A Complete History of the World Part 1: 10,000BC-4,000BC

That's correct, at this very juncture I have decided that it is in my and everyone's best interest to start writing a complete history of the world, from the dawning of civilization to the present day. I have no doubt that it will come to naught, but hey, who the hell cares anyway, I have a user base of near zero, if there was a bright center of the blogosphere this would be the page that it's farthest from. So lets set the wayback machine to the distant past and start the inexorable march forward, God help us.




That's right we're going back to just shortly after the last ice age, when mankind, having struggled our way across the globe via land bridges settled in our respective regions and started ruining things for everyone. Our first important civilized skill to be learned was the domestication of plants, and further the desire to remain in a single place. You see before 10,000 years ago humanity spent most of its time wandering around, hunting and gathering, diets consisting of berries, large land animals and ground up shit they found laying around. You see what happened to us was that we started building dwellings and stopped migrating, once we discovered that we could selectively grow different types of plants, and further make those plants do things we wanted, like make bigger seeds or shed their seeds earlier in the year. This lead to the creation of granaries where our forebears would pile all of this grain. this was not just happening in what is called the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization (modern Middle East) Oh no! This is going on everywhere else, the spontaneous discovery of agriculture (albeit maybe a thousand years later in Asias case and a few thousand years more in South America as well) anyway, each of these other regions cultivated their own unique crops, like potatoes in South America and coffee in Ethiopia.

Anyway, this was all called the Neolithic revolution, our first steps towards motor cars and the internet. the next big endeavor in the revolution was the domestication of animals like goats and pigs, as well as the camel. all of this was focused in and around the fertile crescent again. Largely these changes were caused by an increase in population, putting stress on the early groupings of humans, which is surprising when your life expectancy at the time was probably like 12.



So we collected together and formed little bands of people, building granaries, making animals have sex at our discretion, making plants have their own plant version of sex at our discretion. Bending the world to our will.

these first discoveries prompted us to find out other cool things! Like that if we dried out the skins of our various dead animals we could make shelters and fashionable straps for our collective crotches. We could take the hair from animals like sheep and alpacas and turn it into wool, so we could be itchy from things besides lice and other small parasitic insects. Milk, there's a winner! But best of all we realized that if you took a bunch of goats, tied them together and then tied yourself to it, they would drag you places, at speeds of up to five miles and hour...HOLY SHIT!

From here we also developed our various exciting diseases. Because we lived in shit, with animals, we created all manner of exciting crossbred illnesses like measles and smallpox, not to mention cholera and the like. You see in the Eurasia we loved domesticating animals and drinking their fluids, but in the Americas and the Pacific islands you find people who rarely domesticated large animals and when they did they didn't drink it's various juices. This is an important fact that will crop up in a few thousand years.

So in no time at all, like maybe 5,000 years we see cities cropping up with thousands of inhabitants, toiling away on useless crap, like writing and art. Early Chinese were some of the first peoples to make a semi written language. Regardless of this it's hard to pin down the exact things that make a civilization, for example the Inca had grandiose buildings but no written language until 200BC, the Chinese had a proto language but no great works aside from that. You see where I'm coming from? Now then, with all these densely packed cities cropping up we have the first 'Civilization' appear, the Mesopotamians.


That's right, that very informative video will provide you with valuable imagery to work off of. In reality Mesopotamia wasn't really quite like we were today, you know, organized under a single government, sharing a common language and all that. No, the Mesopotamians were a collection of like minded peoples who knew pretty much the same thing and lived in large cities, the most important of which are Ninevah, Uruk, Nippur and Babylon. Mesopotamia, as with most things during the neolithic revolution, was located in the Tigris and Euphrates river regions of modern Iraq. Besides the Mesopotamians there also arose a group called the Sumerians, who were from the city of Eridu, which would later become the city of Uruk. Now the Sumerians are regarded largely as Mesopotmian, however they spoke their own independent language, and were also the first peoples to do the whole 'agriculture' thing year round.

South of these groups was of course the future 'Big Boys' of the region, the Egyptians, a bunch of kooks all living in the Nile river valley, whose favorite pastimes were inventing forms of writing and getting eaten by crocodiles. The early predynastic Egyptians, known as the Faiyum A culture, created woven baskets, undoubtedly sold in the worlds first Pier 1 Imports.




Then comes the Merimde culture of Egypt, then the El Omari and the Maadi, who like burying their dead in graveyards. After this the list of minor cultures growing then disappearing on the Nile goes on and on, however it was during this time (6,000 BC) or so that the Egyptians developed simple boats, some with sails, to traverse the Nile...and be eaten by crocodiles in new and interesting ways.


However all good things must come to an end, or rather all periods of discovery wherein stone tools are used must come to an end. So from the Neolithic Revolution we move into the Bronze Age, beginning around 4-3,000 BC. Incidentally this is where things begin to get complicated and interesting.