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From Archeology to History: Part II

I'll take us up to about 4K BC today. As a general reflection: I read somewhere that a major civilization-enabling discovery was that animal husbandry and agriculture can be combined. You don't HAVE to have one family leading sheep around and slaughtering them, while another family raises corn. The same family can do both.

I forget where I heard the theory of the synergy within family farms with animals, but I did think of it a lot while putting this together. What we know about this era seems to be largely about who was doing what with cultivated plants on the one hand and domesticated animals on the other.


But let's get to the timeline.

8500 BC Pigs first domesticated in the Near East.

7600 BC By this time the domestication of pigs has reached China. 

7000 BC, a specialized group of hunters in what is now known as Jordan created "desert kites" as traps for gazelles, and created a shrine for themselves near there. Fascinating thing: the shrine includes a small-scale model of the gazelle trap.  This vividly makes the point that hunting gazelles wasn't just 'a living' for them. It had a spiritual side. Photos from the rediscovered shrine above.

6500 BC. Permanent dwellings near Abu Dhabi are known from this time. This is on the Shore of the Persian Gulf, where the shore is itself an east-west line so someone standing on the shore is looking north along the axis of the Gulf. Despite its forbidding climate, the Arabian peninsula seems to have been occupied pretty early.

6100 BC, rising sea water separates the British isles from the continent of Europe.

6000 BC. Systematic study of the study of the positions of the stars and planets over the course of a year is said to have begun in Sumeria about this time.  

5000 BC, the first farming villages on the Nile date from here. 

4500 BC, the domestication of pigs (remember them?)  has by this time reached northern Europe. 

4400 BC, distinctive earthworks begin to be built in Britain. These were the "long barrows" used for communal burials. 

4000 BC, first known farming settlements in the Indus River Valley. Also, writing on clay tablets first appears in Sumeria. 

I was under the impression, until I started working on this post, that I would at the end of it have hooked up my thoughts with another timeline I've posted in this blog, Mention that I have a post titled "Civilization and History in 40 Snapshots" the went up in October 2019. But that picks the story up at 2025. Civilization and History in 40 Snapshots (jamesian58.blogspot.com) So I still need to write.  something about the period 4K BC to 2K BC. 

Once I've done that, I can then put it ALL together -- a Magnificent Single Timeline from the speciation of the first primates to the creation of the Internet. My own idiosyncratic take on All Of It.


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