Early Humans
Leading scholars believe that the earliest hominids emerged on what continent?
Africa
Mesopotamia is Greek for "the land between the rivers." What two rivers did Mesopotamia emerge between?
Tigris and Euphrates
What is the name of the river that made the rise of a civilization in Egypt possible?
The Nile
The Indus Valley civilization existed mostly in the land of what present-day country?
Pakistan
What is the colorful name for the Huang He river in China, which served as the site for the rise of the first Chinese civilization?
Yellow River
What is the term for walking on two legs that distinguishes humans from other apes and primates?
bipedalism
Sumerians
What term do we use for the Egyptian divine "king"?
pharaoh
How many regular flood seasons does the Indus River typically experience each year?
2
What is the name of the philosophy based upon the teachings of Kong Fu Ze, who stressed order, filial piety, and social hierarchy?
Confucianism
Charles Darwin introduced what theory of biological change over time through natural selection and genetic mutation?
evolution
Who was the Babylonian king (1792-1750 BCE) who established a law code that worked on the principle of "an eye for an eye"?
Hammurabi
What is the pictorial language developed in ancient Egypt?
hieroglyphics
Mohenjo-Daro
What did the Zhou emperor claim to have that justified his defeat of the Shang monarch and gave him the legitimate right to rule over China?
Mandate of Heaven
What is the other name we use for the Pleistocene, or the period of falling temperatures that stretched from 2 million BCE until 9000 BCE?
The Great Ice Age
What is the name for the Sumerian system of writing that could be adapted to the numerous Semitic languages of the region?
Cuneiform
What did ancient Egyptians use to make their first paper-like materials?
papyrus
Because of the wide availability of metal, what traditional status symbols did the people of the Indus Valley wear less of than their counterparts in Mesopotamia or Egypt?
jewelry
Daoism
What is the scientific term we use for human-like primates that lived 4.5 million to 1.4 million years ago, whose name translates as "southern ape"?
australopithecus
What term we we use for Mesopotamian raised step pyramids?
ziggurats
What is the name of the Egyptian sun god, who sails to the blue waters of the sky by day, and then returns to the Underworld by night?
Re
Why haven't scholars learned much from the seal stones and copper tablets that have been recovered at sites like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa?
They cannot translate the script
What is the name of the possibly mythic first dynasty in ancient China?
Xia