Analysis Of This Fleeting World

David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2008; 120 pp. $14.95 (paperback) This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, the author, David Christian provides a well-informed and a coherent thesis. Christian supported his historical interpretations with many factual details of three eras throughout history: Foraging, Agrarian, and the Modern era. For each section, Christian would explain and inform us with a variety of explanations he can do to give us a visual and knowledgeable understanding of history. He helps to bring our understanding of the past by enabling us to know how we existed today, why is present day different from the past, and what people did back then in order to

Afterward, he revealed to us within a half million years, Homo ergaster or Homo erectus started to become apparent in East Africa. Later on, modern humans- Homo Sapiens, arrived eventually. Furthermore, learning how humans lived earlier in comparison today is much more complex. Each culture, religious practices, appearance, characteristics, and norms are different from this present day. (Christian 14-15).

Bipedalism (our ability to walk on two legs), the uncommon size of our brains, symbolic language, and the ability to farm/hunt is what makes us different from the past era. (Christian 6-7) Pages 1-22 begins the era of foragers, also known as the “Paleolithic era” where they use stick and stone tools to survive across different climates around the globe. The era of foragers is the longest (250,000 years) and the hardest era to integrate evidence because of the time gap. Christian stated, “Historians have had a hard time integrating the era of foragers into their accounts of the past because most historians lack the research skills needed to study an area that generated no written evidence (2).