Warm Up What types of evidence might historians have used to prove the theory of natural selection?

Types of Sources There are two main types of sources: Primary Secondary

Secondary Sources What is the first thing you do when you want to find out about what happened in the past? Most people would probably say that they would look in a book, ask a teacher or other expert or check it out on the internet. These are all excellent sources of information. Resources like this can tell us not only historical facts but we can also use them to find out what other people think about what happened, in other words their interpretation of history. This type of information is called secondary evidence.

Primary Sources We call evidence that was created at the time of the event, primary evidence. Lots of sources can be counted as primary sources or evidence - letters, newspapers, maps, photographs, pictures, objects and film (just to name a few).

Extract from The War History of the 18th Battalion Durham Light Infantry by W D Lowe, (DUL ref: L 356 LOW). Click on image to enlarge. SecondaryPrimary

Primary Sources – Written Documents This source is an extract from an official report on schools in County Durham that were inspected by two of Her Majesty's Assistant Inspectors between

Primary Sources - Images Every day we find things out by looking at different kinds of images. We look at photographs, cartoons, watch television and look at the internet. Historians are no different. They can use different kinds of images from the past to find things out. They may use photographs, cartoons and film to discover what they can tell us about the past and how we can use them.photographscartoonsfilm

Anachronisms Anachronism means out of time or order, something that could not have been there at that particular time. If you had a photograph of one of your grandparent's house when they were your age you would not expect to see a computer or DVD player would you? If you did you might think the photograph had been altered or was fake. The computer or the DVD player would be an anachronism. Being able to spot anachronisms is important because it helps us test the reliability of a source. If a source seems unreliable then we probably shouldn't use it. We also need to know about anachronisms so that we don't include them when we write about history.

Photograph courtesy of The Dukes

Artifacts As well as using books, documents, images and oral testimony, historians also use artifacts or objects to help them learn about the past. People have learnt a lot about history by looking at things that archaeologists have found. We know things about the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, the Romans and Medieval history that we wouldn't have known if we only had written evidence to look at. But using artifacts is not just useful for the study of ancient and medieval history, artifacts can enliven any period of history.

Oral Oral testimony can be described as the oldest type of evidence. Before people started to write down or otherwise record their history, they passed information from generation to generation through story-telling. It still goes on today.

However, it hasn't always been recognised as being important. Lots of historians in the past thought it was unreliable and preferred to rely on written evidence. They thought the story might have changed as it was passed down and that there was no way of checking whether what it revealed was true. This had lots of unfortunate consequences. Written sources tend to record the details of important, rich or otherwise noticeable people rather than ordinary people so a lot of information about the lives of people like you or me was lost.

So, how useful is oral testimony to historians today? The answer is simple - very! If we are careful about using it and treat it like any other kind of evidence we can find out a lot about the past. Oral testimony can tell us what life was like in the past, what people thought about various subjects, even how people talked.

Bias Basically, bias means having an unfair or unbalanced opinion. Since history is a subject where people express their opinions it means that we have to be very careful to watch out for bias.

Your Assignment You are going to:  Create a timeline of hominid ancestors  Answer: Are there enough traces/artifacts today to prove that there is a link between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo sapiens sapiens?  Due Thursday February 18  Unit Test on Pre-History on Friday February 19