Turning Points in Early World History

• Charles Darwin was an archeologist and anthropologist who found that leading homo sapiens diverged from that leading to chimpanzees about 5 to 6 million years ago.

• Bipedalism: The ability to walk upright on two legs.

• Mary leaky an archeologist discovered in what is now known as Tanzania a series of footprints of three such hominid individuals, preserved in cooling volcanic ash 3.5 million years ago.

• The brains of hominid species grew larger evidenced by the fact that their skulls grew larger 3.2 million years ago.

• Around 100,000 years ago a lot of homo sapiens began to migrate out of Africa onto the Eurasian landmass.

The Globalization of Humankind

• Half a million years ago humankind did not exist up until around 100,000 years ago that was limited to Africa and numbered, some scholars believe, fewer than 10,000 individuals.

• Paleolithic era (old stone age): the phase of human history during which these initial migrations. Which in tales or referred to as food-collecting or gathering, hunting, and fishing way of life (before agriculture).

• The Paleolithic era ended 11,000 years ago.

• The Paleolithic era covered over 95% of the time that human beings have inhabited earth.

The Revolution of Farming and Herding

• Around 1750 the industrial revolution might be considered a single phase of the human story, The age of agriculture.

• Farming and raising animals allowed for a substantial increase in human numbers and many over centuries.

• Nomadic: Roaming about from place to place aimlessly, frequently, or without a fixed pattern of movement

• Not all were Nomadic because some regionals were able to combine with permanent settlements.

Time and World History

• The time following the birth of Christ is referred to as C.E. (the common era)

• A.D. on the other hand is referred to as “years of the lord”

• Year 1, marking Muhammad's compelled relocation from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. As with so lots else, the maps of time that we construct replicate the cultures in which we have been born and the historical experience of our societies

Into Eurasia

• Around 45,000 years ago, human migration from Africa went to the Middle East, then westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.

• Around 20,000 years ago, colder Ice Age temperatures forced more northern European peoples southward into milder areas. They changed their hunting habits, focused on reindeer and horses, and invented new technologies including spear throwers and perhaps the bow and arrow, as well as a variety of stone tools.

• Numerous female figurines were associated with these Eastern European peoples, the oldest of which was discovered in Germany in 2008 and dates back at least 35,000 years.

Into Australia

• Early human migration to Australia, estimated to be around 60,000 years ago, occurred from Indonesia and included another first in human history: the use of boats.

• When the first Europeans arrived in 1788, scholars estimated the population of Australia to be around 300,000 people.

• The emergence of an intricate and sophisticated view of the world, known as the Dreamtime, accompanied Aboriginals' technological simplicity and traditionalism.

• Dreamtime told how ancient creatures crisscrossed the country, forming rivers, hills, rocks, and waterholes; how different peoples came to occupy the land; and how they interacted with animals and one another.

Into America

• Experts continue to disagree on when the initial migrations took place -- some- were between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago.

• Clovis culture initially appeared approximately 13,000 years ago and quickly expanded over most of North America. Scattered bands of Clovis people camped around rivers, springs, and waterholes where large animals gathered, covering a vast region.

• Then, around 11,000 years ago, all traces of the Clovis culture vanished from the archeological record, roughly at the same time that several huge animal species, including the mammoth and numerous kinds of horses and camels, went extinct.

Into the Pacific

• To begin with, it happened quite recently, approximately 3,500 years ago, when it jumped off the Bismarck and Solomon Islands near New Guinea, as well as the Philippine islands.

• Within 2,500 years, these maritime explorers had inhabited every habitable piece of land in the Pacific basin, speaking Austronesian languages that may be traced back to southern China.

• These expeditions were made by both men and women, implying a purposeful aim to settle new areas. Two things happened almost everywhere they visited. One was the establishment of highly stratified civilizations or chiefdoms, such as ancient Hawaiian society.

Variations

• Wheat and wild pigs existed in the Fertile Crescent, but not in the Americas; wheat and wild pigs existed in the Andes area, but not in Africa or Asia. Furthermore, just a few hundred of the world's 200,000 plant species have been domesticated, and only five of them — wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum — have provided more than half of the calories needed to maintain human life in recent decades.

• Some suggest that a cold and dry period between 11,000 and 9500 B.C.E., a very fast but brief pause in the main trend of global warming, was the catalyst for the shift to agriculture.

• According to archeological evidence, the shift to an agricultural way of life in portions of this region occurred quite fast, maybe within 500 years. Large expansions in the size of towns, which now housed several thousand people, were signs of that transition.

• In the Americas, a new pattern of agricultural growth emerged. Plant domestication in the Americas happened in a variety of areas, similar to the Agricultural Revolution in Africa, including the coastal Andean regions of western South America.