Text-dep Analysis─Stone Age Discovery(语境分析─石器时代创新)
2015-02-24
【Aiden in English】
In our present-day life, we would turn on our heating like it was nothing. We go to the grocery store and buy some green beans for dinner without thinking much about it. We would toss a piece of crumpled-up paper into the recycling bin and pretend you’re LeBron James shooting from downtown. All these things we do without much of a second thought, but thousands of years ago during the famous Stone Age, these things would’ve been considered the most modern discoveries and ways at the time. The book The Stone Age News and the articles “Stone Age Recycling” and “Prehistory”, all talk about the most important and modern discoveries of the Stone Age. In The Stone Age News, the author puts the amazing discoveries at the time into a newspaper, describing each major find in history clearly as they were there. The article “Stone Age Recycling” contains many huge discoveries about recycling long ago. The article “Prehistory” explains the advances in life before events were recorded and written down, or before history. So all the simple, no-brainer moves that we all do now were really modern technology thousands of years ago.
After coming home from work or school during another freezing cold day, most people just turn on their heat and wait for the house to warm up. Yet thousands of years ago, the heat was one of the luxuries that not everyone had. Although people back then didn’t have heat, they did have the knowledge about the next best thing. According to the article “Fire” in “Prehistory”, people around a million years ago discovered fire, a very useful heat source. It produced heat almost instantly and being able to create heat was crucial to human life at the time. With the ability to keep warm, humans could move away from the equator and warmer climates to colder places. They were able to survive as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as the most southern point of Cape Horn South America. The fire also brought along cooked food. With cooked food, people could add flavor to their food. In Stone Age News, the author writes a section about all the different ways food could be cooked with fire. Cooked food also meant fewer germs on the meat, and that was a big deal because the meat was eaten raw long ago. Now, people have all kinds of ways to cook food, and we have many different ways of using fire to cook food. There’s the usual roasting over a campfire, boiling, frying, and many more.
Farming is a major source of food, now and thousands of years ago although now, we would simply go to the grocery store for food. If we wished to have broccoli for dinner, drive to the grocery store and buy some broccoli. The same goes for all the other vegetables. Yet thousands of years ago, everyone had to help get food, whether it was hunting or gathering wild berries. In fact, food would probably be one of the major issues of the Stone Age. According to “Prehistory”, farming was discovered by accident. People probably dropped seeds into the ground, and the next year, a plant grew in the exact same spot. During the end of the Stone Age, people learned how to use this method to grow their own food. Farming was a major discovery because, at that point in history, most people traveled from area to area searching for food. With the ability to produce their own food, people could settle in one place and look into other things. In Stone Age News, the author talks about the benefits of farming. Without always constantly moving from place to place, some people would be freed to do other occupations. Also, farming produces a surplus of food. In the Stone Age News, the author writes “Harvesting a field of grain is hard but rewarding work”. People settled in one place with all the extra food, and humans with special talents were able to focus more on their talents. Nowadays, people have a large portion of their diet from farming. We eat bread, vegetables, and fruit every day to get nutrition.
People these days have filled up landfills with trash and junk that could be used again. So recycling is now encouraged in the four corners of the earth to reuse what can be used again. We do this so we are able to keep the environment safe from pollution littering and landfills. People during the Stone Age were also somewhat recycling, although for different needs. In the text “Stone Age Recycling”, the author writes about discoveries in caves of signs of reusing. Old flint from a battered tool could be mended together with something else. Bone chips left on the ground after crafting a tool could’ve been picked up and used again by someone else. Even though people thousands of years ago recycled, their purpose was very much different. The humans of the Stone Age reused things to conserve materials and not to get them later. They didn’t even think about the environment.
Thousands of years ago, humans did many things we do now. Although the reasons or importance might be different, their ways of life have a lot of similarities. People used fire to keep warm, farmed for food, and recycled materials. The Stone Age had a ton of discoveries that built the foundations of civilization today.
