Six ages of the world

The Six Ages of the World is a Christian historical periodization outline first written about with authority by Saint Augustine around the year 400. It is based along Christian religious events, from the birth of Adam to the events of Revelation. The six ages of history were widely believed and in use throughout the Middle Ages, and until the Enlightenment, the writing of history was mostly the filling out of all or some part of this outline.

The outline accounts for seven ages, just as there are seven days of the week, with the seventh age being eternal rest after the final judgment and end times, just as the seventh day of the week is reserved for rest. It was normally called the Six Ages of the World because they were the ages of the world, of history, while the seventh age was not of this world and lasting eternal.

The Six Ages are best described in the words of Saint Augustine, found in On the catechizing of the uninstructed:

• The First Age: "The first is from the beginning of the human race, that is, from Adam, who was the first man that was made, down to Noah, who constructed the ark at the time of the flood."

• The Second Age: "..extends from that period on to Abraham, who was called the father indeed of all nations.."

• The Third Age: "For the third age extends from Abraham on to David the king."

• The Fourth Age: "The fourth from David on to that captivity whereby the people of God passed over into Babylonia."

• The Fifth Age: "The fifth from that transmigration down to the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ."

• The Sixth Age: "With His [Jesus Christ's] coming the sixth age has entered on its process."

Since 321, when Constantine legalized Christianity, former pagan worshipers needed a way to learn about Christianity and Augustine used his Catechetical document as a way to communicate and educate people about Christianity.

Augustine was not the first to conceive of the Six Ages, which had its roots in the Jewish tradition, but he was the first to write about it with authority.

Christian scholars believed it was possible to determine how long man had been alive, starting with Adam, by counting forward how long each generation had lived up to the time of Jesus, based on the ages recorded in the Bible. While the exact age of the earth was a matter of biblical interpretive debate, it was generally agreed man was somewhere in the last and final thousand years, the Sixth Age, and the final seventh age could happen at any time. The world was seen as an old place, and the future would be much shorter than the past; a common image was of the world growing old.

Augustine was the first to write of the Six Ages with authority. The Ages reflect the seven days of creation, of which the last day is the rest of the Sabbath, illustrating the human journey to find eternal rest with God, a common Christian narrative.

Robert Ardrey

“Aspects of Paleoanthropology”

"The Hunting Hypothesis"

Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.

The science arguably began in the late 1800s when important discoveries occurred which led to the study of human evolution. The discovery of the Neanderthal in Germany, Thomas Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, and Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man were all important to early paleoanthropological research.

The modern field of paleoanthropology began in the 19th century with the discovery of "Neanderthal man" (the eponymous skeleton was found in 1856, but there had been finds elsewhere since 1830), and with evidence of so-called cave men. The idea that humans are similar to certain great apes had been obvious to people for some time, but the idea of the biological evolution of species in general was not legitimized until after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Though Darwin's first book on evolution did not address the specific question of human evolution— "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," Darwin wrote on the subject— the implications of evolutionary theory were clear to contemporary readers.

Debates between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen focused on the idea of human evolution. Huxley convincingly illustrated many of the similarities and differences between humans and apes in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. By the time Darwin published his own book on the subject, Descent of Man, it was already a well-known interpretation of his theory— and the interpretation which made the theory highly controversial. Even many of Darwin's original supporters (such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell) balked at the idea that human beings could have evolved their apparently boundless mental capacities and moral sensibilities through natural selection.

Since the time of Carolus Linnaeus, the great apes were considered the closest relatives of human beings, based on morphological similarity. In the 19th century, it was speculated that their closest living relatives were chimpanzees and gorillas, and based on the natural range of these creatures, it was surmised humans share a common ancestor with African apes and that fossils of these ancestors would ultimately be found in Africa.

Shmuel Eisenstadt

“The Axial Age of Karl Jaspers: