Friday
Nov232007
Interacting With Our Ancestors
Mr. Bally
There are a couple of interactive sites to check out involving early hominids. One site is from the BBC and it is an interactive simulation called The Cavemen Challenge. Another site shows an Interactive Timeline illustrating what archaeologists know about early hominids and when they lived.
Be sure to let me know if you find these sites to be interesting. It will help me get better sites for you to view in the future.
Reader Comments (10)
I found these sites interesting and educational. I had trouble with the Caveman Challenge once I got to the level where you had to defend yourself with fire.
From playing the second game, I learned that on the ground, walking upright [saves] more energy then walking on all fours.
By playing the game Interactive Timeline, I learned that bog-wading is a rare activity in primates and therefore unlikely to have been a major factor in the shift to upright walking.
For the past 10 minutes I have learned a lot about our ancestors and I have found it really interesting that our ancestors would climb a tree to get away from a predator instead of run away and that they learned to walk on two legs for uhhh...what was it again... oh yeah saving energy.
I learned that Homo Ergaster was the first Hominoid to use fire about a million years ago. I also learned that with fire, Hominoids learned to cook, making food easier to chew. Because their food wasn't so tough anymore our ancestors' jaws began to shrink.
When doing the caveman challenge, I learned what stages cavemen went through to get to our stage with also having a lot of fun. There were many I failed at, such as the picture one where I got 11%, but I did have fun and it was a good experience for me. [What were some of the stages?]
That was really fun to play. But it got annoying because I never got past caveman. :( I still ended up learning a lot. [What did you learn?]
I love the volcano game. It was cool to rain fire [...] on the people below! [Great...but what did you learn?]
I learned a lot [Like what?] about how it was to be a caveman and how to survive.(Even though I only got 29%).
I learned that evolution takes a long time and is only noticeable if you're looking at the history of man at least 1000 years ago, and then look at how we've changed over the course of so many years. I learned a lot about the different time periods of mankind. It's actually kind of scary to think about what the human race is going to evolve into 1000+ years from now. There were a lot of cool facts in the game. Who would have thought that you could look at thousands of years of history in just 10 short minutes?