Human beings emerged in Africa around 250,000 years ago and began migrating out of Africa around 100,000 years ago, populating the world. Paleolithic societies consisted of small bands of 25-30 hunter-gatherers who were nomadic. Around 12,000 years ago, agriculture began to emerge, allowing people to produce surplus food and live in larger, more permanent settlements. Early civilizations developed around 3500-3000 BC in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Peru, featuring city life, class divisions, and early forms of government. While sharing common features, Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations also had important differences in their development.

1. Ways of the World By: EllySawicky

2. Out of Africa to the Ends of the Earth 250,000 years ago, in the grasslands of southern Africa, Homo sapiens first emerged. Using resources to hunt and fish, human activity flourished. After some time 100,000 years ago, human beings began their long trek out of Africa and into Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, and much later the islands of the Pacific. Much of this long journey occurred during the difficult climatic conditions of the last Ice Age (20,000 years ago), gave the travelers the advantage of using land bridges created from the Ice Age to connect to Alaska, New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania.

3. The First Human Societies An estimated 10,000 people populated the world about 100,000 years ago. Paleolithic societies were small, consisting of bands of twenty-five to thirty people, in which all relationships were intensely personal and thought of normally in terms of kingship. The Paleolithic bands were seasonally mobile or nomadic, moving frequently and in regular patterns to exploit the resources of wild pants and animals, which they depended on. The Paleolithic people were on the move so often that there was no economy normalcy due to no production surplus. Paleolithic societies had rules and structures. There was a gender based division of labor- men as hunters women as gatherers.

4. The Agricultural Revolution Around 12,000 years ago, a second global pattern began to unfold- agriculture. This was “domestication”- the taming, and the changing of nature for the benefit of humankind- but it created a new kind of mutual dependence . Intensification- getting more for less, in this case was getting much more food and resources from a much smaller area of land than it was possible with a gathering and hunting technology.

5. The Globalization of Agriculture Agriculture spread to much of the rest of the earth, although for a long time it coexisted with gathering and hunting ways of life. The process of diffusion, which was the gradual spread of agricultural techniques and the plants of animals themselves, but without the extensive movement of agricultural people. Neighboring groups exchanged ideas and products in a “down the line” pattern in communication. A second process involved the slow colonization or migration of agricultural peoples as growing populations and pressures expanded and pushed outward.

6. The Emergence of Civilizations The earliest of these civilizations emerged around 3500 BC to 3000 BC in three places. One was the “cradle” of Middle Eastern civilizations in Sumer. Sumerian civilization gave rise to the world’s earliest written language. The emergence of Egyptian civilization occurred around the same time as Sumerian. In Peru a populated civilization developed known as Norte Chico.

7. Comparing Mesopotamia and Egypt A productive agricultural technology, city living, immense class inequalities, patriarchy, and the emerging power of states were common features of First Civilizations across the world and also of those that followed. These civilizations did not exist in isolation, for they participated in networks of interactions with the near and sometimes more distant neighbors. When looked closely at the two First Civilizations, Mesopotamia and Egypt, a glimpse can be grasped of the differences, changes, and connections that characterized early civilizations.