Before the writing.
From the last Ice Age through the Neolithic Revolution. Hunter-gatherers, the domestication of plants and animals, and the first permanent settlements that would eventually become cities.
When the last Ice Age ended around 10,000 BCE, the world warmed and the megafauna disappeared. Hunter-gatherer bands that had ranged for millennia began to settle. In the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze valley, Mesoamerica, and the Andes — independently, within a few thousand years of each other — humans figured out how to domesticate plants and animals. The Neolithic Revolution didn’t just feed more people; it built villages, surplus, hierarchy, property, disease, and the social architecture every civilization since has been variations on.
The era, topic by topic.
- 1.
End of the last Ice Age
Climate warms; megafauna disappear; the Beringian land bridge floods. - 2.
The Neolithic Revolution
Agriculture invented independently in 4+ regions within a few millennia. - 3.
First permanent settlements
Çatalhöyük, Jericho, Ain Ghazal — proto-urbanism without writing. - 4.
The long threshold
Five thousand years between farming and the first city-states.
Where this era shows up in your courses
APWH: starts in 1200 CE — this era is foundational context.
APUSH: begins 1491 — pre-Columbian indigenous societies covered in Period 1.
