Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and welcome to history.

We are going to be learning all about prehistoric Britain and I cannot wait to get started.

We've got so much to do, so let's jump right into our lesson today.

We're going to be asking this big question.

So in each of our lessons, we'll frame it around one question that we need to answer by the end of it.

And today's big question is well, how do we know about prehistoric Britain? That's what we're going to be learning, while we're going to be learning about Britain a long, long time ago before anything was written down, when people had tools that were made out of stone, and my first big question for you is, well, how do we know about this period? If nothing was written down, how do we know about it? That's what we're going to be finding out today.

So make sure you've got a nice, quiet place to do our lesson.

Make sure we've got something to write with, and that you've got something to write on.

Make sure that you're really focused and that you are excited to learn so many new facts, that are really, really interesting.

I find this topic so fascinating.

About the world and how people used to live long ago in the past.

Our lesson is going to look something like this.

First of all, I'm going to take you through a brief history of all of time.

That's right, all of time.

We're going to take you through all the time.

So you'll have a history of the whole of time.

After that, we're going to look at how humans, our species, us, how we have evolved over time.

We'll learn about how we moved out of Africa a very long time ago.

And then we'll look at some of that prehistoric evidence, which teaches us about the past and lets us know about the past.

Now we don't know everything yet, some of the things that we know we might get some new evidence to change our minds and have different ideas.

But we do know a lot because of the amazing work that's gone on by all sorts of clever people who have found out about prehistoric Britain.

So, let's get started with our lesson, and looking at a brief history of time.

I've drawn a little timeline up here.

Now, if you want to, you can pause the video and you could draw some of these timelines too.

I'm going to show you quite a few different timelines.

And if you want to have these timelines in your book, because you think they would look great in your book and they will help you to remember and understand this topic.

At anytime you can pause the video and neatly draw out the timeline, that's something you can do.

And I'm just going to talk through each of these timelines without stopping.

So I've drawn a timeline up for you, you'll see here it's got lots of different sections, okay.

In fact, it's got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, count with me 11, 12, 13, 14 sections.

Okay, my timeline has got 14 sections and right here, this is us today.

And time's always going on, it's going forward.

But this is where we are today.

Each one of these little chunks that I've drawn, is, it represents a billion years, Alright, a really, really long period.

I can't get my head around a billion years.

Can you get your head around a billion years? It's a bafflingly large amount of time, but it's a billion years okay, a thousand million years.

That's how long it is.

So if each of these is a billion years, then if we count back, all the way to the end of this timeline, it's 14 billion years ago.

So here we are today, and then we count back and get to 14 billion years ago.

And 14 billion years ago, or about that, just under that, 14 billion years ago is when time began.

That's when time and space and the universe and everything began, in an event known as the big bang.

So 14 billion years ago time began.

everything, the universe was formed, it began, and it took a long time before our earth was then formed.

So there is billions and billions of years, the universe developing.

And then about one, two, three, four, four and a half, 4.

5, about 4.

5 billion years ago, the earth was formed.

Soon after that, maybe about half a billion years.

So I say soon, but we're talking about huge numbers here.

When I say soon, I mean about 500 million years, four or 500 million years later, we get our first life.

And by life there, I mean just tiny little microbes, just single celled organisms. Wouldn't even be able to see them with your eyes.

That's the first life probably in the oceans.

And that happens about 4 billion years ago.

Us, our species, we don't come along for a very, very, very long time.

In fact, if we wanted to draw, when we appeared on this timeline, it's basically an exactly the same position as today because humans have not been around for very long, compared to how long the universe has been around for.

Now, I think that it's actually quite difficult to see humans near to today because it's this time scale is too large.

So let's zoom in just to this chunk.

Okay, so there's all of these 13 billion years happening before, but let's just zoom in to that chunk.

So here we are today.

And now each of these represents a hundred million years.

So each of these chunks is now a hundred million years, So we're in this section, and we're going to chunk it up into a hundred million years.

So that means that if we keep going back, then we get to a billion years ago.

This is a billion years ago, cause this is 10 lots of a hundred million or a thousand million, which is the same as a billion years ago.

And about 540 million years ago, so 100 million, 200 million, 300 million, 400 million, 500 million, 540 million years ago, there was an event known as the Cambrian Explosion.

Okay, the Cambrian Explosion.

There wasn't an actual explosion.

This is a name that's just given to when all of a sudden, quite quickly lots and lots and lots of animals, almost all of the animals that exist suddenly appear.

They start appearing, they are emerging from the oceans and we're getting all sorts of different animals appearing.

So it's not just fish in the sea, and different sorts of sea creatures.

We're getting all sorts of different types of animals appearing in the Cambrian Explosion, about 540 million years ago.

Much later we then get our first dinosaurs.

So they evolve from the reptiles that emerged from the Cambrian Explosion.

About 240 million years ago, We get dinosaurs, and as I'm sure that you know, about 65 million years ago those dinosaurs then become extinct.

We're still not a hundred percent sure why, it could have been a number of different things, including a meteor strike, it could have been some sort of global warming or temperature change, it could have been some sort of evolution into different species like birds, but about 65 million years ago, all of the dinosaurs go.

Okay, so we're still quite big timescale here.

This is 540 million years ago.

All of the animals first emerged.

Let's zoom in again to this section here.

So now each section is 10 million years, okay.

So we've got all of those billions of years going on beforehand, we can't fit them on here.

So we're just zooming in to this 100 million year period.

So this is a hundred million years ago now, and this is today.

So about 65 million years ago, that was when the dinosaurs went extinct, that's there now.

And after the dinosaurs go extinct.

We get this age known as the Age of the Mammals because after the dinosaurs go extinct, it's safe for mammals, we are a mammal, a mammal is any animal that is warm blooded and it gives birth to live young, not eggs, doesn't use eggs.

So the Age of the Mammals, happens about 65 million years ago.

And it continues up to this day.

There are still lots of mammals like us around.

But if we look at all of the existence of the mammals, from 65 million years ago today, we are very, very recent.

Lots of other mammals have been around for millions and millions and millions of years.

We're still quite recent.

We've only been around for these the two pair here about 2.

5 million years, for the first humans, not us, a different species of humans.

But the first types, there's different kinds of humans that were around for a few million years.

And the first kind of human was around probably about 2.

5 million years ago.

Let's zoom in now just to this period, we're getting now to where the humans are appearing.

So let's zoom into this little period here.

So this time each chunk is only 1 million years.

So again, we've got billions and billions and billions of years, we'll put all of that on this side.

It doesn't fit, that's where the dinosaurs are.

So this is 10 million years ago now.

And the first humans appearing about 2.

5 million years ago.

And our species, our species is called Homo sapiens.

Homo sapiens, try saying it, Homo sapiens.

That's the type of animal that we are, Homo sapiens.

And our species only emerges about 300,000 years ago.

Okay, so scientists think that about 300,000 years ago, that's where we first evolved, our species.

So there are different types of humans for a few million years before us.

They're all gone now, they've all got extinct, but we're still around.

And we only formed about 300,000 years ago.

So if we zoom back out, you can see that we first humans, we had to zoom right into 300,000 years to find us, but most of history for the billions of years, hasn't included us.

How fascinating I find this really, really interesting.

Okay, so let's see if we can recap.

I've given you lots and lots and lots of different, or that I told you that was a brief history of time.

I've just given you 14 billion years worth of history, in about seven minutes and you've taken it all in and you must be in bamboozling so well done.

Let's take a moment to pause , try and get it ordered in our head.

There's some of those key events from the history of the universe.

And so I've put another timeline up here for you.

Here's today.

4.

5 billion years ago, something really important happened.

What was it? 4 billion years ago, just after this important thing happened, half a billion years later, something else important happened, what was it? Then about 540 million years ago, there was something really important.

Then about 65 million years ago, something important happened.

And finally about 300,000 years ago, something important happened.

Now you might think ooh, I can't quite remember what those different things were.

Remember all the different events that you're talking about, I needed a little need something to jog my memory.

No problem, I've got you covered.

One of them is the age of the mammals, one of them was Homo sapiens, our species emerging, one of them was the earth forming, one of them was the first life on earth, now, just those tiny microbes, you remember, like little germs? and one was Cambrian Explosion All those animals, all the animals suddenly appearing on earth.

So can you choose where these different events go? And put them in the right place? You might like to just write out the names with the dates next to them, or you might like to draw out a nice timeline.

You should draw a nice timeline.

That would look great in your book.

If you just draw a nice timeline with these different events dotted in.

And of course they're not perfectly spaced, because we've seen that the distances between them and the old timelines are much, much bigger.

But just to make this task a little bit easier, just put them side by side.

So you can pause the video now, and see if you can match up the event with the time that it happened.

Great work, you worked really hard.

Let's see how many you got correct.

This was a difficult task, I've started you off with a difficult task, but I know that you're really smart, So it's okay, it's all right if you get it wrong, don't worry, it'll be a good chance now if you get a wrong, to muddle it in your head and make sure you remember even better for next time.

So here we go.

4.

5 billion years ago, that was important because that was when our earth was formed.

Our planet was formed.

In fact, most of the solar system was formed at that time.

So we get our star and the different planets surrounding including earth about 4.

5 billion years ago.

About half a billion years later, we get the first life, the oceans forming on earth, about half a billion years later.

And then we get the first microbes.

We then have to wait billions and billions of years until we get that explosion of animals.

Animals suddenly appearing.

When I say suddenly, I mean, we're talking about millions and millions of years here, so it's not like overnight, all of a sudden the animals were all here.

They evolved gradually, but lots and lots of animals over a relatively short period of time compared to the millions of years we we're talking about, suddenly emerge and develop and branch off from each other.

That's the Cambrian Explosion.

About 65 million years ago, we get the Age of the Mammals.

We are a mammal, that's the type of animal that we are.

And once the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, that's when mammals started to dominate the earth.

And finally, we don't emerge until quite recently, about 300,000 years ago.

That's when the Homo sapiens, our species emerge.

Okay, so I've talked about Homo sapiens, our species, what do I mean by that? What do I mean by different kinds of humans? I thought there was just one kind of human right, us.

Well, no, not quite.

Our species is a type of human, and it's called Homo sapiens, but in the past there have been other types of humans.

They just don't exist anymore, they went extinct.

Let's have a look at some of them.

So one of the earliest types of humans is this guy here.

So the name of this species is Homo Australopithecus, okay.

Maybe try and say that.

It's almost like you're saying Australia for a little bit, but then you say Australopithecus, Homo Australopithecus and this was one of the earliest humans or human type ape, walking on two legs.

starting to use fingers carefully and getting much better control over fingers.

A larger brain, it's the first ape that starts to have human-like features, they branch off from the other apes towards human.

And that was about 4 million years ago.

We then get about two and a half million years ago, often referred to as the first earliest human cause this is the first ape scientist that used tools that started to make tools, stone tools.

So sometimes prehistoric Britain is known as the stone age because we were using stone tools.

Well this species, Homo habilis, is the first species to use stones, we think.

And that was about two and a half million years ago.

We then get Homo erectus, standing fully upright, and you might notice some of the features looking very human there.

That's a reconstruction of what Homo erectus from skulls and things that we've found might have looked like and Homo erectus was around about 2 million years ago, just under 2 million years ago.

We're moving on in time, as you can see and about 600,000 years ago, we find Homo heidelbergensis.

So Heidelberg, I think Heidelberg was the name of the person who discovered this species.

Homo heidelbergensis is another descendant of apes as a human type species.

And they were around about 600,000 years ago.

None of these of course are around anymore, they've all gone extinct, but they're all ancestors of ours in terms of early humans.

And the last one you should remember, you should recognise because this species emerged about 300,000 years ago, and this is our species, Homo sapiens.

This is the type of human that we are.

So have a look, cause I'm going to test you.

I'm going to quiz you on these different types of early humans.

There's one that I haven't bothered called Neanderthal, which you might have heard of, because we're going to talk about Neanderthals in later lessons.

But here are some of the early humans.

You can see how they're starting to develop as over the last few million years.

Okay, time for me to jumble them up.

So take one last look, if you need to pause to memorise then you can, but let's see if you can match up these different early humans with their names.

Okay, they're all jumbled.

Did you see that? I jumbled them all up, there you go.

So they are all jumbled.

One was Homo Autralopithecus, one was Homo habilis, one was Homo erectus, one was Homo heidelbergensis and one was Homo sapiens, which is which? Can you match them up? You can match them up with your finger, or you can, maybe write down the different names and with maybe you can draw a different picture.

Pause the video and have a go at that now.

Okay, let's see if you match those correctly.

So I'm going to match them up with lines now.

So I'll give you a warning so that as I say them, you can, as I point to them, you can point to the correct one.

So this one here, this early human here, who is this? Here comes the line.

This was Homo heidelbergensis so well done, if you got that right.

And they were around about 600,000 years ago.

Homo erectus was our next one, about 1.

9 million years ago.

What about this one? Everybody should have got this one, because this is us.

This is Homo sapiens.

What's the name of our species? You need to know to the name of our species.

That's who we are.

That's the type of animal we are.

What's the name of our species? Homo sapiens, well done.

Some people sapiens, some people say Homo sapiens, some people say Homo sapiens, you can choose.

I like to say Homo sapiens.

So this one here, one of the earliest humans or human type apes, and that was Homo Australopithecus.

And lastly this one here, the first early human to use tools Homo habilis, well done if you've got all of those right.

Give yourself a little pat on the back, you're already learning so much.

You've learned about 14 billion years worth of history.

You've learnt about the evolution of our species and different types of them.

You are incredibly smart.

Your brain is already bulging probably with all the new information.

And you're going to be world-leading expert on this topic by the end of this lesson, I'm sure, so well done.

So those were the early humans, but where were the earliest humans? So let's take a look at a map.

We've learned about some of the earlier humans as they developed.

Where did early humans develop? Well, if we take a look at this map here, you'll see that most scientists, well, almost all scientists agree that humans emerged from Africa.

Not a hundred percent sure where in Africa, maybe Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, but Africa is where humans first evolved and first developed.

And you'll notice here that, although humans began in Africa, they soon started to move out of Africa.

Many humans stayed in Africa, but some started to spread out and settle in different places around the world, over thousands and thousands of years.

So these numbers here tell us when the humans were around.

So 300 Ka here, the Ka stands for, K stands for a thousand like in kilogramme.

So Ka is thousand years ago.

So 300,000 years ago, we get some humans up in North Africa here.

And then this yellow line here on my key, it tells me that was about 120,000 years ago, about 120,000 years ago, that's when humans were moving.

The first humans were moving out of Africa.

Some people think it might have been a little bit earlier than that, but about 120,000 years ago, according to this data, when humans first started moving out of Africa.

And you see there are other humans here who are moving out 55,000 years ago, and they're spreading all around the world, across the different continents into Australia, Japan to Europe.

And these red dots here tell us when humans mixed with Neanderthals.

So Neanderthals were another human species, different to us, they're extinct now.

And there are different theories about why they went extinct.

Some people thought think that maybe humans, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals fought against each other.

Some people think that Homo sapiens were better at hunting.

And so the Neanderthals didn't have the food to eat, and some people think that maybe the Neanderthals and the humans sort of teamed up and there were more Homo sapiens than the Neanderthals, but they sort of mixed and teamed up.

But there were different human species that were living alongside each other at this time.

We're just the only human species that's left.

So a little test for you here, checking out these numbers, so if you need to pause the video and study this map a little bit then you absolutely do that.

That's a good idea, but the first little test for you, can you write out this sentence and complete it, For me? It says evidence suggests that Homo sapiens first migrated from Africa hmm so when was that? Pause the video, write out that sentence and see if you can finish it off.

So we were just talking about that, weren't we? Little bit of a disagreement, but according to this data, is thought about 120,000 years ago.

It might've been a bit earlier than that, about 120,000 years ago, humans started to move out of Africa across the Middle East here and into the rest of the world.

First for the fertile crescent around here.

What's next? Have a look carefully at the map and the numbers.

When did Homo sapiens first migrate into Europe? So here's Europe, when did Homo sapiens first migrate into Europe? How many thousands of years ago? Can you pause the video, and write up that sentence, finishing it off.

So I can see from the map here, it says 43,000 years ago.

And again, there were some Neanderthals around there that we mixed with.

About 43,000 years ago, Homo sapiens moved into Europe.

Here's a little question to see if you were paying close attention and thinking about those early humans.

This is a statement, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived alongside each other, is that true or is that false? That is true, so well done if you chose true.

We're not entirely sure how they interacted with each other, but we know that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived alongside each other.

In fact, most people have a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in them that shows that we mixed with Neanderthals many tens of thousands of years ago.

So how do we know all of this? I mean, giving you all of these different facts and fascinating information from a very long time ago, but of course it's much, much, much beyond living memory.

There's nobody, no stories that are being passed on, that can tell us about this past.

There's certainly no photos.

There's not even any writing.

Prehistory is, so history is usually taken as when there was writing around, pre-history before there was writing.

So how do we know about this? Well, there are a few different groups of people that help us.

The first are archaeologists and archaeologists find and study items made by people from the past.

That's what an archaeologist does.

that's their job.

They look, they usually dig underground cause its usually buried.

They find anything's been made by people and they studied them, they think about how long ago it was that this thing was made and what it tells us about the people that were living there.

There are also palaeontologist, palaeontologist have a slightly different job.

They look at fossils.

So they look at fossils of animals, including humans and plants.

And they might find bone fragments from old humans, they might find bits of Jawbone in different places and know how old that is, and that will tell them where humans were and what types of humans were there.

And the last group are scientists, special kind of scientists called geneticist and geneticists will study your DNA, the code, the genetic code inside of every cell of yours.

Inside every cell in your body, there's a special kind of code that's programme just for you called DNA, and those genes give us clues about the past, about other species and about how we've developed.

And geneticists, will look at genes and work out the past from that and how different species have developed.

And so these three groups really help us to learn about the past.

Archaeologists, finding, digging up and finding artefacts objects from the past made by people, palaeontologists, looking at fossils of humans and animals and plants and geneticists who listed the DNA of people and animals.

So let's put all that together.

Let's see if you can write me a quick paragraph to finish off, it's the last task for today.

So if you're thinking bored we've been working so hard, you have, well done, last task to tie it all together, answer our big question.

How do we know about prehistoric Britain? Answer this question for me.

How do we know about what happened long in the past during the prehistoric period? And you might like to include there our new vocabulary we just learned about archaeologists, palaeontologists and geneticists.

We were just learning about those and their different jobs and how they might help us.

So pause the video and write your answer to that question now.

Great work, so I'd like to show you an example that I wrote.

You can compare yours to mine and see if you wrote anything that I forgot in which case awesome work well done.

If you missed anything and you see it in my answer, I'm absolutely fine with you pinching those ideas and putting them into your answer to make it even better, That would be a cool thing to do.

So I wrote, we have lots of different evidence of how people lived a long time ago.

archaeologists find different objects, for example, stone tools, which give us clues about how people behaved.

Palaeontologist can study fossils of teeth and bones from early humans.

Lastly, geneticists study the DNA of humans and different animals to try and work out how humans evolved and changed over time.

If you want to pause the video and just add some of my ideas into your answer, then you can, if you think, no, my answer looks just as good as that, I'm happy or even been better than that, well done, blown me out of the water, great work.

You have worked extremely hard today.

We have covered so much.

It's been a big lesson and we've gone straight into this really, really interesting period of history or prehistory covering millions of years with the first humans.

I think it's so important to know where we came from to know the development of our species.

And over the course of all of these lessons, we're going to learn more and more about prehistoric humans, about prehistoric Britain, What Britain was like during these prehistoric times, how things changed, what stayed the same and how we got to where we are today.

So well done for working so hard.

Please remember that there's a quiz that you need to complete at the end of this lesson.

So you click next, have a go at that quiz.

See if you can remember, I've got some questions to test to see how hard you were working and I'll see you in our next lesson.

Where we'll be learning even more about prehistoric Britain, I'll see you then.