the prominent Soviet anthropologist G. F. Debets back in 1938. A detailed study and description of this find was carried out by a team of scientists at the Institute of Anthropology of Moscow University, headed by Professor M. A. Gremyatsky. The Teshik-Tash collection, in which the results of the study of this valuable find were published, was awarded a high award in 1950 - the Stalin Prize.

Sculpture of the head of a Neanderthal child, made from a skull found in the Teshik-tash site (Uzbekistan). The work of M. M. Gerasimov, Museum of Anthropology, Moscow University.

Skull of a Teshik-Tash child was found shattered into about one hundred and fifty pieces. It was restored by the anthropologist-reenactor M. M. Gerasimov. Based on the restored skull, he also created a sculptural portrait of a Teshik-Tash child for the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow University. By the way, we note that Gerasimov restored the appearance of other fossil people of the ancient stone era, as well as historical figures. Gerasimov's work "Fundamentals of facial reconstruction from the skull" was also awarded the Stalin Prize in 1950.

There is a widespread theory among some foreign reactionary scholars that Neanderthals are not the ancestors of Cro-Magnons that both of these types of people lived at the same time. According to this theory, Cro-Magnons are the "superior" breed of people. They came to Western Europe, exterminated the Neanderthals and settled there themselves. The remnants of the Neanderthals, under the onslaught of the Cro-Magnons, left Europe for Africa and Asia, where they gave rise to the modern peoples of these countries.

Soviet anthropologists are credited with exposing this false theory. They discovered and described a number of finds that make up the transition from a Neanderthal species to a modern one. Such finds have been found in the North Caucasus (Podkumok), near Moscow (Skhodnya), on the Volga (Khvalynsk) and near Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine.

Similar intermediate finds have been found in Czechoslovakia and Palestine. The Neanderthal skull from Skhul cave in Palestine, for example, has a protruding chin, like modern man. We also note that sometimes there are skulls of modern people, bearing some weakened Neanderthal features.

Finally, it must be pointed out that bone remains of Neanderthals are found in more ancient layers of the earth than Cro-Magnon. Never have Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon finds been found in the same layer. This refutes the fabrications of reactionary scientists who are trying to undermine the doctrine of the ape origin of modern people and prove that they allegedly do not have fossil ancestors. As you can see, the emergence of society did not occur locally, but in different regions.

No less merit belongs to Soviet archaeologists in the study lifestyle of the people of the late Paleolithic era. Suffice it to point out that over the past thirty years about three hundred Late Paleolithic sites have been explored and excavated in the USSR. Let's focus on two of them.

In 1946, a joint expedition of the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow University and the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the USSR Academy of Sciences, led by M.V. Voevodsky (1903–1948), discovered a Late Paleolithic site near Kursk, the excavation of which continued during 1947–1949. There is a parking lot on the bank of a small river Ragozna (a tributary of the Seim River), where the village of Avdeevo is now located.

At the Avdeevka site, people settled back in the Ice Age, about thirty to forty thousand years ago. At this time, a huge glacier was moving from the north, covering most of Eastern Europe. According to the definition of geologists, the thickness of the ice in some places reached 2 kilometers. The southern part of the glacier ended with two "tongues" moving along the valleys of the Don and Dnieper rivers.

The Avdeevo site was somewhat south of the glacial boundary. The climate here was harsh. The area was a tundra, turning into an arid steppe. Permafrost was located not deep from the soil surface. Nevertheless, the animals hunted by the people of that time were found here in abundance.

The fact is that as the glacier moved from the north, which lasted for tens of millennia, the vegetation became sparse, and then completely died under the ice cover. As for the animals, those that did not adapt to the onset of climatic changes died out, and the rest gradually moved further south, adapting to new living conditions. Thus, the territory located south of the glacier was like a reserve in which many different animals accumulated. Mammoths, woolly rhinos, reindeer, musk-sheep, brown bears, wolves, arctic foxes, wild horses and others were found in abundance here.

Avdeevskaya parking had about fifteen dugouts located along the edges of a stretched circle (ellipse). Each dugout was a shallow pit up to 4 square meters. On top of each such pit, a skeleton of mammoth tusks and large bones of other animals was arranged. This skeleton, apparently, was covered with skins that decayed and were not preserved.

Not all dugouts were inhabited. Judging by the cultural remains found in them, it can be assumed that some of the dugouts served as storage facilities for stocks of food and skins, which accumulated after each successful hunt. It was public property. Based on the total number of residential dugouts and their size, one should think that the Avdeevka camp consisted of approximately forty to fifty settled hunters.

Among the tools found at the Avdeevka site, there are flint knife-like plates, chisels, chisels, and drills. There were also found items made of mammoth bone - the so-called adzes, which were apparently used as diggers, piercers, burnishers, and awls. There are decorations in the form of specially made pendants and drilled animal teeth. There were also several female figurines made of mammoth bone in the parking lot.

Of no less interest is the Late Paleolithic parking Talitskaya, named after M. V. Talitsky (1906–1942), who discovered it in 1938, who died in the fight against the Nazi invaders. The Talitskaya site is located in the region of the Northwestern Urals, on the Chusovaya River, not far from the city of Molotov. The Talitskaya site, later studied by some other Soviet scientists, provided abundant archaeological material. It was a camp of semi-sedentary hunters who lingered here for several years.

At the site, hearth pits were found filled with coal from burnt bones, mainly of a mammoth and a woolly rhinoceros. Bones of wild horses, reindeer, roe deer, arctic foxes and some other animals were also found.

The Talitskaya site testifies that already about twenty-five thousand years ago people settled widely on our land, penetrating far to the north.

Although in the late Paleolithic era people were already moving to a sedentary lifestyle, they still did not engage in agriculture or cattle breeding, and their main occupation was hunting large animals. But there is some reason to believe that at that time a dog had already appeared (a tamed wolf in some places and a jackal in others), which, perhaps, was not only a guard of camps, but also accompanied a person in his hunting wanderings.

An attempt at a scientific description of the origin of society was made within the framework of the Marxist tool-labor theory, according to which labor, and then articulate speech, created a person. Without denying the importance of tools, we nevertheless do not find any intelligible confirmation of this hypothesis in scientific facts. Z. Freud saw the source of the origin of man in his possession of a conscience. This view is not at all supported by ethnographic studies. J. Huizinga sees in the game and game activity the fundamental principle of culture, which formulates a person. Ernst Cassirer (1875-1945) put forward the symbolic concept of the origin of man and his culture. According to Cassirer, man did not possess natural gifts that would ensure his survival. the chance for survival was given to man in his ability to see the adaptive behavior of other animals and imitate them. This allowed our distant ancestors to go beyond their species program and overcome their species limitations. In turn, imitative behavior became the source of sign symbolism, and then speech.

The development of the mind. Man, unlike animals, has a special form of thinking - conceptual thinking. The concept contains the most important essential features and properties, the concepts are abstract. The reflection of reality by animals is always concrete, objective, connected with certain objects of the surrounding world. Only human thinking can be logical, generalizing, abstract. Animals can perform very complex actions, but they are based on instincts - genetic programs that are inherited. The set of such actions is strictly limited, a sequence is defined that does not change with changing conditions, even if the action becomes inappropriate. A person first sets a goal, draws up a plan that can change if necessary, analyzes the results, draws conclusions.

Speech. IP Pavlov (1925), studying the features of human higher nervous activity, reveals its qualitative differences from the nervous activity of animals - the presence of a second signaling system, that is, speech. Through the senses, animals and humans are able to detect various changes in the qualities and properties of surrounding objects and phenomena (sound, color, light, smell, taste, temperature, etc.). It is the work of sensory mechanisms that underlies the action of the first signaling system common in humans and animals. At the same time, a second signaling system develops in humans. The signals here are words, speech, separated from the subject itself, abstract and generalized. The word replaces immediate stimuli, is a "signal of signals." Numerous observations have shown that the second signaling system can be developed only when communicating with people, that is, the development of speech has a social character.

Labor activity. Many animals are capable of certain creative activities. But only a person is able to make complex tools, plan labor activity, correct it, foresee results and actively change the world around.

The use of fire. The development of fire was of great importance for the development of man and social relations. This fact allowed a person to stand out from the natural world, to become free, not to depend on the conditions of the elements. The heat treatment of food and the use of fire to make more advanced tools have become positive in the development of mankind.

Division of labor. Already at the initial stages of the development of human society, there was a division of labor according to age and gender. This led to the development of social relations, to an increase in labor productivity, and made it possible to transfer experience and knowledge to a new generation.

Family and marriage relations. The regulation of marital relations by society was a positive factor not only for the development of society, but also for the biological evolution of man. The prohibition of related marriages prevents the accumulation of negative mutations, leads to the enrichment of the gene pool of society.

The Neolithic Revolution After the Mesolithic, at different times in different territories, the Neolithic began - the period of the manufacture of polished stone tools, the invention of stone drilling, the appearance of an ax (which contributed to the reduction of forests), and later - the invention of molding and annealing clay for making dishes. Accordingly, pre-ceramic and ceramic Neolithic are distinguished.

The main event of the Neolithic era was the so-called Neolithic revolution - the transition from gathering and hunting to crop production, associated with the emergence of cultivated plants, and animal husbandry, associated with the domestication of animals. The Neolithic revolution first began in the Middle East, where the first types of cereals were introduced into the culture - wheat, einkorn and two-grain, barley. The goat was also domesticated here, and, as our studies have shown, the ancestors of the sheep are Asian mouflons. First unconscious, and then conscious artificial selection began to be applied. The result of the Neolithic revolution was the emergence of agriculture. From the Middle East, agriculture began to spread to the Mediterranean countries and southern Europe and move east. There was a strong anthropogenic pressure on pastures and arable land.

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture touched primarily on areas with a relatively warm temperate climate, where the previous Late Neolithic and Mesolithic ecological crises led to a sharp reduction in hunting resources. The hunting tribes did not disappear, but began to develop more northern regions of Europe and North America, which were liberated after the melting of glaciers.

The transition to agriculture and animal husbandry meant a sharp increase in food resources and made it possible to increase the human population during the Neolithic by at least an order of magnitude, i.e. as a result of the Neolithic revolution, the human population began to be measured in tens of millions of individuals. So, according to the estimates of the American archaeologist F.K. Howell, the human population by the end of the Neolithic revolution - 6000 years ago - was 86.5 million individuals.

The set of cultivated species of cultivated plants also grew steadily. The first pastoralists and farmers quite quickly brought domestic animals and cultivated plants out of their natural habitats, which undoubtedly accelerated the process of breed and variety formation.

Ecological consequences of the Neolithic revolution. The domestication of animals led to the competitive displacement of their wild ancestors and relatives from their native habitats. The ancestor of the common goat - the bezoar goat (Capra aegargus), the ancestor of the common sheep - the Asian mouflon (Ovis gmelini) - were pushed back to the highlands of Western Asia. The domestication of the horse, a descendant of the European tarpan, led to the almost universal extinction of a wild species that survived in the southern Russian steppes until the 19th century, but disappeared from most of its range at the end of the Neolithic. Wild relatives of domesticated species have also been ousted.

Having moved from gathering and hunting to farming and animal husbandry, humanity provided itself with food and got the opportunity to increase its numbers from a few million to tens of millions. At the same time, the number of domestic animals accompanying humans has sharply increased - millions of populations of domestic goats and sheep, many tens of thousands of heads of large cattle, several tens of thousands of heads of horses, donkeys and camels accompanied Neolithic man. In order to expand agricultural land, our ancestors burned forests and planted fields in conflagrations. Due to primitive agriculture, these fields quickly lost productivity, then new forests were burned. The reduction in the area of forests led to a decrease in the level of rivers and groundwater.

The largest ecological result of Neolithic pastoralism was the creation of the Sahara desert. As studies of expeditions of French archaeologists led by Henri Lot showed, 10,000 years ago there was a savannah in the Sahara, hippos, giraffes, African elephants, and ostriches lived. Man overgrazing herds of cattle and sheep turned the savannah into a desert. The rivers and lakes dried up - the hippos disappeared, the savannah disappeared - there were no giraffes, ostriches, most species of antelopes. Following the disappearance of the North African savannas, the once numerous cattle also disappeared.

A less noticeable, but undoubtedly important result of the transition to agriculture was the appearance of synanthropic animals around human settlements. House mice (a complex of species from the Mus musculus group) fed on grain reserves. Within 10–12 thousand years, synanthropic species (the Eastern European and Eastern Mediterranean species Mus musculus and the Western European species M. domesticus) separated from wild-living species of house mice, living in houses. In the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, a 38-chromosomal form of the black rat (Rattus rattus) settled next to man, and in China, the 42-chromosome form of the black rat. Black rats are good swimmers and climbers. Canals and rivers were not an obstacle for them. Mankind faced massive plague pandemics, from which tens and hundreds of thousands died, and in the Middle Ages, millions. From the plague in the history of mankind died not less people than from all wars.

The desertification of vast areas in the Neolithic was the cause of the second ecological crisis. Mankind emerged from it in two ways: 1) advancing north and advancing on the steppe zone, forest-steppe and forests, where tribes of hunters and fishermen still roamed. Here, in connection with the melting of glaciers, new territories not previously developed by man appeared; 2) the transition to irrigated agriculture in the valleys of the great southern rivers - the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. This is where the earliest civilizations originated.

The emergence of human society.

The era of the formation and development of primitive communal relations is of great importance in the history of mankind. It begins with the separation of man from the animal world. During this era, the foundations of all further development of the material and spiritual culture of human society were laid.

“This “hoary antiquity” under all circumstances will remain an unusually interesting epoch for all future generations, because it forms the basis of all later higher development, because it has as its starting point the separation of man from the animal kingdom, and its content is the overcoming of such difficulties, who will never be met by future associated people ”(F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Gospolitizdat. 1953, p. 109.), Friedrich Engels wrote about the era of the primitive communal system.

Human Origins.

The process of the formation of man and the development of the primitive communal system consists of a series of successive stages. V. I. Lenin in his work “State and Revolution”, speaking of the initial stages of human development, mentions “a herd of monkeys taking sticks”, about “primitive people” and about “people united in clan societies” (tribal communities) (See V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, Soch., vol. 25, p. 361.). These definitions are accepted by Soviet science to designate three different successively changing stages of human evolution and the formation of society.
The first two stages are the time of separation of our ancient ancestors from the animal world. As a result, they became a turning point in the history of our planet, opening up a long, difficult and complex, but great path for the development of labor and society, which went from impotence before nature to the ever-increasing power of man over it.

In order to more fully imagine the course of events in these first stages of human history, as well as throughout primitive history, it is necessary first of all to keep in mind the natural geographical situation, those events in the history of the globe, against which changes occurred in the lives of our distant ancestors. , in many respects closely related to changes in the nature surrounding them.

As you know, the history of the Earth is divided into four eras: Archean, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The last era continues to the present. Each of these eras is further subdivided into a number of periods. Only in the second half of the Archean ("original") era, which lasted about 1/2 billion years, did life appear on earth, first in the form of simple organisms, then algae, sponges, coelenterates, mollusks, annelids. Sometimes the time of the appearance of life on earth is singled out in a special era - the Proterozoic (the era of "early life"). In the Paleozoic era (the era of "ancient life"), which lasted about 325 million years, fish, insects, amphibians, reptiles, as well as terrestrial spore plants appear. Mesozoic era (era " average life”), which lasted about 115 million years, was the time of the development of gigantic reptiles. The Cenozoic era (the era of "new life", the time of the dominance of mammals) is divided into two large periods: Tertiary and Quaternary.

The closest human ancestors

The Tertiary period, compared with the entire history of man, lasted an extremely long time. It began about 70 million and ended about 1 million years ago.

The significance of the Tertiary period in the history of the Earth, especially its animal and plant life, is very great. During this time there have been great changes in the appearance of the globe. Vast mountainous regions, seas and bays were formed, the outlines of entire continents changed. The mountains of the Caucasus, the Carpathians and the Alps arose, the central part of Asia rose, crowned with the mountain ranges of the Pamirs and the Himalayas.

At the same time, no less important changes were taking place in the plant and animal world. The oldest plants, including giant cycads, tree ferns, and giant horsetails, have long since given way to the more advanced angiosperms. The time of the domination of mammals began. Finally, the most important event in the history of the development of life on earth took place, prepared by the entire progressive evolution of the animal and plant world as a whole: at the end of the Tertiary period, as a result of a process of long development, the closest ancestors of man appear.

Materialistically thinking naturalists, especially Charles Darwin, collected by the middle of the 19th century. a huge amount of material that allows us to present in general terms the appearance of those ancient anthropoid (humanoid) apes, which were supposed to be the immediate ancestors of man. Scientists have found out the main features of the lifestyle of anthropoids and those biological prerequisites that, in the course of the struggle for existence, prepared the transition from apes to humans through natural selection.

In the 19th century in the deposits dating back to the end of the Tertiary period, the remains of highly developed ancient monkeys were found, called driopithecus (From the Greek words "drio" - tree and "pitekos" - monkey, that is, literally: "tree monkey"). Dryopithecus was the common ancestor of man and the African great apes of our time - gorillas and chimpanzees. Discovered in 1902 in Australia, the three molars of the "Darwinian Dryopithecus" are so similar to humans that the closest relationship of this ancient ape to humans is beyond doubt.

The discovery of the bones of Dryopithecus was a brilliant confirmation materialistic theory Darwin about the origin of man from the ancient great ape, as for the first time he gave a concrete idea of how these monkeys, the ancestors of man, actually should have looked.

In the future, the number of such finds continued to increase continuously. They more and more filled the abyss that idealist scientists sought to dig between man and the rest of the organic world, trying in every possible way to support the decrepit biblical legend about the creation of man "in the image and likeness of God." In northern India, in the Tertiary layers of the Sivalik Hills, for example, fragments of the jaw of Ramapithecus, an ancient anthropoid ape, closer to humans than Dryopithecus, were found. It differed from all other great apes in that its fangs did not protrude forward compared to the rest of the teeth. The appearance of Ramapithecus was thus less animal-like, even more human-like. On the territory of South Africa in 1924, the remains of a new anthropoid, Australopithecus, were found even more interesting for highlighting the question of human ancestors (The name of this creature comes from the words "Australis" - southern and "Pitekos" - monkey and can be translated as "southern monkey "). Subsequently, in 1935-1951, the remains of at least 30 individuals of this monkey were found. As it turned out, Australopithecus was closer to humans in its structure than all other known to science, including the living anthropoid apes. The pelvis and femurs of Australopithecus are close to human; Australopithecus mostly walked on two legs in an upright or nearly upright position.

The reason for the transition of Australopithecus to upright posture is explained by the general conditions of their life and struggle for existence. During the previous hundreds of millennia, monkeys, in contrast to animals leading a terrestrial lifestyle, were four-armed creatures that widely used their limbs, primarily the front ones, precisely for grasping movements. But unlike other monkeys that lived on trees in a tropical forest, moving through the trees with all four limbs and a tail, Australopithecus lived in areas that were already almost treeless and semi-desert in those distant times - in the west and in the center of South Africa. These conditions predetermined the transition from climbing trees to terrestrial life, to movement with the help of only the lower limbs.

This is indicated by the structure of the bones of the upper limbs of Australopithecus. His thumb was opposed to the rest of the fingers and, unlike the thumb of modern anthropoids, was relatively large. Therefore, Australopithecus could well perform such grasping operations with their own hands, which are difficult or inaccessible to modern higher apes.

The next important feature of Australopithecus, also inextricably linked with bipedalism, are the structural features of the skull, indicating a more vertical head position than that of other anthropoids. This can be seen from the fact that on a significant part of the occiput of Australopithecus there were no longer strong neck muscles, which were supposed to hold the head in weight when it was in a horizontal position. This placement of the head of the australopithecine should have contributed further. more accelerated development of the brain and skull of human ancestors.

All these mutually connected features, which have developed over hundreds of thousands of years in the conditions of terrestrial life, put apes of the Australopithecus type in a special position compared to other anthropoid apes, opened up completely new opportunities for them in the struggle for existence. The release of the forelimbs from supporting functions and the expansion of their grasping activity made it possible to develop the activity of Australopithecus along a completely new path - along the path of an increasingly expanding and systematic use of various items, primarily sticks and stones as natural tools.

The enormous, fundamentally important significance of this circumstance for the further evolution of human ancestors is evidenced by studies of the remains of other animals found along with the bones of Australopithecus themselves. Examination of fossil baboon skulls found in the same area where Australopithecus bones were found showed that 50 of the 58 of these skulls had fractured injuries from impact. great strength caused by some heavy objects. Bones of large ungulates were also found, the ends of these bones were broken and broken. Fragments of tortoise shells, lizard bones, and freshwater crab shells were found in the "kitchen heaps" of Australopithecus. It can be assumed, therefore, that in addition to collecting plant food, bird eggs, Australopithecus hunted small animals, caught lizards, crabs, and sometimes attacked relatively large animals, using stones and sticks.

The constant use of animal meat by these ancient monkeys, in contrast to those monkeys that lived in trees and ate mainly plant food, contributed to their accelerated progressive development. Meat food allowed human ancestors to improve faster and more fully from generation to generation, as it had a great influence on the development of their brain, delivering the substances necessary for its development to the brain in more than before, and in a more concentrated, easier to digest form. An increased supply of the brain with the substances necessary for its growth was absolutely necessary. The struggle for existence was associated with the use of primary. unfinished tools, it required the continuous development and complication. of conditioned reflex activity, the growth of ingenuity and resourcefulness.

Thus, the study of monkeys of the Australopithecus type gives an idea about a certain and very important link in the evolution of our ancestors and, in addition, quite clearly shows how the direct predecessors and ancestors of [Man . In any case, they were very close in type to Australopithecus, the same highly developed anthropoid apes. They had to have approximately the same physical structure as Australopithecus and lead a similar lifestyle. These monkeys apparently inhabited a vast territory in Africa and southern Asia. The area of their settlement probably also included the southern parts of the USSR, as evidenced by the recent discovery of the remains of an anthropoid ape in Eastern Georgia. This species of great ape was believed to be close to driopithecus and received the name "Udabnopithecus" after the Udabno area, where the remains of this monkey were found.

As for other representatives of the genus of monkeys, these " younger brothers Our distant ancestors were hopelessly behind and stayed away from the main road of evolutionary development that led from ape to man. Some species of highly developed monkeys of the late Tertiary period increasingly adapted to life in trees. They remained forever tied to the rainforest. The biological development of other monkeys in the struggle for existence went along the path of increasing the size of their bodies. This is how huge monkeys appeared - meganthropes, gigantopithecus, the remains of which were found in southern China, as well as monkeys like the modern gorilla. But their brute strength, which made it possible to successfully fight for life in the primeval forest, grew to the detriment of the higher sphere of life activity, to the detriment of the evolution of the brain.

The role of labor in separating man from the animal world

Monkeys such as Australopithecus, under the pressure of the struggle for existence, radically changed their way of life, moving in search of food from climbing trees in the rainforest to terrestrial life. At the same time, completely new possibilities for the development of the brain of these monkeys were opened up, determined by the transition to a straight gait, and also by the fact that the head began to gradually acquire a vertical position.

But the most essential, decisive, was not at all in the purely biological prerequisites for the formation of man, brilliantly revealed by Darwin.

The founders of Marxism established the most important fact that all these biological prerequisites could be realized, could serve as the basis for the transition from the animal state to the human state, not by themselves, but only thanks to labor. In his remarkable work “The Role of Labor in the Process of Turning Apes into Humans,” F. Engels wrote: “Labor is the source of all wealth, say political economists. He really is such, along with nature, which supplies him with the material that he turns into wealth. But he is also something infinitely more than that. It is the first basic condition of all human life, and, moreover, to such an extent that in a certain sense we must say: labor created man himself ”(F. Engels, The role of labor in the process of turning a monkey into a man, M. 1953, p. 3.) .

Late Tertiary apes such as Australopithecus did not yet know how to make artificial tools and used only ready-made ones that were available in nature - sticks and stones. But they, apparently, could no longer exist without the use of such tools, at least initially given by nature itself, because they did not have natural weapons that could withstand the natural weapons of their bloodthirsty opponents from the world of predatory animals - they did not have sharp claws , nor such teeth as those of predators.

But on the other hand, in the constant use, and then in the manufacture of tools (at first in the form of simple sticks and sharp stones), labor activity arose, at first still largely instinctive, then more and more systematic and conscious. Labor activity was not individual, but collective, uniting and rallying the herd groups of our most distant ancestors with such strong and flexible bonds that no other animal that also leads a herd lifestyle knows and cannot know.

In the process of consolidation, development and complication of this primary labor activity, the whole organism of our ancestors changed just as slowly, but irresistibly and consistently. First of all, their hands developed more and more, and with them their brains. The higher nervous activity deepened and expanded.

At the initial stage of the formation of man, to which the appearance of monkeys of the Australopithecus type belongs, of course, only the prerequisites for the emergence of labor activity were brewing. But it is precisely from here, from the remotest depths of millennia, that the road begins to work in the true sense of the word, to the deliberate manufacture of artificial tools by primitive people.

The significance of the second stage, associated with the manufacture of tools, is exceptionally great. With it begins the development of man in the proper sense of the word, and at the same time the history of society, the history of human thought and speech. True, the first people who emerged from the animal kingdom were still, according to Engels, just as not free as the animals themselves. But each step in the development of labor was a step towards the liberation of man from complete subordination to the elemental forces of nature.

In labor, in obtaining a means of subsistence with the help of tools artificially produced by people, social ties arose and strengthened: a herd of monkeys who took sticks gradually and very slowly turned into a human collective - into a community of primitive people.

Pithecanthropus

A great achievement of advanced science in late XIX v. there were finds of the remains of even more highly organized creatures than Australopithecus. These remains date back to the entire Quaternary period, which is divided into two stages: the Pleistocene, which lasted until about the 8th-7th millennium BC. e. and covering the pre-glacial and glacial time, and the modern stage (Holocene). These discoveries fully confirmed the views of the leading naturalists of the 19th century. and the theory of F. Engels on the origin of man.

The first to be found was the most ancient of all known now primitive man - Pithecanthropus (literally "monkey man"). Pithecanthropus bones were first discovered as a result of persistent searches, which lasted from 1891 to 1894, by the Dutch doctor E. Dubois near Trinil, on the island of Java. Going to South Asia, Dubois set as his goal to find the remains of a transitional form from ape to man, since the existence of such a form followed from Darwin's evolutionary theory. Dubois's discoveries more than justified his expectations and hopes. The skullcap and femur found by him immediately showed the great significance of the Trinil finds, since one of the most important links in the chain of human development was discovered.

In 1936, in Mojokerto, also in Java, the skull of a baby Pithecanthropus was found. There were also bones of animals, including, as is believed, several more ancient, Lower Pleistocene times. In 1937, local residents brought the most complete Pithecanthropus skull cover with temporal bones to the Bandung geological laboratory from Sangiran, and then other remains of Pithecanthropus were found in Sangiran, including two more skulls. In total, the remains of at least seven individuals of Pithecanthropus are currently known.

As its very name indicates, Pithecanthropus (monkey-man) connects the ancient highly developed apes of the Australopithecus type with the primitive man of a more developed type. This significance of Pithecanthropus is most fully evidenced by the skulls found in Trinil and Sangiran. These turtles combine specific simian and purely human features. The former include such features as the peculiar shape of the skull, with a pronounced interception in the anterior part of the forehead, near the orbits, and a massive, wide supraorbital ridge, traces of a longitudinal ridge on the crown, low skull vault, i.e., sloping forehead, and a large thickness cranial bones. But at the same time, Pithecanthropus was already a completely bipedal creature. The volume of his brain (850-950 cubic cm) was 1.5-2 times larger than that of contemporary great apes. However, in general proportions and the degree of development of individual lobes of the brain, Pithecanthropus was closer to anthropoids than to humans.
Based on plant remains, including excellently preserved leaves and even flowers found in sediments directly overlying the Trinil bone layer, the Pithecanthropus lived in a forest of trees that still grow in Java, but in a somewhat cooler climate that exists now at an altitude of 600-1,200 m above sea level. Citrus and laurel trees, fig trees and other plants of the subtropics grew in this forest. Together with the Pithecanthropus, the Trinil forest was inhabited by a wide variety of animals of the southern belt, the bones of which survived in the same bone layer. During the excavations, the horns of two species of antelope and a deer, as well as teeth and fragments of the skulls of wild pigs, were found most of all. There were also bones of bulls, rhinos, monkeys, hippos, tapirs. There were also the remains of ancient elephants, close to the European ancient elephant, predators - leopard and tiger.

It is believed that all these animals, whose bones were found in the Trinil deposits, died as a result of a volcanic catastrophe. During the volcanic eruption, the wooded slopes of the hills were covered and burned with a mass of hot volcanic ash. Then the rain streams laid deep channels in the loose layer of ash and carried the bones of thousands of dead animals into the Trinil valley; thus the bone layer of Trinil was formed. Something similar took place during the eruption of the Klut volcano in the eastern part of Java in 1852. According to eyewitnesses, the large navigable river Brontas that went around the volcano swelled and rose high. Its water contained at least 25% volcanic ash mixed with pumice. The color of the water was completely black, and it carried such a mass of fallen wood, as well as the corpses of animals, including buffaloes, monkeys, turtles, crocodiles, even tigers, that the bridge that stood on the river, the largest of all bridges on the planet, was broken and completely destroyed. the island of Java.

Together with other inhabitants of the tropical forest, the Pithecanthropus, whose bones were found in Trinil, apparently became a victim of a similar catastrophe in ancient times. These special conditions, with which the Trinilian finds are associated, as well as the finds of bones of pithecanthropes elsewhere in Java, explain why there were no signs of the use of tools by pithecanthropes.

If the bones of Pithecanthropus were found in temporary sites, then the presence of tools would be very likely. In any case, judging by the general level of the physical structure of Pithecanthropus, it should be assumed that he already made tools and constantly used them, including not only wooden ones, but also stone ones. Indirect evidence that Pithecanthropus made stone tools is provided by coarse quartzite items found in the south of the island of Java, near Patjitan, along with the remains of the same animals whose bones were found near Trinil in the same thickness of deposits with the bones of Pithecanthropus.

Thus, it can be concluded that with Pithecanthropus and creatures close to him, the initial period in the formation of man ends. It was, as we have seen, the remotest time when our ancestors led a herd life and were just beginning to move from the use of ready-made objects of nature to the manufacture of tools.

Ancient stone tools.

From about 700-600 to 40 millennium BC. e., by definition of archaeologists and geologists, that ancient period of human history, which is called the lower (or early) Paleolithic, lasted. If the first tools were unworked random pieces of stone with sharp edges and simple sticks, then over time people begin to deliberately make tools from stone, using the simplest techniques for crushing and splitting stones. At the same time, it must be assumed, they learned to sharpen their primitive wooden tools by burning the points of sticks in the fire or cutting them with sharp stones.

The oldest wooden products have disappeared without a trace, and therefore science cannot say anything about them. It is also very difficult to distinguish flints split by natural forces (so-called dolits) from those rough initial products that primitive man made at first, deliberately splitting flint nodules and cobblestones in order to obtain the cutting blade or point he needed. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about the fact that stone tools having a regular and stable shape were preceded by precisely such shapeless rough products. This First stage the primary use of the cutting properties of stone, the stage immediately following the use of sticks and sharp stones in the finished natural form, had to cover a huge period of time, in any case, several hundred millennia.

Following this, certain methods of using the stone are already formed. The first purposefully designed tools appear, and not randomly obtained pieces of stone with a cutting blade or point. Obviously, Pithecanthropes should have used such primary tools.

On the territory of Western Punjab (modern Pakistan), in the ancient pebble deposits of the Soan River, for example, rough massive flakes were found, undoubtedly made by a human hand, called "Early Soan". Together with them, crude tools were found, made of whole pebbles, roughly hewn at one end only, while the rest of the surface of the stone was left in natural form. One of the localities in China, not far from Beijing (Zhoukoudian), where the remains of animals belonging to the early phase of the Lower Pleistocene were found, is attributed to approximately the same time. There were also burned bones and one double-sided chipped pebble - “the oldest human product known now in China,” as the famous Chinese archaeologist Pei Wen-zhong writes about it.

Roughly processed pebbles found in different areas of the African continent: in Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, Tanganyika and in the valley of the Vaal River belong to the number of such ancient tools. They are almond shaped. One end of them is chipped along the edges with several chips and turned into a rough massive point. In East Africa, such tools were found at the very base of the ancient pebble deposits of the Zambezi River (Aldoway Gorge). Together with them, the bones of a primitive elephant were found - the ancestor of the ancient elephant, the dinoteria elephant, the zebra, the horned giraffe. In southern Africa, such tools have been found in the gravel of the ancient terraces of the Waal River. In the classical region of the ancient Paleolithic of Europe, in the valley of the river Somme, near the city of Amiens, in the pebble deposits of the second terrace, along with similar products, numerous flakes made by people were also found. Slightly corrected along the blades with rough retouching (Retouching here is the processing of stone with small chips.) they form different kind primitive tools, similar to points, as well as scrapers with a convex and concave blade; the form also depends entirely on the outlines of the source material, i.e., flakes. In the same pebble layers, bones of animals of the Middle Pleistocene time were found - the southern elephant, the ancient elephant, the Merck rhinoceros, the Etruscan rhinoceros, Stenon's horse (Named after the names of scientists who studied and identified the fossil remains of the aegis of animals.), Saber-toothed tiger (machairod).

Shell period.

The next stage in the development of the material culture of the most ancient people is called by archaeologists "Shell" (according to the village of Shell in France, at the confluence of the Marne River into the Seine, where stone tools characteristic of this stage were first discovered). Shellic sites in France, in the Somme valley, near Amiens, have been studied most fully. They draw a well-established technique for using flint, which is based on the method of two-sided chipping of pebbles, which thus obtained a definite, strictly expedient form of a massive tool, one end of which looked like a point. These were Shellic hand axes. Left untreated, the smooth part of the pebble at the end opposite the point served as a natural handle, convenient for holding the tool in the palm of your hand. The edges of Shellic axes were formed by strong chips, which were applied alternately from one side, then from the other, and therefore, if you look at them from the side, they have a characteristic zigzag appearance.

The Schell axe, the only clearly defined form of large tools of that time, was undoubtedly universal in its purpose. The Shellic man could perform all the work that required a strong point and massive cutting blades, and at the same time it was necessary to apply strong blows - chop, cut, dig the ground, for example, when extracting edible plants or when extracting small animals from holes. It goes without saying that the ax could also serve as a weapon in defense or attack, especially when hunting animals. It is interesting that the Shell axes are more conveniently grasped with the right hand and at the same time in such a way that the working part of the tool is not only its sharp end, but also the lateral longitudinal blade. Already in the Shellic time, a person worked mainly with his right hand.

However, the ax was by no means the only tool of the Shell man. In all the monuments of the Shell period, along with axes, there are also small tools, although they are rough, but with a completely defined form: points, rough piercings, scraper-like tools. The ancient master inevitably received a large number of flakes as a result of hewing the initial nodule or pebble. Each large flake could then be used as a primitive cutting tool in finished form, even without further processing. Such sharp flakes could serve to dismember hunting prey, replacing sharp claws and fangs that were absent in humans. Even more important, apparently, was their role as tools for making tools and weapons from wood, if only in the form of simple pointed clubs and sticks.
The area of distribution of Paleolithic tools also includes the southern regions of Asia far from the Mediterranean Sea. Shell axes found in India, especially in the Madras region, have long been known; there are also on the island of Ceylon. Shell axes have now been found in the north of Pakistan - in the Punjab, as well as in Kashmir, Upper Burma, Malaya, and Java.

In the USSR, shell-type tools were discovered by Soviet researchers in Armenia. The territory of Armenia is a high plateau, almost completely covered with thick strata of Quaternary lavas, which covered the more ancient, early Quaternary relief of the country. Only a few sections of the Armenian plateau remained free from the influence of the Quaternary volcanic activity. On one of these sites is located the Big Bogutlu or Artin hill, at the foot of which is the Satani-Dar hill, which has now gained worldwide fame in archeology.

On the slopes of Satani-Dar, strewn with fragments of volcanic glass - obsidian, pieces of this stone, processed by man, were found. These are, first of all, rough axes. Their shape is almond-shaped and heart-shaped, the blade is zigzag, the handle, or, as they sometimes write, “heel”, often occupies about two-thirds of the tool. Along with hand axes, there are coarse disc-shaped chopping tools, massive points and primitive "drills", i.e. flakes or pieces of obsidian with a point.

Similar archaic tools were found on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, especially in Yashtukh, near Sukhumi. Coarse flakes and items like hand axes were also found on the Dniester, near Luka-Vrublevetska. Thus, the zone in which the development of mankind began covered a number of southern regions of the Soviet Union.

Judging by the distribution of Shellic tools, man already existed in many places at that time. In Europe, the most numerous traces of his activity are known, as mentioned above, in France. Shell tools have been found in large numbers in Spain. The abundance of Shellic finds in Africa confirms that this continent, especially the valley of the Upper Nile and the now desert regions adjacent to it, was one of those places where people already lived at that time.

The newest finds on the territory of North Africa, in Ternifin (Algeria) are also exceptionally valuable. Here, during the development of sandstone, since the 70s of the last century, bones of animals of the Lower Quaternary time were often found: a large Atlanticus elephant, including the whole skull of this elephant, bones of a hippopotamus, rhinoceros, zebra, giraffe, camel, large baboon, antelope, as well as saber-toothed tiger - mahairod. Together with these bones, there were found similar to the Shellic rough stone products made of dense sandstone, limestone, and less often of flint, including trihedral in cross section, bilaterally processed axes. In 1934, in Ternifin, under the same conditions, in the same layers, the remains of the most ancient people were discovered.
Thus, for the first time, it is established with complete clarity that the most ancient people, close in their level of development to Pithecanthropus and at the same time already having similarities with a more developed man, Sinanthropus, as expected, made tools of the Shell type, used in their labor life with the chopsticks of Shellic forms.

Conditions of human life in the Shellic period.

In order to imagine the conditions in which the man of the Shellic period existed, one should first of all pay attention to the remains of animals found during excavations together with Shellic tools or in deposits in which such tools are found.

In France, these were the southern animals of the distant preglacial past - the hippopotamus, the ancient elephant with straight tusks, Merck's rhinoceros, Stenon's horse, the giant beaver. The Schellian man in France, in the region of modern Paris, was thus surrounded by a nature similar to that in which the Pithecanthropus lived in Java. In similar conditions, the Shell man lived on the territory of the USSR.

The conditions in which Shellic tools are found, which lie in the pebble deposits of ancient river terraces, show that the man of that time lived in small groups and led a wandering life along the banks of rivers, lakes and in the depths of the subtropical forest. In rain or heat, dense groups of trees or bushes, rocky sheds, and, at best, the most primitive sheds made of hastily sketched branches, could serve as a refuge for a person. Clothing was absent or limited to capes made from raw animal skins.

Making fire was not known. The most that was in the possibilities of man was for some time to maintain a fire that arose against his will.

Findings of bones of large animals, together with Shell tools, apparently indicate that people of this time sometimes killed giant thick-skinned animals. But it is enough to look at the primitive Shellic products to make sure that such a hunt could not yet be systematic. The main source of subsistence of the people of the Shellic time was probably hunting for small animals. Only in rare cases did they manage to take advantage of the inexperience of the cubs of large animals or kill a large animal. The collection of wild edible plants, which abound in the subtropics, as well as insects and lizards, must also have been of great importance.

But the main thing, from a historical point of view, was that the hunter and gatherer of the Shellic time was already firmly and irrevocably standing on the human path of development. Since that time, the most ancient mankind has followed the path of progress, due to the development and complication of collective labor activity - the force that singled out man from the animal world and then raised him high above nature.

Acheulian period.

The further development of labor is reflected in the improvement of stone tools and the technique of their manufacture.

Wherever rough shell tools are found, they are replaced by new ones, more carefully and skillfully made - Acheulean (named after the place of their first discovery in Saint-Acheul (a suburb of the city of Amiens in France)).

The Acheulian hand ax differs from the axes of the Shelles primarily in their regular almond-shaped, triangular or oval outlines. The surface of the Acheulean axes is usually completely processed with chips, which already testify to a good knowledge of the properties of flint, to an incomparably more skillful hand of the master, which now delivered well-aimed and well-calculated blows. If a man of the Shell time could inflict only strong and sharp blows, as a result of which deep grooves remained on the edges of the tool, then the Acheulean man learned to separate thin and flat flakes from the stone. The blade of the Acheulian ax was therefore no longer zigzag, but straight and sharp. The shapes of tools made from flakes are improving, and series of certain items are consistently repeated: points, side-scrapers, and so-called drills.
Changes in the way of life of people were also important. In the Acheulean, hunting camps first appeared, more or less permanent settlements appeared. A remarkable example of such settlements are the early Acheulean finds in Torralba (Spain). The ancient settlement was located here at an altitude of 112 m above sea level, on the shore of an ancient lake. Elephants, rhinoceros, bulls, deer and horses came to the lake for a watering place, on its banks covered with lush vegetation, which became the prey of primitive people. Many bones of these animals survived at the site, including the whole skulls of a southern elephant with tusks reaching 3 m in length, bones of an Etruscan rhinoceros and Merck's rhinoceros, Stenon's horse. Numerous axes made of quartzite, chalcedony, and sandstone, as well as ordinary small flake items, were found in the cultural layer along with animal bones.

The man of the Acheulean time is already widely mastering ready-made natural dwellings, which were used for him by cave canopies and grottoes. Cave settlements of the Acheulian time are known in the grotto of the Observatory, near Monaco, near the Mediterranean coast, in the cave of Umm Qatafa, southeast of Jerusalem, and especially in the cave of Et-Tabun, on Mount Carmel, in the northern part of Palestine.
The al-Tabun cave looked like a deep and high niche, open to the north and filled with loose cave deposits for more than 15 m. In its late Acheulean layer, the remains of hearths were found in the form of dark brown or yellow spots of burnt earth. Processed flints were located unequally, mainly near the rocky wall of the grotto. In one place, at the entrance to the grotto, there was a cluster of tools, consisting of 29 specially hidden hand axes. In total, about 50 thousand items were found in the excavated sections of the grotto, and the vast majority of them were ready-made, completely finished tools: axes, scrapers, points, retouched flakes and plates. The most striking thing here is the abundance of hand axes, which indicates the importance of this ancient tool in the life of Paleolithic man. More than 8,000 have been found here.

Numerous traces of hearths, many excellently crafted flint tools, including thousands of axes, clearly show that the cave of Et-Tabun served for thousands of years as a dwelling for a person of that time, who had already far left behind his predecessors and ancestors of the Shell period, who wandered without permanent shelters in subtropical forests and jungles of the preglacial era. Fire has now become, together with tools, the basis of human existence and the support of the primitive community in its struggle with nature.

The Acheulean man obviously used fire not only as a source of life-giving heat to warm his body during the cold season, but also as a means of combating predators that constantly threatened him.
Even weak old men, women and children, armed with a flaming brand, were stronger than those animals that were the thunderstorm of the rainforest.

Very early, presumably, people learned to roast the meat of animals, as well as edible roots and fruits, on fire. This not only improved food and expanded food resources, but also put an even sharper line between man and animals, capable of eating food only in its natural form given by nature itself.
Sinanthropus.

For a long time, however, the appearance of the Acheulian man himself was not known. A single European find (we mean the so-called Heidelberg jaw, found in 1907 near Heidelberg, in Germany, from where its name comes from), relating approximately to this period, was not enough to clarify the appearance of the Acheulean man. Of absolutely exceptional importance are the remarkable finds of Chinese scientists in Zhoukoudian, filling the gap that exists between the finds of the remains of the most ancient ape-man (Pithecanthropus), on the one hand, and the man of the next stage (Neanderthal), on the other.

Zhoukoudian is located 54 km southwest of Beijing, in the place where the Beijing plain turns into a mountainous region cut by valleys. During the systematic research undertaken by Chinese scientific institutions from 1934 to 1937, prior to the Japanese invasion of China, a great deal of work was done on the study of the Zhoukoudian deposits with the remains of ancient fauna, representing the filling of ancient cracks and caves. In the People's Republic of China, research on the world-famous Zhoukoudian finds was resumed and again yielded rich results.

As a result of many years of work, it was established that that in Zhoukoudian at five points (locations No. 1, 4, 13, 15 and the "Upper Cave"), along with animal bones, there are traces of human activity.
Locality No. 1 was the most extensive and richest find. Initially, it was a grandiose cave, possibly consisting of several caves arranged in tiers, but their vaults collapsed at the beginning of the Upper Pleistocene time. Primitive man lived in it for many tens or even hundreds of millennia, during which a thickness of deposits of more than 50 m accumulated. This was, according to some researchers, the early Pleistopenian time. According to others, more likely, the settlement of the main cave of Zhoukoudian by the most ancient people dates back to the Middle Pleistopenian time, that is, to the end of the second glaciation or to the interglacial stage that separates the second glaciation from the next, third ice age in the Himalayas.

The contemporaries of the man of that time, called Sinanthropus by scientists, were two types of rhinos, a saber-toothed tiger and other representatives of giant cats of the Middle Pleistopenian time, two types of bears, a Chinese hyena, wild horses, a wild boar, gazelles, deer, and buffaloes. Sinanthropus hunted mainly deer. Of the animal brushes found in the cave, 70% belongs to the deer. In addition, Sinanthropus ate edible plants, especially berries and fruits, including wild cherries. The most remarkable feature of the deposits in locality No. 1 is the presence of thick layers of ash in it, indicating that Sinanthropus widely and daily used fire, burning bushes in fires, although, perhaps, he still did not know how to artificially make fire.

The stone products found here are made mainly of sandstone, quartz, and also partly of quartzite, volcanic rocks, hornfels and flint. Sinanthropus usually used river pebbles rolled by water as a raw material for the manufacture of his tools, roughly knocking them along one edge. In this way, large chopping tools were made with a wide oval blade, like a chopping or splitting ax. Rough disk-shaped stone cores-cores were also common, from which flakes and plates were beaten off. Flakes and blades were used as cutting tools. A simple retouch along the edge turned them into scraper-like tools or points.

Thus, although no indisputable hand axes, similar to the Acheulean ones, were found in the Sinanthropus cave, the Sinanthropus has already risen quite high in terms of the general level of its cultural development. He used fire permanent places dwelling in caves, hunted such large animals as deer, gazelles and wild horses, even hunted rhinos. According to the general level of development of technology, most authors attribute Sinanthropus to the early Shellic period, others even see in it features close to the later, Mousterian, period. It would be more correct to attribute the finds in Zhoukoudian to the Acheulian time.
The relatively higher level of development of Sinanthropus is also evidenced by its bone remains. In Zhoukoudian, the remains of more than 40 Sinanthropus specimens, including fragments of skulls, are scattered at different levels of locality No. 1. Judging by the structure of the lower limbs, Sinanthropus was already a completely bipedal creature. The general progressive development of Sinanthropus found a distinct expression in the structure of its upper limbs, which developed more and more rapidly in the process of constant and systematic labor activity. His upper limbs were basically already real human hands, formed as a result of labor and intended mainly for labor activities.

In the process of developing labor, Sinanthropus more and more clearly developed such a purely human trait as the predominant importance of the right hand. Unlike animals, in which the forelimbs are developed strictly symmetrically, and even from Pithecanthropus, in Sinanthropus, the right hand carried an incomparably greater labor load than the left. This can be seen from the fact that the brain of Sinanthropus has an asymmetric structure - one half of its brain is better developed than the other.

Settlement of people like Sinanthropus.

Of great importance are the finds of the remains of creatures close to Sinanthropus in other countries. These are the teeth found in 1948 in the north of Vietnam, similar to the teeth of synanthropes; two jaws close to those of a Heidelberg man, discovered in 1949 and 1950 in the Swartkrans cave, in southern Africa; a molar found in the Transvaal in 1938, belonging to some representative of the most ancient people, close to Sinanthropus.

The humanoid creature that owned the bones found in the Swartkrans cave has features close to both the Sinanthropus from China and the Heidelberg people from Europe. In 1935, near Lake Eyasi, in East Africa, the remains of skulls of creatures similar to Sinanthropus were found, which were called Africanthropes. No less interesting - as a new indication of the fact that the remains of Sinanthropus and creatures close to it in appearance represent a certain stage of human evolution - is the discovery of one lower jaw in 1953 in Makapansgat (Central Transvaal, Africa). This jaw, found in a limestone quarry, belonged to an adult, apparently female, of a creature called "Australopithecine Prometheus", and is very similar to the jaw of Sinanthropus from Zhoukoudian.

On the territory of the Soviet Union, Acheulean tools, testifying to the presence of the most ancient people here at that time, have now been discovered in whole series in the North Caucasus, Abkhazia, Armenia, South and North Ossetia. Traces of a person of this or a very close time have now been found in Turkmenistan - off the coast of the Caspian Sea, as well as at the heights of the Tien Shan - in Kyrgyzstan.

Thus, in the vast expanse of the southern regions of Asia, in the south of Europe, as well as in Africa up to its extreme southern regions in the Middle Pleistocene, before the great, or maximum, glaciation of Northern Europe and Northern Asia. the most ancient people already lived, standing in terms of the degree of development of their tools at the level of the Acheulian culture, and in physical appearance close to Sinanthropus.

Throughout this territory, the progressive process of development of primitive mankind was steadily going on, which was based on the development of labor and the strengthening of social ties.

Strengthening public relations.

The collectives of Sinanthropus and, obviously, their immediate predecessors were qualitatively different from those associations that are characteristic of animals, it was no longer a herd of monkeys, but a human association, although still very primitive.

We cannot clearly imagine the internal structure of these ancient associations, since ethnographers do not know anything similar to the state of people of such a distant time, and it is absolutely impossible that, by some miracle, after 500-300 thousand years, a type of relationship has survived to our time, although would be remotely similar to the system of collectives of the Shellic or Acheulian time. Even the most backward groups of mankind, which found themselves in the XVIII-XIX centuries. in the places of the globe most remote from the centers of advanced culture, like the Tasmanians, in their physical and mental development did not differ from other modern people. The study of various survivals of ancient social relations, even among a number of tribes of our time, can give very little to solve this complex problem.

One thing is indisputable: the general level of development of primitive people in that period was extremely low. Throughout the vast territory of the settlement of ancient mankind, there were separate small groups of people, separated from each other by vast spaces. Their technical experience and production skills grew extremely slowly. The tools of labor were extremely crude and imperfect. Labor as a whole remained still undeveloped.
The forms of marital relations within these ancient communities were a direct legacy of the animal past. Judging from what we know about these relations in later human communities, where they were only partially regulated, in this ancient time, marital relations must have had a promiscuous character (the stage of promiscuity), determined only by biological instinct.

But the most important thing was that within such a primitive group, horde or human primitive herd, the existence of which was conditioned by vital necessity, there was such a powerful force that did not exist and could not exist even in the most tightly knit herd of animals - collective labor activity. in the fight against nature. In the process of the development of labor activity within the primitive community, social ties grew and strengthened, curbing the former zoological instincts inherited by man from his animal ancestors. In the course of millennia, the new, human, more and more prevailed over the old, bestial. This was expressed, in particular, in the restriction of sexual intercourse between parents and their children.
Judging by the structure of the brain, the most ancient people, up to and including the Neanderthal, could not yet control their behavior to the extent that it became possible for later people, in particular, restrain outbursts of rage. It goes without saying that the farther back into the past, the more this feature of the most ancient people should have been sharper and more pronounced - in Sinanthropus it is stronger than in Neanderthal, and in Pithecanthropus it is stronger than in Sinanthropus. And, on the other hand, the further history went, the faster the evolution of man as a social being, the stronger the educational influence of the primitive community, the more fully the behavior of the individual was determined by social ties. In any case, it is clear that even the most primitive people never led the life of solitary "Robinsons". The history of ancient mankind does not know the fantastic period of individual hunting and searching for food. The strength of primitive people, their advantage over the most powerful and dangerous predators, was that they acted not alone, but as a team, fastened by labor activity, a joint struggle with nature.

The development of higher nervous activity of man.

The continuous upward development of the human mind is clearly evidenced by the consistent increase in the volume of the brain of our ancestors and the complication of its structure, especially the cortex and those parts of the brain with which the higher functions of thinking are associated, which can be judged by the relief of the internal cavity of the skull, corresponding to the volume and shape of the brain .

It is characteristic that on plaster casts of the inner cavity of the skull of Pithecanthropus it is clearly seen, for example, that the frontal lobe of the brain was much weaker in it than in later people; the parietal part of the brain also had primitive structural features. Studying these features of the Pithecanthropus brain, the researchers came to the conclusion that the centers of attention and memory were still sufficiently developed in him, and the ability to think remained rudimentary.

The progressive evolution of the brain of Sinanthropus found its expression, as we have already seen, in the asymmetry of its structure directly caused by the growth of labor. It expressed itself at the same time in other, no less significant changes in this body. If the brain of a Pithecanthropus, having an average volume of about 870 cubic meters. cm, significantly exceeded in size the brain of Australopithecus and, moreover, the great apes of our time, then the brain of Sinanthropus increased to an even greater extent, reaching an average volume of 1040 cc. and one of the skulls even had a capacity of 1,225 cubic meters. cm.

Higher than that of Pithecanthropus, became as a result overall increase the brain of Sinanthropus as well as its cranial vault, which in turn, presumably, should have been inextricably linked with the progressive development of the structure of the skull as a whole, with the design in it of new, human features and in the arrangement of its facial part. The head of Sinanthropus, therefore, should have had a much more human appearance than that of its predecessor, Pithecanthropus.

The development of the human psyche went inextricably linked with the evolution of his labor activity. “That state,” says Marx, “when human labor has not yet freed itself from its primitive, instinctive form, belongs to the depths of primitive times.” That was the time of "the first animal-like instinctive forms of labor" (K, Marx, Capital, vol. I, Grspolitizdat, 1953, p. 185.). The further the development of the collective activity of people went, the richer and fuller, of course, became the thinking of man. Of particular importance in this regard is the continuous improvement of stone tools throughout the Lower Paleolithic. These primarily include hand axes that have gone through a number of stages in their evolution, ranging from simple pebbles, only slightly hewn at the end, to elegant, geometrically regular in outline, almond-shaped or triangular products of the late Acheulian time. Such a consistent evolution of the forms of the most ancient tools clearly testifies to the progressive development of the mind of primitive man.

Before getting a finished tool, it was necessary to find a suitable material for this and correctly assess its technical qualities. This was followed by a series of operations for the preliminary release of the stone from the crust, for the initial design of the tool with the help of a special chipper, and, finally, for its final finishing, maybe not even a chipper, but a more suitable tool like wooden hammer or a pusher.

IP Pavlov showed that in the development of higher nervous activity in animals and humans, two special types of it should be distinguished. One species is represented by the first signaling system, above which even the most highly organized animals did not rise. Animals are able to perceive only specific signals - irritations that enter their brain from the outside world. The energy of external stimulus appears in the nervous signal system only as a reflex, as a concrete sensory experience in the form of a sensation that reflects only particular and specific qualities of certain objects of the external world. The animal feels, for example, heat or cold, the taste of this or that object, and accordingly reacts with its behavior to these sensations in the struggle for existence.

Of great importance, then, is the fact that the necessity of successfully adapting animals in the struggle for existence to changing environmental conditions requires flexibility in animal behavior, i.e., a rapid change in reactions. Such a rapid change of reactions is provided by conditioned reflexes, not innate, but acquired. Conditioned reflexes allow animals to detect food by random and temporary signs, which serve as conditioned signal stimuli for them to move towards the food source. Without this, animals would not be able to find food in a changeable complex environment and would die out. Conditioned reflexes save animals from the danger that threatens them. IP Pavlov wrote that if the animal began to seek salvation only at the moment when the fangs of a predator touched it, it would inevitably die; but thanks to the development of conditioned reflexes, the animal, as soon as it hears sounds that are signals of the approach of a predator, hides from the enemy.

Already at this stage, therefore, enough complex shapes reflection of reality, a sufficiently flexible higher nervous activity of animals develops. However, the rudiments of knowledge are limited at this stage to a few. They do not rise above the ability to distinguish the qualities of individual objects.

Remaining on the whole at the level of the first signaling system, modern anthropoid apes in many respects have gone further than other animals in its development. Their higher nervous activity is based on much more complicated and clear conditioned reflexes. It accordingly differs in the greatest mobility and flexibility. This development of the higher nervous activity of anthropoid apes is connected with their structure and is conditioned by the nature of the struggle for existence.

Possessing four arms that other animals do not have, monkeys can easily perform actions that four-legged animals are unable to do, for example, use sticks, stones. Because of this, they enter into more complex relationships with the environment, they can perform much more complex actions. In accordance with the complicated nature of the activity of monkeys, the reflex processes in their brains also become more complicated. Separate associations, separate sensations and impressions merge in anthropoids into more complex chains of associations than in other animals.

Thanks to their increased observation ability, anthropoid apes are able to notice various more subtle phenomena and qualities of reality. I. P. Pavlov defined these behavioral traits of monkeys as rudimentary "thinking in action", which is based on chains of associations. But with the end of the action, the “thinking” process also ends, for in monkeys it is limited to a specific given situation, the framework of a given action. Unlike man, the monkey is not able to tear himself away from this particular situation, he himself cannot take a far-reaching initiative, make at least the simplest invention that requires generalization.

Thinking in its origin is inextricably linked with the next, second stage in the development of higher nervous activity, characteristic only of man and fundamentally, qualitatively different from the higher nervous activity of not only lower animals, but also the most highly organized monkeys.

The emergence of the second signal system was therefore a turning point, a transition from one quality to another, higher one. Such a transition, of course, was prepared by the long development of the first signaling system in the most highly organized animals. In order to move from the higher nervous activity of animals to human thinking, it was necessary to have grown in the process of labor activity, on the basis of practical experience hundreds of generations, the ability to respond not only to direct irritation, but also to a special kind of sound stimulus - the word. It is necessary that the feeling causing the reaction be replaced by a word - this is the second signal system. The organism now reacts not only to signals of direct external stimuli, but also to combinations of sounds, which at first were themselves a reaction to such stimuli. Combinations of sounds - words become "signals of signals." They express common features and qualities, presented in all the variety of specific phenomena and sensations, and therefore the importance of speech for the development of human thinking is enormous. V. I. Lenin wrote about this: “Every word (speech) already generalizes. Feelings show reality; thought and word are common” (V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, Gospolitizdat, 1947, p. 256.).

In words, in language, already abstract thinking is expressed, but in language it is formed, it cannot exist without it. It goes without saying that the second signaling system in humans does not at all cancel or exclude the first signaling system. On the contrary, the richness and complexity of the activity of the human brain is determined precisely by the fact that a person has both the first and second signaling systems, which are closely related to each other. At the same time, it should be emphasized that, being a more perfect form of higher nervous activity, the second signaling system significantly changed in man and the work of his first signaling system. Thanks to the word, a person perceives and feels the world differently than an animal - he cognizes it in the process of his social experience. The process of cognition of reality is at a qualitatively different level for a person than for all other living beings.

Reflecting reality in logical forms of thinking, i.e. ascending from sensations, impressions and concrete sensory representations - images to abstract general concepts, a person singles out the essential in objects and phenomena. He more fully and deeply reveals their real essence, cognizes the objective laws of the real world. The emergence of abstract thinking is a long and complex process. It became possible thanks to labor activity, thanks to social life. A person cognizes reality in the course of its practical assimilation, hourly, every minute testing his ideas by practice. Preserving the right and rejecting the wrong, he goes from ignorance to knowledge.

The most ancient people, of course, were still extremely far from any deep knowledge of reality, from power over nature. Armed only with sticks and crude stone tools, only partly separated from the animal kingdom, they stood at the very beginning of the great path of human progress.

Origin of speech.

The development of thinking, therefore, cannot be considered independently of the development of speech. From the very beginning, language and thinking grew up on the same labor soil, were inextricably linked and interacted with each other. Language consolidates and registers the results of the work of thinking and makes it possible to exchange thoughts, without which social production is impossible, and consequently, the very existence of society.

From this it is clear what great importance in the history of ancient mankind, in the development of its thinking and culture, must have belonged to language.

In science, starting from the ancient world, many hypotheses have been put forward, many efforts have been spent to reveal the secret of the origin of speech, to establish the time when it appeared, and the reasons that brought it to life. But all attempts to explain the origin of speech were fruitless, because the creators of these theories did not have a correct dialectical-materialist idea of society and the historical process and, consequently, could not understand the social role and significance of language.

The classics of Marxism were the first in the history of the development of science to show that language, as a means of communication between people, was born by the development of labor and society; at the same time, it was a condition and a powerful stimulus for the further development of human labor activity and social relations.

At the same time, it should be emphasized that already the most ancient speech was mainly sound; body movements and facial expressions only supplemented sound speech, although the role of these auxiliary means of expressing thoughts and feelings could be more significant among ancient people than at present.

As you know, monkeys are the noisiest inhabitants of the rainforest. Sound plays a huge role in their life. Loud cries help the monkeys find each other in the dense foliage, with cries they warn each other about Danger, draw attention to food supplies. A variety of cries and noises accompany the movements of the monkeys, their games, etc. The sounds of the monkey express discontent, anger, fear, impatience, despair, satisfaction.

But the sounds made by the most ancient people should already be fundamentally different from the sounds that the monkey's vocal apparatus can make. The difference here, of course, was not simply and not only in the richness of certain modulations, not in the variety of sounds, but in their social role, in their social function in man. The sounds of the speech of the most ancient people differed qualitatively from the sounds of monkeys, they were approximately in the same relation to them as the tools used by primitive people, even the simplest, most primitive, to the sticks and stones sometimes used by monkeys.

No matter how primitive the sounds of ancient speech were, but accompanying labor, arising from labor activity and serving it, such sounds expressed a certain social content. “People who were being formed,” F. Engels wrote about this, over time inevitably “came to the point that they had a need to say something to each other” (F. Engels, The role of labor in the process of turning a monkey into a man, p. 6. ).

The speech sounds of the most ancient people differed, therefore, from the vocal sounds emitted not only by monkeys, but also by all animals without exception, including the most gifted in terms of sound. The abstracting abilities of the mind, the conscious nature of human activity, and not blind instinct, were expressed in the sounds of people's speech. Therefore, the sounds of speech did not remain with the most ancient people and their immediate ancestors in the same unchanged state, as with animals. On the contrary, with the development of labor and in connection with it, these sounds, and with them the corresponding organs, were improved, developed and enriched.

A comparative anatomical study of the larynx of higher apes and humans clearly shows how, in close connection with other changes in the human body, the vocal apparatus of our distant ancestors gradually changed:

Of decisive importance is, first of all, the fact that Pithecanthropus was already a two-legged creature, that its body had a straight, vertical position. Straightening the position of the head strengthened the connection between the larynx and the oral cavity and led to a change in the shape of the glottis. Indistinct cries disappeared, they were replaced by sounds with more subtle shades, significantly different from the sounds made by monkeys.

Judging by the nature of the lower jaw, the Pithecanthropus or Sinanthropus still lacked the possibility of frequent changes in the articulation of speech. Their vocal apparatus was still too primitive and undeveloped for this. The larynx of a primitive man was not yet able to pronounce any complex and clearly defined combinations of sounds. But the presence of already sufficiently differentiated relief in the region of the lower part of the left frontal gyrus of the brain, i.e., the one where the motor center of speech activity is located, suggests that, for example, Sinanthropus was already explained by sound speech, although not quite articulate. The speech of the people of the entire Lower Paleolithic, of course, still consisted of very poorly differentiated sounds, supplemented, if necessary, by facial expressions and body movements. We cannot establish what exactly the primary complexes of sounds were, how these ancient words were formed, with which speech began. But the most important thing is clear - it was a powerful means of further advancement of a person along the path of strengthening social ties, born of labor.

The continuous progressive development of the rudiments of language was natural and inevitable because the development of labor increasingly increased the need for communication, strengthened social ties, required the enrichment and improvement of the language as the main means of communication between people.

Changes in natural conditions.

Angel type culture is changing new culture, Mousterian (Mousterian is a cave on the banks of the Weser River, in France, where the site of ancient people, the so-called Neanderthals, was found, more highly developed and having more advanced technology than the most ancient people of the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic (including Sinanthropus).) (100— 40 thousand years ago), which is sometimes distinguished from the Lower Paleolithic into a special "Middle Paleolithic". The Mousterian culture is widespread not only where the Acheulean people lived, but also in places where the people of the Shellic and Acheulean times did not go. Such a wide settlement of the man of the Mousterian time, although he now lived in much less favorable conditions than his predecessors, was possible because he was able to overcome the difficulties that arose thanks to the development of culture.

Highly developed apes - the closest ancestors of man, who lived at the end of the Tertiary and at the beginning of the Quaternary, as well as primitive people such as Sinanthropus and his immediate descendants, everywhere existed in a relatively mild climate, in quite favorable conditions for life. Over time, significant changes take place in the natural environment that surrounded primitive people. Due to insufficiently as yet clarified causes, the action of which in one way or another covers the entire globe and all continents, periods of the onset of glaciers begin, separated from each other by breaks (interglacial periods). A clearer and better developed scheme of the alternation of ice ages in the Alps, where it has a classical character in its clarity and completeness. The history of the glaciation of the Alps and the part of Europe adjacent to them is divided into the Günz, Mindel, Ris and Würm stages. They are separated by interglacial periods, respectively called Günz-Mindel, Mindel-Ries, Riess-Würm. The Wurm stage is divided by Western researchers into four more stages. A number of scientists also outline three stages of glaciation for the territory of the USSR: Likhvinian, Dnieper (maximum), Valdai. The first of them corresponds in general to the Mindelian period of the Alpine scheme, the second to the Rissian, and the third to the Würmian.

The existence of Mousterian man in Europe and in neighboring countries dates back to the time of the maximum glaciation of these countries, to the Rissian, or Dnieper, stage of the ice age. In order to visualize the scale of these events and their significance for the history of Paleolithic man, it should be borne in mind that solid ice massifs then stretched from the British Isles in the west and almost to the Ob in the east. The ice cover reached the areas where the cities of Molotov and Kirov are now located on the territory of the European part of our country, then steeply dropped to 50 ° N. sh., which it crossed in two places, going south with wide protrusions-tongues, reaching the areas of the present cities of Stalingrad and Dnepropetrovsk, and then receding somewhat to the northwest. The area of the ice sheet exceeded 9.5 million square meters. km. Its thickness reached, according to the calculations of geologists, 2 km.

Slowly moving layers of ice leveled the hills, plowed the valleys and destroyed all life in its path. The heat-loving vegetation of the past in the zone immediately adjacent to the glaciers has disappeared. Extinct or gone to the south, to more favorable places for them, and the corresponding animals. They are replaced by a new animal world. Instead of the "fauna of the southern elephant", a new, "mammoth fauna" is widely distributed, represented, in addition to the mammoth, by the woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, arctic fox and other animals.

This process was lengthy and uneven in its pace in various areas. The thermophilic fauna continued to exist for a long time in the south of Europe, in Italy and in those countries (for example, in Africa) where catastrophic changes in climate did not occur during the Quaternary period. In the south, then came the time of rains and showers (pluvial period), when the present Sahara was covered with lakes, rivers and grassy plains, alternating with dense groves of tropical trees.

Neanderthal man.

The man of the Mousterian time, in many of his characteristics, already stood significantly higher than the most ancient people such as Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and Heidelberg man.

The remains of people of the Mousterian time were first discovered in Europe in 1856 in the Neandertal valley (Germany). This was followed by new finds - in Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, France, Italy. On the territory of the USSR, the bones of people of the Mousterian time were discovered in the Kiik-Koba cave in the Crimea, in the grotto Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan). In other countries outside Europe, such remains have been found in Palestine, Iraq, South Africa, and Java.
In their physical structure, people of the Mousterian time often show very significant differences from each other, which is why they are divided into separate groups. Excellent, for example, are the Palestinian finds, on the one hand, and the European ones ("Chapelles" (named after a skeleton found in a cave near the village of La Chapelle aux Seine (France).)) - on the other. European finds also differ from each other. But in general, they have so much in common that it is customary to designate all these ancient people of the Mousterian time with one common name - Neanderthals (according to a find in Neanderthal).

Judging by European finds, the Neanderthal was stocky build with a massive skeleton and powerful muscles. His height was small, not exceeding 155-165 cm for men. Since the body of the Neanderthal was relatively short, and the curves of the spine were weakly expressed, it is possible that he walked stooping, and ran slightly crouching to the ground. Massive Neanderthal foot bones from the Kiik-Koba cave in the Crimea testify to such a gait. Neanderthal hands found in the Kiik-Koba cave turned out to be paw-shaped. Features of the Neanderthal skull: a low, sloping, as if "running" back forehead, superciliary arches protruding strongly forward, merging into a continuous supraorbital ridge. The upper jaw strongly protrudes forward, the incisors are large, spatulate. There is no chin protrusion.

The brain of Neanderthals - and this is much more important than the external features of the relief of the skull - was already significantly developed. In addition to a significant volume (1300-1600 cubic cm), it also shows signs of further evolution in structure. Casts made from the inner cavity of Neanderthal skulls clearly show the development of individual lobes of the brain associated with the placement of centers of higher mental activity: the frontal lobes increase, the parietal lobe grows. Corresponding to the development of the brain, the vault of the skull rises, the inclination of the forehead decreases, the back of the head becomes rounded, i.e., features are found that still more connect the Neanderthal with modern man. Most clearly, such features, as we will see later, were expressed in Neanderthals, whose remains were found in Palestine.

Mousterian stone tools.

The Neanderthal did not die out and retreat south before the cold breath of the glaciers. On the contrary, he continued to continuously settle in new areas and further develop his culture, primarily to improve tools and techniques for their manufacture. Ancient hand axes, made by hewing a boulder, are still occasionally found in the Mousterian layers, but tools made by the “chipping technique” from plates and flakes chipped from a disk-shaped core (nucleus) already belong to decisive importance. The cutting technique is improving. If earlier the cores had irregular outlines, now they acquire definite and stable forms in the form of disks, which ensured the correct outlines of blades and flakes. In addition, special attention is paid in the Mousterian time to the special preparation of the cores that were struck.
The outstanding Russian archaeologist V. A. Gorodtsov clearly showed the importance of such an operation in a number of systematic experiments on the manufacture of tools from flint. “Noticing that the long fragments that I had beaten off from the core were thicker downwards, and often broke without reaching the lower base of the core, I began to trim the lower ends of the cores, and things went well. A precisely directed strike at a certain point of the impact plane of the core is of decisive importance, but achieving such an impact in practice is often hampered by the imperfection of the shape of the chippers, the working ends of which are usually uneven and thick, often completely cover the intended impact points, due to which the fragments are beaten off either too thick or too thin, small. In general, I still managed to overcome the difficulties encountered, and I could work all forms of tools found in Mousterian-type sites, ”V. A. Gorodpov wrote about his experiments.

Thus, the undercutting of cores, characteristic of the Mousterian time, was of great importance in improving the technique of splitting flint and provided the form of blanks necessary for the manufacture of Mousterian tools - blades and flakes.
More skillfully and confidently than his predecessors, Neanderthal man uses the flint retouching technique. He no longer follows the finished outlines of flakes, but gives them a certain expedient form. A direct indication of the development of retouching techniques are the "anvils" that first appeared in the Mousterian time, usually pieces of animal bones covered with potholes as a result of the pressure on them of the sharp edge of flint products during processing. Such "anvils" were used, apparently, when applying fine and careful retouching to the blades of tools, which was becoming more and more widespread in the Mousterian time.
The nature of the tools themselves changed significantly in the Mousterian time. The forms of tools become not only more stable and definite, but also much more differentiated. Large, bilaterally processed triangular or almond-shaped points could serve as universal cutting tools, as well as daggers.
Bilaterally pointed tips could be attached to the end of a long wooden spear.
The small blade points were no doubt only cutting and piercing tools. Among them, points stand out, the convex edge of which is processed in such a way that fingers could rest against it when cutting. Mousterian side-scrapers also differ in their form and character; some of them served as scrapers, others as knives and actually scrapers for processing skins.

Towards the end of the Mousterian time, new forms of tools in the form of rough chisels, apparently intended for processing wood, and later bone, also spread.

The improvement in the technique of stone processing and the complication of the set of stone tools thus clearly reflect the continuous enrichment of the labor skills and production experience of the people of the Mousterian time, which underlay the progressive development of their entire culture.

Artificial production of fire. Economic life.

The fact that the people of the Mousterian time, in new, much more severe conditions, spread even more widely than before, is obviously due to their new most important achievement - the invention of methods for artificially making fire. As mentioned earlier, Sinanthropus already knew how to systematically use fire, and this was a great achievement of the most ancient man; but the fire received by the person casually was used. In the process of labor activity, a person noticed that sparks appear from the impact of a stone on a stone, and during the drilling of a tree, heat is released; this is what they used. It is impossible to say when and where exactly man first developed methods for artificially making fire, but they were already firmly mastered by Neanderthals in various regions of the globe. The enormous significance of this discovery was determined by F. Engels, who wrote: “On the threshold of the history of mankind is the discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat: making fire by friction; at the end of the period of development that has passed so far is the discovery of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion: the steam engine. But despite the gigantic liberating revolution that the steam engine makes in the social world, this revolution is not yet half completed, nevertheless there is no doubt that the production of fire by friction surpasses even the steam engine in its world-historical action, which liberates mankind. After all, the production of fire by friction for the first time gave man dominion over a certain force of nature and thus finally separated man from the animal kingdom ”(F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 107-108.).

The progressive development of man of the Mousterian time is found primarily in the economic field. Hunting has always been one of the most important sources of livelihood for the most ancient people. Now it is rising to the level of the leading occupation, leaving behind the gathering, which should have been much more important among the most ancient people, the predecessors of the Neanderthals, due to the imperfection of their hunting tools.

Of particular interest for understanding the economic life of the Mousterian man is the fact that in a number of cases there is, as it were, a certain specialization of ancient hunters: they hunt mainly on certain animals, which, of course, is due to nothing more than natural conditions and the abundance associated with them. certain types of animals.

At the Ilskaya site (Northern Caucasus), bison bones accounted for at least 60% of the mass of animal bones. It is believed that bones belonging to at least 2 thousand bison can be found here. In the highlands of the Alps, they mainly hunted such a predator, distinguished by its strength, huge size and fury, as a cave bear. The finds in the Teshik-Tash grotto in southwestern Uzbekistan are equally indicative. Judging by the broken and split to extract the brain, often even finely crushed, tubular bones of animals found during excavations in large numbers, people from Teshik-Tash were skillful and dexterous hunters. The most important source of subsistence for the inhabitants of the grotto was the hunting of mountain goats - kyiks, a difficult, complex and dangerous business even for modern man, who is immeasurably better armed.

The main weapon of Neanderthal man was, apparently, a spear. So, in the cave of La Quina, in France, "animal bones were found with sharp fragments of flint stuck into them. Such wounds were apparently inflicted with a spear with a flint point-tip. On one of the Neanderthal skeletons found in the Es-Shul cave (Palestine), traces of a wound inflicted by a wooden spear without a stone tip were found.As you can see, the weapon stuck into the victim's thigh with such terrible force that it pierced through the head of the femur and came out with its end into the pelvic cavity.

The weapons of the Mousterian hunters were still very primitive. Of decisive importance were not individual, but collective hunting methods, uniting all members of each Mousterian group. Such battue hunts were especially widespread in highly rugged areas, where animals were driven to cliffs, falling from which they were smashed to death or maimed. Such, for example, is the area in the vicinity of the Teshik-Tash grotto, whose inhabitants hunted mountain goats.

The improvement of technology and the development of hunting, naturally, should have contributed to a further improvement in general living conditions, including more or less long-term settling of groups of people in places convenient for hunting and rich in game.

Consolidating the achievements of his predecessors, the Mousterian man not only extensively mastered the caves as natural dwellings with ready-made walls and vaults, but constantly created more or less long terms open-air settlements. Where there were no caves, in the harsh conditions of that time, undoubtedly, the simplest shelters from rain, wind and cold were built in the form of barriers or canopies.

The beginnings of the tribal system.

Joint labor activity, a common dwelling, a common fire that warmed its inhabitants - all this, with natural necessity, united and united people. The strengthening of social ties, caused by the need to unite people to fight nature, is clearly evidenced by the whole situation of the Mousterian settlements, all their culture, all traces of their activities, including even such seemingly ordinary and inexpressive finds from this side as “kitchen garbage" in the form of thousands or even tens of thousands of animal bones found in the cave dwellings of Neanderthals and in their open-air camps. They show how man gradually overcame the animal egoism inherited from the prehuman state. Unlike animals, man no longer cared only for himself and not only for his own children, but also for the whole community. Instead of eating the prey at the hunting ground, the Mousterian hunters carried it to the cave, where women, children and the elderly, busy with housekeeping, remained around the blazing fire. All ethnographic material known to science clearly testifies to the custom of collective distribution of food and joint consumption, characteristic of the primitive communal system at all its stages.
It is very likely that it was at this time that the transition to a new form of social life began. The first rudiments of the most ancient form of tribal society, the maternal tribal community, i.e., a collective bound by ties of kinship, arise. Due to the then existing form of marital relations, only the mother of the child was indisputably known, which, along with the active role of a woman in economic life (gathering, participation in hunting) or her role as a fire keeper, determined. her high social position.

By this time, the forms of marital relations had already passed a significant path of development, although it is difficult to say with certainty what level they had reached. Initially, as noted earlier, the relationship between the sexes, apparently, was disordered by social rules. The further development of the family went along the line of narrowing the circle of persons participating in marital intercourse, first of all by limiting marital intercourse between the generation of parents and children, then between uterine brothers and sisters, etc.

The development of the Neanderthal mind.

There can be no doubt that the progressive development of labor and society caused corresponding progressive changes in the consciousness, in the thinking of primitive man. There are idealistic theories that try to prove that the thinking of primitive man was allegedly irrational and mystical through and through, that our distant ancestors supposedly had completely false, fundamentally wrong, completely wrong and fantastic ideas about reality.

However, it is enough to get acquainted with the actual process of development of primitive man and his culture to be convinced of the opposite. It is absolutely clear that if the content of the consciousness of our primitive ancestors were not real ideas that correspond to objective reality and are basically a true reflection of the laws and phenomena of the real world, but only some kind of mystical ideas and groundless fantasy, then humanity would not. could successfully develop further. If the consciousness of primitive man to some extent did not reflect objective reality in its present and true form, he would not be able to resist the forces of nature and would eventually become their victim. Having the so-called mystical thinking, man would not be able to make his tools and improve them.

The path from ignorance to knowledge, from vague, obscure, and also false ideas about reality to more accurate and correct ideas, was, of course, extremely slow and difficult. But precisely because this positive knowledge, which lay at the basis of man's conscious activity and at the basis of his thinking, was consistently growing and enriching, man went on and on.

The development of the consciousness of primitive man was based on the consistent growth of his labor activity, his daily labor practice, as the only source of knowledge and a criterion for the reliability of ideas about the world around him.

The development of the mind of Neanderthal man is reflected with particular clarity in the further improvement of his tools. The presence of skillfully executed colorful spots and stripes at the end of the Mousterian time testifies to the more complex mental activity of the Mousterian man in comparison with his primitive ancestors. These are rather wide streaks of red paint applied by the hand of a Neanderthal man across a small slab of stone discovered during excavations of a Mousterian settlement in the cave of La Ferraci (France).

Neanderthal man could not yet draw or sculpt the figure of the beast. However, already at the end of the Mousterian period, the first attempts to intentionally change the shape of the stone were noticeable, not only in order to make tools out of it. In the Mousterian deposits, slabs of stone with skillfully hollowed out depressions, the so-called "cup stones", were found. On the slab from La Ferraci, the cup depressions were arranged not singly, but in a compact group, and moreover, in such a way that some kind of connection is found in their placement.

Of course, it would be wrong to overestimate and exaggerate the degree of development of abstract thinking in Neanderthals. Even more sharply, it should be emphasized that the primitive man was not at all free from false, incorrect ideas about himself and about the world around him, since he took only the first steps from ignorance to knowledge, since every hour, every minute he felt his weakness in the struggle with nature and dependence on its elements.
early burials.

Many idealistically thinking philosophers and historians strive to present religion as the highest manifestation of the human spirit, the ideological achievement of mankind, "the crown of its development." From this point of view, religion could not have arisen in remote primitive times; it should have appeared only in a fully formed and highly developed person, "completing" his achievements in the field of spiritual culture.

Other reactionary philosophers and idealist historians, on the contrary, try to prove the "eternity" of religion. They claim that already at the very initial stages of their ancient development man not only had a religion, but also received, as it were, in the order of "divine revelation" faith in a single God - the creator of the universe and the source of all blessings on earth. In fact, however, such religious ideas arise only in the course of the long development of human society, in a class society, and the initial religious beliefs that arise in primitive man are extremely primitive.

Both of these reactionary, idealistic points of view are completely refuted by the entire course of the primitive history of mankind. They are exposed by facts, archaeological data, revealing the actual time and specific conditions in which the rudiments of primitive religious beliefs arise.

In fact, religion arose as a result of the oppression of primitive man by the forces of nature, as a fantastic reflection of this weakness and humiliation.

The data on the most ancient burials, appearing in the Mousterian time, provide factual material about the emergence of the rudiments of these primitive religious-fantastic beliefs.

Researchers have found more than 20 cases of burial of Neanderthal bodies. The most remarkable of them are noted in Spy (Belgium, near Namur); in the Bufia cave, near the village of La Chapelle aux Seine, Yves, La Ferrassi (France), where the remains of 6 skeletons were found; on Mount Carmel, in the caves of Et-Tabun and Es-Skhul (Palestine), where the remains of 12 skeletons were found. In the USSR, Mousterian burials were found in the Crimea, in the Kiik-Koba cave, and in Central Asia, in the Teshik-Tash grotto.
In all these cases, there was a deliberate burial of corpses in the ground. The burial places were caves, which were the dwellings of people, but burials outside the caves are not excluded. In some caves, burials were made more than once. Sometimes the corpses of the dead were placed, perhaps in ready-made recesses, in "sleeping" pits. In other cases, special pits were dug for this, and even with considerable effort.

The corpses of adult men and women, as well as the corpses of children, were buried. In some cases, there are burials of two bones of adults located nearby, as well as the bones of a child and a woman (Kiik-Koba cave, in the Crimea). A certain position of the bones in the graves is also established:

they usually lie with bent legs, that is, in a slightly crouched position. In some cases, both arms or one of them are bent at the elbow, and the hands are near the face. This posture resembles the position of a sleeping person.
Thus, in the middle and at the end of the Mousterian time, to which the listed burials belong, for the first time a certain and completely new attitude towards the dead appears, expressed in intentional and already rather complex actions - in the burials of corpses. At the basis of this attitude lay, undoubtedly, concern for a member of one's collective, arising from the entire life system of the primitive community, from all the unwritten laws and norms of behavior of that time. It was an indisputable expression of that feeling of inextricable blood connection between relatives, which runs like a red thread through the entire primitive era of human history.

But this concern for the deceased member of the primitive community was based here in false ideas about man himself, about life and death. It must be assumed that these were the first germs of fantastic, fundamentally wrong ideas, on the basis of which ideas about the “soul” and “ afterlife”, continuing after death, which are one of the most important sources, and then an indispensable part of every religion.
At the same time, it should be emphasized that there are no traces of intentional human burial before the Mousterian time. In an earlier time, to which the bone remains of Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and the most ancient people close to the latter belong, there was no concern for the dead. This shows that there can be no question of any "original religion"; the first traces of deliberate burial of human corpses appear only 500-600 thousand years after the beginning of the formation of man.

Religious beliefs are not "intrinsic to human nature," not "intrinsic to human thinking," as idealists of various stripes claim. Religious beliefs arise under certain social conditions, change, and then disappear depending on the change in these conditions.
The Mousterian time was a natural transitional stage from the most ancient period of human history to a new period, to the time of primitive matriarchal communities. This was a period when a process of gradual accumulation of elements of the new in people's lives took place, which then gave its results in a significant and even unexpected at first glance, but quite natural from the point of view of a materialistic understanding of history, the rise of the culture of the subsequent Upper Paleolithic time.