Deck 1: The African Origins of Humanity, Prehistory-10,000 B.C.E

Question 1

Adaptations to the new conditions seem to have included all of the following EXCEPT:

A) The domestication of dogs.
B) A spurt of technical innovation, leading to innovations likes boomerangs, better fishhooks, and bird traps.
C) Expanded trade networks to exchange goods across ecological zones.
D) Better nutrition and health because of the improved hunting techniques.

Answer 1

D

Question 2

Homo erectus

A) Made simple tools, but did not yet walk upright.
B) Could not leave the tropics because they had not mastered the arts of making fire or tanning leather.
C) Typically possessed a brain that was larger than those of modern humans.
D) Were fully stable on their feet, lived on the ground, could travel rather easily, and had mastered the use of fire.

Answer 2

D

Question 3

Another result of the Ice Age was:

A) An enhanced ability to migrate because areas formerly separated by seas became accessible over ice.
B) A great increase in the number of large animals because they could take refuge in areas too cold for humans.
C) A reduction in the genetic variations between various human societies because they were no longer isolated.
D) A dramatic increase in the total population of humans over the globe, due to improved techniques for hunting large animals.

Answer 3

A

Question 4

Symbolic thinking among Homo sapiens:

A) Is evident only in European caves and hidden places.
B) Is visible in art which shows evidence of the ability to conceptualize images by thinking abstractly.
C) Seems to have been absent from human societies until about 10,000 years ago
D) Clearly conveys the creators' intention in rendering paintings and clay sculptures.

Question 5

In traditional Australian Aboriginal society, as described in the nineteenth century, most marriages:

A) Were monogamous
B) Were polygamous.
C) Were only recognized between members of the same clan.
D) Limited to men who were successful traders.

Question 6

Forager societies:

A) Are also known as "hunting and gathering" societies.
B) Had a short life span because of the uncertainty of being able to find sufficient food.
C) Generally lived in caves because they did not generally possess the skills to build other types of shelter.
D) Were completely self-contained, never acquiring resources through trade or barter.

Question 7

Rock art and cave art in Europe:

A) Very often depict human hunters tracking prey.
B) Generally depict fanciful figures, such as a bison with a human head, or an owl with a human body.
C) Often depict animals such as reindeer, horses, cattle, mammoths, etc.
D) Show clearly that human intellectual ability and symbolic thinking has evolved rapidly in the past 10,000 years.

Question 8

Gender was an aspect of social organization in early foraging societies in what respect?

A) These societies were clearly patriarchal because of the importance of males in hunting for meat and defending the tribe.
B) These societies were clearly matriarchal, as shown by their peaceful social organization and veneration of Earth Goddesses.
C) There is evidence of some division of labor between males and females, but not enough evidence to formulate any dependable global opinions about dominance.
D) Paleolithic pictures and symbols clearly show the gendered power structure of pre-agrarian societies.

Question 9

"Venus" figurines:

A) All depicted obese female forms with exaggerated sexual characteristics.
B) Have been unearthed all over western and central Europe.
C) Were sometimes tiny, but many were so large it is difficult to imagine them being transported from campsite to campsite.
D) Were, according to inscriptions found on them, designed for use in religious ceremonies.

Question 10

The following is NOT evidence of the development of abstract thought among Homo sapiens:

A) Jewelry
B) Grave sites
C) Paintings or drawings in caves and on rocks
D) Evidence that the same butchery sites were used by successive generations.

Question 11

"Kennewick man":

A) is definitely Native American.
B) Was very short and small-boned.
C) Was remarkably free of injuries or other health problems.
D) Seems to have died after being trapped in an avalanche.

Question 12

In Australian Aboriginal culture, the shaman did all of the following except:

A) Forbade other members of the clan to cast spells
B) Was enabled to read other people's minds, by drawing on the tribe's sacred traditions
C) Claimed to heal illnesses
D) Constructed the imaginary reality of the tribe's origins and roots

Question 13

The most important physical ability in the transition from hominin to human was:

A) The ability to climb trees to avoid predators.
B) Bipedalism, which allowed them to function effectively in both forest and savanna.
C) The ability to use knuckle-walking to move through forests quickly.
D) The combination of physical strength and speed.

Question 14

Early humans were able to expand their dietary resources to include a greater variety of food sources, such as meat from animal carcasses:

A) Because they moved to different areas.
B) After technological breakthroughs.
C) Because they had developed the ability to think in abstract terms.
D) Because their legs were long.

Question 15

The history of humans from the time of Clovis and the Fertile Crescent to the present:

A) Represents a mere 0.02 percent of the time from Ardi to the present.
B) Represents about 20 percent of that from the first Homo sapiens to the present.
C) Clearly illustrates the steps needed for human societies to develop.
D) Indicates that all human societies adapt and evolve at the same pace.

Question 16

All of the following were results of the last Ice Age EXCEPT:

A) Pyrenees mountains between modern France and Spain
B) The area from southern France to Mongolia changed to frozen tundra in winter and semiarid steppe in summer.
C) The increase in the size of African rain forests encouraged a temporary return to vegetarianism.
D) The deserts of the Sahara, Kalahari, and the interior of Australia expanded.

Question 17

The Ice Age in the Americas:

A) Made it easier for humans to migrate westward from Alaska.
B) Probably prevented southward migration over land until a pathway was cleared across the area of modern Alberta.
C) Prevented migration over water or by rafts, canoes, or boats because of the ice.
D) Resulted in the inhabitants of the Americas having remarkably similar languages and mitochondrial DNA.

Question 18

The authors of the textbook believe that the principal reason for the slow pace of deep history was:

A) Because collecting vegetal foods, fishing, and hunting are not safe or dependable ways of securing nourishment.
B) The fact that foragers had more leisure time than farmers.
C) The conscious effort of foragers to limit population growth and group size.
D) Because all humans retreated southward during the last Ice Age.

Question 19

Homo floresiensis, commonly called "hobbits"

A) Seem too primitive to have developed water-going capability
B) Lived 100,000-60,000 years ago
C) Could not have evolved from Homo erectus, judging from their brain size
D) Survived until the 17^th century

Question 20

Examples of humans depicted with the features of lions, bison, stags, or even plants suggests

A) The existence of a religious life
B) A lack of understanding of the basic life cycle
C) The idea that humans could assume the identity of other beings in nature
D) The notion that identities are fixed

Question 21

Every evolutionary step had to build successively on every preceding one so that, ______________, fully evolved modern humans could emerge in Africa about 100,000 years ago.

A) Quickly and efficiently
B) Inexorably and smoothly
C) Emotionally and reluctantly
D) Anatomically and intellectually

Question 22

Historians who insist on a rigid separation between "prehistory" and "history" may be forgetting that: _____________.

A) The scientific instruments used by anthropologists have a high failure rate in the field
B) Archaeologists developed the parameters of field surveys long before "history" existed as a literary form
C) Orangutans
D) Written records have survived from 2 million years ago, but the languages in which they were composed are, at least today, untranslatable

Question 23

The straight legs of the hominins called "Ardis" (4.5 - 4.3 million years ago) enabled them to:

A) Steady themselves with one hand on a branch and reach for fruit with the other
B) Kick away predators from the base of the trees in which they lived
C) Walk upright in the savanna for extended periods
D) Use their feet while carving Acheulian tools

Question 24

The relative speed of the dispersion of H. erectus groups and their adaptation to new environments after leaving Africa are indicated by:

A) Fossils found in Java and stone tools in India dating to 1.8 - 1.6 million years ago
B) Fossilized footprints that have been discovered in China's Gobi Desert
C) Prehistoric sailing vessels that have been recovered from the Indian Ocean
D) Mitochondrial DNA found among people living in the Volga River basin in Russia

Question 25

A recent analysis of five Homo erectus remains found in a cave in Georgia (in the Caucasus) in 2005 suggests that this line of humans:

A) Had crossed into Beringia and interacted with other hominins already living there
B) Was perhaps of non-African origin
C) Were sewing together fiber clothes as early as 1.8 million years ago
D) Became extinct as the result of a sudden Ice Age

Question 26

"Foraging", sometimes called "hunting and gathering", was the dominant pattern of human history for the longest period, several hundred thousand years, but it is also:

A) Thought to have accelerated soil erosion and led to the extinction of animals who relied on pasturage land
B) The least documented, forcing a reliance on comparative evidence provided by anthropologists for recent centuries
C) The period during which hominins made the greatest strides toward perfecting the design and efficacy of their tools
D) The period during which women began to emerge as the dominant figures in clan society, due to their power of giving birth

Question 27

The discovery of obsidian at a prehistoric site probably indicates:

A) A recent volcanic eruption at the site
B) A bout of sudden and violent lightning strikes in the vicinity
C) Experimentation by early humans in the art of channeling fire
D) The existence of trade networks, providing material mined as far as 200 miles away

Question 28

The development of jewelry was a critical step in societal development, as it indicated the existence of:

A) Abstract, symbolic thinking
B) High status females within the group
C) Rising sea levels, which transported seashells from far distances
D) An early attempt to record the number of items a person owned

Question 29

A pictorial representation of a rhinoceros, variously dated between 59,000 and 23,000 years ago, may suggest:

A) The worship of animals of this sort across wide portions of southwestern Africa
B) An imaginative leap among prehistoric artists, who could create an animal that had not yet appeared, at least in its present form
C) The influence of cross-continental trade, since an identical image appears in the Bradshaw paintings found in Australia
D) Early humans' ability to create symbols that signify something other than the materials from which they were made

Question 30

Foraging remained the dominant mode of subsistence among Australia's Aboriginal people, largely because:

A) Large marsupials continued to propagate and diversify their ranks, especially after 16,000 years ago
B) Raiding parties from other parts of Southeast Asia continuously destroyed the crops the Aboriginals had planted in undefended fields
C) Australia possessed only two types of grain and lacked the rich concentrations of grain found in the Fertile Crescent of Western Asia
D) It permitted a division of labor by gender that satisfied the goals of both the men and the women in the group

Question 31

Aboriginal society remained "stateless", in the sense of possessing no administrative institutions, largely because:

A) The shamans recognized no presence of "state" in their tribe's Dreamtime.
B) No agriculture meant that there was no agricultural surplus available to promote trade and a further stratification of society.
C) Elders in positions of authority were trained in the effective wielding of weapons, and the general populace willingly surrendered power to them, rendering an enforcement mechanism unnecessary.
D) Rapidly moving glaciers had destroyed their governmental buildings, and it was thought unwise to rebuild them and drawn down the gods' anger.

Question 32

The discovery and analysis of _________________ suggests the reasons for the abandonment of the northern European and Russian plains for 15,000 years.

A) Glaciers containing the remains of humans who were swept away in a sudden ice floe Feedback a: Incorrect. Please see page 21 of Patterns of World History.
B) Gigantic wooly mammoth remains, which had the effective of terrifying humans into leaving the area
C) Malaria-infected mosquitoes, embedded within samples of amber in the Baltic Sea region
D) Human bone remnants, which show signs of malnutrition and disease as a result of the Ice Age's onset

Question 33

Study of the mitochondrial DNA of present day Native Americans points to _________.

A) The impossibility of their being related to East Asians who crossed the Beringia land bridge around 25,000 years ago
B) The incompleteness of the human genome, at least at present
C) A gap of roughly 10,000 years between the emergence of their genome in Siberia, and its transfer to the Americas
D) The imprint of a bacterial infection that was acquired when one individual sailed across the Pacific to the vicinity of modern-day Seattle

Question 34

Why was the analysis of human remains found in a Portuguese cave in 1999 so intriguing?

A) The child resulted from a "mixture" of Neanderthal genetic material with that from a Homo sapiens.
B) It proved that Homo sapiens had murdered at least one Neanderthal person, apparently by stabbing him with a spear
C) It proved that the brain of a Neanderthal was, indeed, smaller than that of contemporary Homo sapiens.
D) The Neanderthal skeleton was taller and better proportioned than that of any contemporaneous Homo sapiens.

Question 35

Up to this point, the fossil record suggests that: ______________.

A) Open grasslands and steppes
B) Thick forests that hampered their use of bows and arrows
C) Wetlands bordering on lakes and rivers
D) Warming climates

Question 36

New discoveries of human settlements from across the Americas are creating a scholarly consensus that: ________________.

A) The Beringia ice bridge was a vibrant exchange of people and materials, and many people crossed it multiple times
B) The DNA evidence indicates multiple points of origins for Amerindians, from Africa to Asia to the Middle East
C) Humans arrived in the Americas more than 13,500 years ago
D) Human migrants were unable to travel from Central America to South America because the isthmus of Panama had not yet been formed

Question 37

According to a study published in 2014, the skeletal remains of "Naia", found in an underwater cave in the Yucatán Peninsula, give strong evidence for the notion that:

A) Water once covered the entirety of modern Mexico and humans had adapted to these conditions
B) Early Amerindian cultures practiced human sacrifice
C) Cro-Magnon peoples had emigrated to the Americas carried by favorable winds across the Atlantic Ocean
D) Members from one single, genetically uniform population populated the Americas from at least 16,000 years ago

Question 38

The question of when the "Hobbits" of Flores Island died out is complicated, given ____________.

A) The exact and well-documented timeline for the first appearance of humans in the vicinity
B) The consecration of their burial sites as a burial ground recognized and maintained by devout Muslims
C) The failure to discover the remains of more than one individual
D) Rumors to the effect that small people were seen on the island at the time of the Portuguese conquest in the 16^th century

Question 39

The detailed arrangement of broken stalagmites found in a cave in France is new evidence in support of the theory that

A) Neanderthals did create art
B) Neanderthals could control fire
C) Neanderthals hunted
D) None of the above

Question 40

Neanderthals were probably able to talk, albeit in a rudimentary way because

A) Their brains were small
B) They did not possess the throat structures of H. sapiens
C) They died out before language fully developed
D) They had no need for language

Question 41

The cultural artifacts of early humans include all of the following except:

A) Rock drawings
B) Jewelry
C) Irrigation canals
D) Geometrical figures cut into stone

Question 42

Hominins were forerunners of humans after genetically splitting from ___________ 4-5 million years ago:

A) Gorillas
B) Chimpanzees
C) Orangutans
D) Squirrel monkeys

Question 43

Australopiths were prehuman species that existed before those classed under the _________ Homo.

A) Phylum
B) Taxon
C) Species
D) Genus

Question 44

_____________ became a key evolutionary advantage to hominins, since walking on two feet freed the arms to do something else.

A) Bipedalism
B) Bifurcation
C) Ambidextrousness
D) Bimetalism

Question 45

Walking on two feet, humans were able to venture out of the African ____________, i.e. broken forests with interspersed bush and grasslands.

A) Tundra
B) Jungle
C) Savanna
D) Mesa

Question 46

All of the following tool styles or cultures were named for locations in modern France except:

A) Acheulian
B) Oldowan
C) Cro-Magnon
D) Levallois

Question 47

The oldest specimen of H. sapiens discovered so far is a fossil discovered in Morocco and dated to _______________.

A) 12,000 years ago
B) 1.8 million years ago
C) 135,000 years ago
D) 300,000 years ago

Question 48

Levallois is a stone technique where workers first shaped a hard rock into a ____________.

A) Cylinder or cone
B) Serpent or dragon
C) Triangle-shaped hand axe
D) "Clovis" point

Question 49

A dozen or so dispersed families of H. sapiens would come together around a campfire, forming a clan, _______________.

A) Which elected a priest to represent them to the gods
B) Which courted sexual partners from outside the group
C) Among which sexual partners were chosen
D) Among which a form of barter in Acheulian tools was established.

Question 50

A rock formation inside a cave, discovered in Botswana in 2006, was carved and shaped into the head of a(n) ____________ some 77,000 years ago.

A) Lion
B) Woman
C) Python
D) Elephant

Question 51

The most esteemed elders among the Australian Aboriginals possessed a deep knowledge of the tribe's past in the _______________.

A) Temple dedicated to the principal god
B) Form of a holy book
C) Dreamtime
D) Pastime

Question 52

In Australian Aboriginal culture, the shaman did all of the following except:

A) Forbade other members of the clan to cast spells
B) Was enabled to read other people's minds, by drawing on the tribe's sacred traditions
C) Claimed to heal illnesses
D) Constructed the imaginary reality of the tribe's origins and roots

Question 53

A set of 15,000-year-old engravings on the floor of the La Marche Cave shows realistic sketches of __________.

A) Rhinoceroses
B) Whales
C) Only young men, who were presumably hunters
D) Old and young men and women

Question 54

Tundra is a landscape in which the top soil unfreezes during the summer and supports ____________.

A) The rapid development of rain forests
B) The replenishment of nitrogen, which aided the work of early farmers
C) The re-emergence of ponds and swamps
D) The growth of small shrubs, mosses, and lichens

Question 55

As hunters, the Neanderthals were not well adapted to ______________.

A) Open grasslands and steppes
B) Thick forests that hampered their use of bows and arrows
C) Wetlands bordering on lakes and rivers
D) Warming climates

Question 56

Scholars believe the migration of Homo sapiens into central and western Europe occurred along the _______________ around 35,000 years ago.

A) Pyrenees mountains between modern France and Spain
B) Baltic Sea coast
C) Danube River Valley
D) English Channel coast

Question 57

The mitochondrial DNA of a young girl's teeth, found in the Yucatán peninsula and dating to 13,000-12,000 years ago, is:

A) Completely unique in the genetic record and cannot be connected, at this point, to any other ethnic group
B) Closely related to that of the groups of Siberian Homo sapiens who migrated to Beringia during the Ice Age
C) Impossible to reconstruct, given the limitations of modern genetic science
D) Compelling evidence of a mixed Neanderthal and Homo sapiens heritage

Question 58

Neanderthals died out because

A) They were defeated by humans
B) The environment changed
C) Humans pushed them out of habitable areas
D) Of disease

Question 59

Provincial governors appointed by the Persian king were called

A) The Philippines
B) The Azores
C) Indonesia
D) Polynesia

Question 60

Forager clans and tribes had to retreat southward and adapt to the harsh environmental conditions when ____________.

A) Neanderthal hunting parties infringed on the forests controlled by Homo sapiens groups
B) The climate suddenly began to warm and the polar icecaps began to melt
C) Ash from a volcanic eruption dimmed the rays of the sun and dinosaurs began to die
D) The Ice Age hit their dwelling places