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-s...