The Prehistory in Winter

INDEX What’s our environment like? Where do we live? What do we live of in this period? What is our society like? What do we believe in? Techniques. Art Nature

Presentation: We are Estrella Guerrero, Blanca Jiménez and Laura López, three people who live in Altamira caves. We live in the Prehistory and we are going to tell you about our life in this cave. This cave is situated in the north of Spain. Spain is in Europe. Now, we live in the Palaeolithic period. The Palaeolithic period begins with the apparition of the first hominids.

What’s our environment like? In this period, the weather changed. It’s very cold in the Palaeolithic period. Some parts of the Earth are covered by ice. Some animals disappeared.

Where do we live? We are nomads. We don’t stay in one place forever. When the meal is over, we leave and look for another place. But we don’t live alone. We live with other people. We survive because we live in groups.

What do we live of in this period? We hunt, go fishing and collect fruits and nuts. We use all the parts of the animals like meat, milk, leather. We are predators.

What's our socienty like? What's our socienty like? Women collect fruits and nuts. We look after children. We make clothes, capture small animals and we keep the fire. Men hunt, fish and make tools. They look after the tribe. They use axes of carved stone to hunt. We are predators. We are arranged in tribes of 20 to 30 people.

What do we believe in? We believe in religious beliefs and in the forces of nature like the Sun and the rain.

TECHNIQUES THE STONE WORK We, the first hominids, use stones to hit and dig. We make axes of carved stone to cut the meat, to woodworking and so on.

OBTAINING FIRE One day, a tribe discovered the fire. The fire is very useful for us. We can’t live without it. The fire was discovered when a lightning burned a tree and set it on fire. At first, we only knew how to keep the fire burning. Now, we know how to do it. We learned it because someone of our tribe got fire. That person was hitting two stones when a spark appeared. Now, we use the fire for lightning and heating. We use it for cooking. It is also used for capturing big animals and for drying leathers.

THE LEATHER WORK We make clothes, shoes, cabins, bags, belts and so on with the skins of animals. Leather is used for sleeping too. The leather care is very important. We have to grease it very often to keep it with flexibility and waterproofing. We wear animal’s skins.

ART We make cave paintings. They are naturalistic paintings. These paintings always represent animals we want to hunt like mammoths, bison, deer, bobcats, wild boars and horses. We live in a cave, called Altamira, in Cantabria, with many important cave paintings. Here you have some of the cave paintings in Altamira:

There is also another cave, called Lascaux, in France, which have many important cave paintings too. Here you have some photos of Lascaux cave:

We also make Venus. Venus is a small sculpture made of ivory, stone or bone, which portrays women with exaggerated and bulky shapes. Men find it amazing that women can have children, so they make sculptures representing fertility. Here you have some Venus:

NATURE NATURE We can see a lot of beautiful things like : the river Estero and Barberena an the Cantabrian range.

Written by: Estrella Guerrero Caumel Blanca Jiménez Palomar & Laura López Bueno