| A | B |
|---|
| Australopithecus | "Southern Apes" - Human-like hominids; "Lucy"; basic traits of humans; could stand up (about 3 million BCE) |
| Homo Habilis | "Handy Humans" - first true humans; stone tools - the first tool makers; lived in Africa (about 2 million BCE) |
| Homo Erectus | "Upright Humans" - walked completely upright; made and controlled fire; the first hunters; traveled over land bridges from Africa to populate the world; "Peking Man" (about 1.5 million BCE) |
| Homo Sapiens & Homo Neandertalensis | "Wise Humans" & Neandertals - buried their dead with ceremony; skeletons shaped similar to ours today; created stone tools, bone needles, and bone fish hooks; sewed clothes from animal skins and made boots; marvelous hunters (about 500,000 BCE) |
| Homo Sapiens Sapiens | Cro-Magnon & "Moderns" - very capable hunter/gathereres; well constructed huts with central hearths for fires; jewelry; cave art and paintings; lived all over world (about 25,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE) |
| Hominids | member of the group that includes human beings and earlier human-like creatures |
| Fossils | remains of living things (plants, animals, people) not things that were made |
| Artifacts | remains that were made by people such as a tool, ornament, or pottery |
| Donald Johanson | Discovered Australopithecis remains and named them "Lucy" in 1974 45 miles north of Hadar, Ethiopia |
| Louis and Mary Leakey | Researched most evidence for Homo Habilis at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and other sites in eastern Africa |
| prehistory | the timeperiod before people developed writing (about 5,500 years ago) |
| anthropologists | scientist who studies physical and cultural characteristics of humans and their ancestors |
| paleontologists | scientist who studies fossil remains |
| archaeologists | scientist who studies earlier peoples and cultures |
| radiocarbon dating | modern scientific method for telling the age of once-living material by measuring the amount of radioactiv carbon remaining in it |
| nomads | member of group of people with no fixed home, who travel constantly to find food and water |
| technology | the skills and knowledge used by people to make tools and do work |
| culture | the way of life of of a given people at a given time, including language, behavior and beliefs |
| "Homo" | Human |
| "Sapiens" | Beings |
| Taxonomy | a scientific system of categorizing animals and plants (with two word Latin names) |
| Paleoanthropology | the study of early humans through the discovery and interpretation of physical evidence left behind, such as fossils and artifacts |
