Category Kids Queries

The ancient Egyptians took pyramid construction to new heights along the Nile River in northeastern Africa 5,000 years ago, but they weren’t the only civilization to build massive pyramid-shaped monuments (for even to mummify their dearly departed, which other ancient cultures also practiced). Pyramids were the most structurally sound buildings that could be constructed out of stone – as long as a civilization had sufficient rocks to quarry and the manpower to move them. Cultures all over the world built pyramids throughout history. They came in different forms and functions.

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Eskimos – a broad term for people native to frigid subarctic regions in the United States, Canada, Greenland, and Russia – don’t speak five of them, none of which has a hundred words for snow. The myth of their ice-obsessed vocabulary comes from the way their languages work. Eskimos create larger words (and full sentences) out of smaller “root” words. Their languages have only a few root terms for snow, but to those small terms they add other words to create long one-word descriptions of the snow’s conditions and uses (“the snow is icy and dangerous,” for instance, or “this wet snow is excellent for making a snowman”). The structure of Eskimo language makes it seem like they have hundreds of words for everything, not just snow.

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Although it’s crucial in battle, communication is worthless – even dangerous – if it’s intercepted by the enemy. Even messages created by complex “encryption machines,” which convert plain words into secret codes, can be hacked given enough time. Native Americans, however, speak complex languages that are virtually unknown outside their tribes. Since the First World War, they’ve used their unique linguistic abilities in the U.S. military’s signal corps as “code talkers,” translating sensitive communications into their language and transmitting them much faster than any machine. Even if enemies learned to decode Cherokee, Comanche, Navajo, Choctaw, or any of the other code-talker languages, they would still need to figure out the secret terms for words that didn’t exist in those languages. The Navajo word for “iron fish,” for instance, was used to describe submarines. A tank became “turtle” in Comanche.

The code talkers’ mission was so top secret they weren’t even allowed to share details with their loved ones. Their existence was finally made public in 1968 (23 years after the close of the war), but it took several decades before they recognized for their crucial role in winning World War II.

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Researchers can only guess when humans first began forming sounds into words to communicate thoughts (there certainly weren’t any books to record the invention of language). Ancestors of the human species possessed the mouth and throat parts necessary to pronounce words nearly two million years ago, but they likely didn’t have much to talk about until they started creating complex tools and building fires more than a million years later. The first system of words might have described tools and fire-making techniques. “Carl blow on fire, fire grow big,” Carl the Homo erectus our immediate evolutionary ancestor – may have explained to his campfire pals 500,000 years ago.

No doubt the earliest members of our species – Homo sapiens – added to the conversation when they appeared around 200,000 years ago. But as they started leaving Africa to explore Asia, Europe, and eventually the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago, our human ancestors began to develop more complicated tools – and probably words to describe them – within their own tribes. Their vocabularies grew and split off from the languages spoken by more far-flung groups. The farther these pockets of humanity moved from southwestern Africa – the point of origin for both Homo sapiens and language – the more their languages changed. And that’s why we have nearly 7,000 languages spoken around the world today.

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It is located in Northern Spain. It was painted 15,000 years ago. Using charcoal and the curve of the cave walls to create 3-D effects, ancient artists painted bison, horses, deer, and other animals that looked so realistic, archaeologists thought they were forgeries when the caves were discovered in the late 1800s. They didn’t believe Stone Age artists had the intellectual capacity for such creativity. They were wrong.

The Altamira cave is 270 metres (890 feet) long. In the vestibule numerous archaeological remains belonging to the Aurignacian (Perigordian), upper Solutrean, and lower or middle Magdalenian periods were found, including ceremonial staves and engraved animal shoulder blades. The great lateral chamber that contains most of the paintings measures 18 metres by 9 metres, the height of the vault varying from 1.15 metres to 2.65 metres. The roof of the chamber is covered with paintings, chiefly of bison, executed in a magnificent, vivid polychrome of red, black, and violet tones. There are also two wild boars, some horses, a hind, and some other figures in a simpler style; in addition, there are eight engraved anthropomorphic figures, various handprints, and hand outlines. The other galleries contain numerous black-painted or engraved figures. In many cases, the creator of the designs exploited the natural contours of the rock surface.

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It is located in Southwestern France. It was painted 20,000 years ago. Crammed with more masterpieces than any art museum, this cave complex in the French countryside offers a window into the wild world of our Stone Age ancestors. The cavern walls are awash with stunning etchings of horses, bison, birds, humans, and bulls – one of which is 17 feet (5 m) long.

Besides the paintings, many tools were found at Lascaux. Among these are many flint tools, some of which display signs of being used specifically for carving engravings into the walls. Bone tools were also present. The pigments used at Lascaux contain traces of reindeer antler, most likely introduced either because antler was carved right next to the pigments or because it was used to mix the pigments into water. The remains of shellfish shells, some of them pierced, tie in well with other evidence of personal adornment found among humans living in Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic.

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