Evolution of Humanity: Civilization

Essay by smmustiUniversity, Bachelor'sA, June 2005

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There are some irrefutable facts that almost everyone accepts in the history of humanity. Existence of the first man, Adam, is one of these facts However, this information is not merely enough to characterize our greatest ancestor. People have always wondered what he looked like, his life and his interaction with nature. This wonder is not only a result of personal interests; it is also a question that examines the origin of humanity and civilization. People have assumed that primitive humans were like animals therefore there was a huge gap between the life of primitive man and today's civilized man and they began to investigate the reasons for this change and several questions were asked: When did the civilization process of human begin? Was foundation and development of humanity a revolution or an evolution that progresses relatively to the time? How can this progress be called: "the taming of a beast of prey" as Friedrich Nietzsche claims or a development in ideas and life styles of humans and improvement of technique? All these questions are to be answered in the rest of this essay.

First of all, the image of the first man -or more generally 'primitive man'- has to be described. The image that evokes in today's people mind is the portrait of 'an animal', which has not met with civilization yet. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes this image by characteristics of Enkidu: "In the wilderness (?) she (Annu) created valiant Enkidu...His whole body was shaggy with hair, he had a full head of hair like woman ...He ate grasses with the gazelles and jostled at he watering hole with the animals; as with animals, his thirst was slaked with (mere) water."(Gilgamesh, I, 6). Here Enkidu seems to reflect the uncivilized human as a 'wild animal'. This...