The terms and definitions for the vocabulary terms in Ways of the World: Chapter 1.
Terms : Hide Images
| 5346469812 | Venus Figurines | Paleolithic carvings of the female form, often with exaggerated breasts, buttocks, hips and stomachs, which may have had religious significance. | 0 | |
| 5346469813 | trance dance | In San culture, a nightlong ritual held to activate a person's inner spiritual potency (n/um) to counteract the evil influences of gods and ancestors. This practice was apparently common to the Khoisan people, of who the Ju/'Hoansi are a surviving remnant. | 1 | |
| 5346469814 | shaman | In many early societies, a person believed to have the ability to act as a bridge between living humans and supernatural forces, often by means of trances induced by psychoactive drugs. | 2 | |
| 5346469815 | San, or Ju/'hoansi | A Paleolithic people living on the northern edge of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa. | 3 | |
| 5346469816 | Paleolithic "settling down" | The process by which some Paleolithic people moved towards permanent settlement in the wake of the last Ice Age. Settlement was marked by increasing storage of food and accumulation of goods as well as growing inequalities in society. | 4 | |
| 5346469817 | Paleolithic rock art | Although this term can refer to the art of any gathering and hunting society, it is typically used to describe the hundreds of Paleolithic paintings discovered in Spain and France and dating at about 20,000 years ago; these paintings usually depict a range of animals, although human figures and abstract designs are also found. | 5 | |
| 5346469818 | Paleolithic | Literally "old stone age", the term used to describe early Homo sapiens societies in the period before the development of agriculture. | 6 | |
| 5346469819 | "the original affluent society" | Term coined by the scholar Marshall Sahlins in 1972 to describe Paleolithic societies, which he registered as affluent not because they had so much but because they wanted or needed so little. | 7 | |
| 5346469820 | n/um | Among the San, a spiritual potency that becomes activated during "curing dances" and protects humans from the malevolent forces of gods or ancestral spirits. | 8 | |
| 5346469821 | Neanderthals | Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a European variant of the Homo sapiens that died out about 25,000 years ago. | 9 | |
| 5346469822 | megafaunal extinction | Dying-out of a number of large animal species, including the mammoth and several species of hoses and camels, that occurred around 11,000-10,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. The extinction may have been caused by the excessive hunting or by the changing climate of the era. | 10 | |
| 5346469823 | Jomon culture | A settled Paleolithic culture of prehistoric Japan, characterized by seaside villages and the creation of some of the world's earliest pottery. | 11 | |
| 5346469824 | insulting the meat | A San cultural practice meant to deflate pride that involved negative comments about the meat brought in by a hunter and the expectation that a successful hunter would disparage his own kill. | 12 | |
| 5346469825 | Ice Age | Any of a number of cold periods in history; the last Ice Age was at its peak around 20,000 years ago. | 13 | |
| 5346469826 | "human revolution" | The term used to describe the transition of humans from acting out of biological imperative to dependence on learned or invented ways of living (culture). | 14 | |
| 5346469827 | Hadza | A people of northern Tanzania, almost the last surviving Paleolithic society. | 15 | |
| 5346469828 | Great Goddess | According to one theory, a dominant deity of the Paleolithic Era. | 16 | |
| 5346469829 | "gathering and hunting peoples" | As the name suggests, people who live by collecting food rather than producing it. Recent scholars have turned this term instead of the older "hunter-gatherer" in recognition that such societies depend much more heavily on gathering than hunting for survival. | 17 | |
| 5346469830 | Flores man | A recently discovered hominid species of Indonesia. | 18 | |
| 5346469831 | Dreamtime | A complex worldview of Australia's Aboriginal people that held that current humans live in a vibration or echo of ancestral happenings. | 19 | |
| 5346469832 | Clovis Culture | The earliest widespread and distinctive culture of North America; named from the Clovis point, a particular kind of projectile point. | 20 | |
| 5346469833 | Chumash Culture | Paleolithic culture of southern California that survived until the modern era. | 21 | |
| 5346469834 | Brotherhood of the Tomol | A prestigious craft guild that monopolized the building and ownership of large oceangoing canoes, or tomols, among the Chumash people (located in what is now southern California) | 22 | |
| 5346469835 | Austronesian migrations | The last phase of the great human migraton that established a human presence in every habitable region of the earth. Austronesian-speaking people settled in the Pacific Islands and Madagascar in a series of seaborne migrations that began around 3,500 years ago. | 23 |
