Chapter 2 1 The myth of the creation of the world

Our great motherland has a very long history.According to the ancient tradition, from the legendary Yellow Emperor to the present, there is a history of more than 4,000 years, which is usually called "up and down five thousand years". In the five thousand years of history, there are many touching and meaningful stories.Many of them are documented.As for the situation in ancient times 5,000 years ago, there are no written records, but some myths and legends have been passed down. For example, where did our human ancestors come from?There is a myth in ancient times that Pan Gu created the world, which means that before the creation of the world, the universe was just a chaotic ball of gas with no light or sound in it.At this time, a Pan Gu came out and split the chaos with a big axe.Light air floats up and becomes the sky; heavy air sinks and becomes the earth.

From then on, the sky grew ten feet higher every day, the earth became ten feet thicker every day, and Pan Gu himself grew ten feet taller every day.After eighteen thousand years like this, the sky became extremely high and the ground became very thick, and Pan Gu became a giant standing upright.Later, when Pan Gu died, his various parts became the sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, vegetation and so on. This is the myth of the creation of the world. After all, myths are just myths, and now no one would believe that such a thing really existed.But people like this myth. When talking about history, they often say that it started from "Pangu opened the world".This is because it symbolizes the great courage and rich creativity of human beings to conquer nature.

So, where should human history begin?Later, with the development of science, the fossils unearthed from the ground proved that the earliest ancestor of human beings was a kind of ape man transformed from ancient ape. Scientists in China have unearthed many ape-man remains and remains of fossils in various parts of the motherland. It can be seen that the earliest primitive man in our motherland has a history of more than one million years.The Yuanmou ape-man discovered in Yunnan is about 1.7 million years old; the Lantian ape-man unearthed in Shaanxi is about 800,000 years old; and the famous Peking man is 400,000 to 500,000 years old.

Here, we start with the Peking Man.The Peking Man lived in the Zhoukoudian area.At that time, the climate in northern China was milder and wetter than it is now.Up and down the mountain, there are woods, shrubs and lush weeds.Ferocious tigers, leopards, wolves, bears and other beasts haunt the woods and mountains.There are also elephants, rhinoceros (sound xi) cattle and sika deer. The strength of the ape-man is not as strong as these ferocious beasts, but what makes them fundamentally different from any animal is that the ape-man can make and use tools.This tool is very simple, one is a wooden stick and the other is a stone.There are many wooden sticks in the woods, but they have been chopped by people; stones have been smashed by people, although they are very rough, they are tools made by people after all.

They use this simple tool to collect fruit and dig up the roots of plants to eat.They also used sticks and stone implements to fight against wild animals and hunt for food. However, this kind of tool is too crude after all, the food they get is very limited, relying on the strength of a single person, they can't live on, so they have to live in groups, work together, and jointly deal with the invasion of ferocious beasts.This kind of people is called primitive people. Hundreds of thousands of years have passed, and the ape-man has evolved in an arduous struggle.In the cave on the top of Longgu Mountain in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, the remains of another kind of primitive man were found.The appearance of this primitive man is no different from that of modern man.We call them "cavemen".

The labor tools of the Upper Cave Man have been greatly improved. They can not only smash stones into stone axes and stone hammers, but also grind the bones of wild beasts into bone needles.Don't look at this small bone needle. At that time, it was not easy for people to grind bone needles.With bone needles, people can sew animal skins into clothes, not as naked as the Peking Man period. The cave dwellers also lived in groups.But their group life has been fixed according to blood relationship.Members of a collective are all descended from a common ancestor, that is, people of the same clan.In this way, human society has entered the period of clan communes.