| A | B |
|---|
| Austronesian migrations | The last phase of the great human migration that established a human presence in every habitable region of the earth. Austronesian-speaking people settled the Pacific islands and Madagascar in a series of seaborne migrations that began around 3,500 years ago |
| Brotherhood of the Tomol | A prestigious craft guild that monopolized the building and ownership of large oceangoing canoes, or tomols ( pron. toe-mole), among the Chumash people |
| Chumash Culture | Paleolithic culture of southern California that survived until the modern era |
| Clovis Culture | The earliest widespread and distinctive culture of North America; named from the Clovis point, a particular kind of projectile point. |
| Dreamtime | A complex worldview of Australia’s Aboriginal people that held that current humans live in a vibration or echo of ancestral happenings. |
| Flores Man | A recently discovered hominid species of Indonesia |
| "gathering and hunting people" | As the name suggests, people who live by collecting food rather than producing it. Recent scholars have turned to this term instead of the older “hunter-gatherer” in recognition that such societies depend much more heavily on gathering than on hunting for survival. |
| Great Goddess | According to one theory, a dominant deity of the Paleolithic era. |
| Hadza | A people of northern Tanzania, almost the last surviving Paleolithic society |
| human revolution | The term used to describe the transition of humans from acting out of biological imperative to dependence on learned or invented ways of living (culture). |
| Ice Age | Any of a number of cold periods in the earth’s history; the last Ice Age was at its peak around 20,000 years ago. |
| "Insulting the meat" | A San cultural practice meant to deflate pride that involved negative comments about the meat brought in by a hunter and the expectation that a successful hunter would disparage his own kill. |
| Jomon Culture | A settled Paleolithic culture of prehistoric Japan, characterized by seaside villages and the creation of some of the world’s earliest pottery. |
| megafaunal extinction | : Dying-out of a number of large animal species, including the mammoth and several species of horses and camels, that occurred around 11,000–10,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. The extinction may have been caused by excessive hunting or by the changing climate of the era. |
| Neanderthals | Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a European variant of Homo sapiens that died out about 25,000 years ago. |
| n/um | Among the San, a spiritual potency that becomes activated during “curing dances” and protects humans from the malevolent forces of gods or ancestral spirits. |
| "the original affluent society" | Term coined by the scholar Marshall Sahlins in 1972 to describe Paleolithic societies, which he regarded as affluent not because they had so much but because they wanted or needed so little. |
| Paleolithic | : Literally “old stone age”; the term used to describe early Homo sapiens societies in the period before the development of agriculture |
| Paleolithic rock art | While this term can refer to the art of any gathering and hunting society, it is typically used to describe the hundreds of Paleolithic paintings discovered in Spain and France and dating to about 20,000 years ago; these paintings usually depict a range of animals, although human figures and abstract designs are also found. The purpose of this art is debated. |
| Paleolithic settling down | The process by which some Paleolithic peoples moved toward permanent settlement in the wake of the last Ice Age. Settlement was marked by increasing storage of food and accumulation of goods as well as growing inequalities in society |
| San, or Jo/Hoansi | A Paleolithic people still living on the northern fringe of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa; |
| Shaman | In many early societies, a person believed to have the ability to act as a bridge between living humans and supernatural forces, often by means of trances induced by psychoactive drugs. |
| trance dance | In San culture, a nightlong ritual held to activate a human being’s inner spiritual potency (n/um) to counteract the evil influences of gods and ancestors. The practice was apparently common to the Khoisan people, of whom the Jo/’hoansi are asurviving remnant. |
| venus figurines | Paleolithic carvings of the femaleform, often with exaggerated breasts, buttocks, hips, and stomachs, which may have had religious significance |
