--- title: The first people: hunters, gatherers and cave painters — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The first people: hunters, gatherers and cave painters», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: For almost all of the time humans have existed, nobody farmed, built towns or wrote anything down: people lived by --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / The first people: hunters, gatherers a… # The first people: hunters, gatherers and cave painters Lesson 1 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/1-the-first-people/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/0/) — For almost all of the time humans have existed, nobody farmed, built towns or wrote anything down: people lived by hunting animals and gathering plants. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/1/) — The first people like us lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and over many thousands of years their children's children walked out and spread over the whole world. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/2/) — Picture a camping trip with no tent from a shop, no matches and no supermarket: you must know which berries are safe, where the deer drink and how to keep a fire alive all night. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/3/) — Hunter-gatherers knew all that by heart, along with hundreds of plants and animals. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/4/) — They were just as clever as us. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/5/) — They made sharp stone tools and bone needles, sewed fur clothes in the Ice Age, told stories round the fire and painted horses and bulls on cave walls. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/6/) — Cartoon cavemen who grunt and ride dinosaurs are pure fantasy: dinosaurs died out about 66 million years before the first humans. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/7/) — The first humans like us, Homo sapiens, lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and every person alive today has ancestors from Africa. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/8/) — From Africa people spread step by step over the whole world over many tens of thousands of years; they did not appear everywhere at once. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/9/) — For most of human history people were hunter-gatherers who hunted, fished and gathered berries, nuts and roots, moving camp with the seasons. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/11/) — The earliest tools were stones chipped to a sharp edge; later people also made fine blades, spear points, bone needles and fish hooks, which is why this long time is called the Stone Age. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/12/) — People learned to keep and use fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, which gave warmth, light, protection from animals and cooked food. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/13/) — During the last Ice Age huge sheets of ice covered the north, and people lived alongside woolly mammoths, cave bears and giant deer. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/14/) — Dinosaurs died out about 66 million years ago, millions of years before any humans existed. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/15/) — In caves such as Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain people painted horses, bulls and deer with colours made from earth and charcoal, and some cave paintings are over 30,000 years old. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/16/) — People also blew paint around their hands to leave hand outlines, called stencils, which are found all over the world, including Indonesia and Argentina. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/17/) — Nobody knows exactly when language began, but early humans talked, sang and told stories. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/1-the-first-people/18/) — Ötzi the Iceman lived about 5,300 years ago; his body was kept by the ice of the Alps and found by hikers in 1991, with his copper axe, bow and grass-stuffed shoes. - next →: [The first farms and towns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/2-the-first-farms-and-towns/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)