Intro, Ch1 & Ch2

Important Facts & What I learned:

• Big bang, 13.7 billions years ago.
• First human-like creatures born on the last day of Cosmic Calendar, 2.7 million years ago.
• 90 percent or more of the total mass of the universe is made of invisible substance know as "dark matter."
• Human history has great impact on, not ourselves alone, but also the earth and many other living creatures.
• Three big context: change, comparison and connections (interactions, encounters, cross-cultural connections).
• A distinguishing feature of the modern era, the growing depth and significance of such cross-cultural relationships, is know as globalization.

(CH1)

• Homo Sapiens diverged from that leading to chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, some 5 to 6 million years ago, and it happened in eastern and southern Africa.
• Homo Sapiens, emerged no more than 250,000 years ago (debatable) has a remarkable capacity for symbolic language that permitted the accumulation and transmission of learning.
• Paleolithic era: a food-collecting or gathering and hunting way of life, lasting till 11,000 years ago, representing 95% of the time that human beings have inhabited the earth, although only accounting for 12% of the total number of people who have lived on the planet.
• Agricultural/Neolithic Revolution, 10.000 to 12,000 years ago. Agricultural era: domesticating animals and farming. Root crops, bananas and wild grains.
• Pastoralists/nomads: moving frequently and in regular patterns to search for pasturelands.
• "Civilizations": more complex societies that were based in bustling cities and governed by formal states.
• Although without writing records, a great deal can be learned about Paleolithic and Neolithic people through their material remains: stones and bones, fossilized seeds, rock painting, and engravings...
• The first 150,000 years or more of human experience was an exclusively African story. Tools: stone blades and points, hand axes, bones, grindstones.Body ornaments. Patterns of exchange over a distance of 200 miles indicate lager networks of human communication. Planned burials. Social and symbolic behaviors. The earliest evidence comes form the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dates back to 100,000 years ago.
• 16,000 to 10,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended and more resources became available. People started to settle down and lived in villages.
• Gobekli Tepe, a ceremonial site, in Turkey, build 11,600 years ago. World's oldest temple. It represents a kind of monumental constructions long associated only with agricultural societies and civilizations.
• One of the most significant aspects of the Agricultural Revolution is that human began to actively change nature and consciously "directing" the process of evolution for the benefit of humankind.
• The most extraordinary feature of the Neolithic/Agricultural Revolution was that it occurred, separately and independently, in many widely scattered parts of the world: the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, Several places in sub-Saharan Africa, China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and eastern North America, all roughly around the same time, between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago. 
• broad-spectrum diet: the use of a large number of plants and both small and large animals, since Paleolithic time.
• While the process of Agricultural Revolution only took 500 years, it took 3,500 years in Mesoamerica because of the environment and the kinds of crops it yield.
• Two ways of how agriculture spread: diffusion and slow colonization and migration of agricultural peoples.
• Indo-European languages, which probably originated in Turkey and are widely spoken even today from India to Europe, reflect this movement of culture associated with the spread of agriculture. In a similar process, the Chinese farming system moved into Southeast  Asia and elsewhere, and with it a number of related language families developed.
• Some peoples in certain regions resisted adopting agriculture, wither because unsuited for farming or abundance in resources.
• New technologies: use of vessels such as pots, the weaving of textiles and the age of metals. 
• The "secondary products revolution", new use for domesticated animals: milk thier animals, harvest their wool, enrich their soil with animal manure, ride horses and camels, and hitch various animals to plows and carts.
• Wine and beer. In Iran, around 5400 B.C.E. and in China, around 4000 B.C.E.
• Pastoral societies, conflicts with agricultural societies, relative equality of men and women.
• Early agricultural societies still maintained equality of men and women since the time of gathering and hunting. Some such societies traced their descent through the female line and practiced marriage patterns in which men left their homes to live their wives' families. 
• Chiefdoms: not by force, by relied on their generosity, or gift-giving, their ritual status, or their charisma.
• Horticultural societies, using a hoe or a digging stick for farming.

(CH2)

• Three earliest civilizations: Middle Eastern Civilization from Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, Egyptian Civilization from the Nile River valley in Africa, and the less-known one called Norte Chico Civilization from the central coast of Peru, all roughly emerged from 3500 B.C.E. to 3000 B.C.E.
• Indus Valley Civilization in the Indus and Saraswati river valleys in Pakistan from 2000 B.C.E.
• Chinese Civilization from 2200 B.C.E.
• Oxus Civilization in the Oxus or Amu Darya river valley in the Central Asia from 2200 B.C.E.
• Olmecs Civilization along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico took shape around 1200 B.C.E.
• Cities of the first civilizations were political/administrative capitals; they functioned as centers for the production of culture, including art, architecture, literature, ritual, and ceremony; they served as marketplaces for both local and long-distance exchange; and they housed most manufacturing activity. 
• Alongside the occupational specialization of the first civilizations lay their vast inequalities, in wealth, status and power. As the fist civilizations took shape, inequality and hierarchy soon came to be regarded as normal and natural. This transition represents one of the major turning points in the social history of humankind. 
• In all of the first civilizations, slaves - derived from prisoners of war, criminals, and debtors - were available for sale; for work in the fields, mines, homes, and shops of their owners; or on occasion for sacrifice.
• Since the emergence of the first civilizations, gender systems have been patriarchal, meaning that women have been subordinate ti men in the family and in society generally. The patriarchal ideal regarded men as superior to women and sons preferable to daughters. Men had legal and property rights unknown to most women. Public life in general was associated with masculinity, which defined men as rulers, warriors, scholars and heads of households.
• Better ability at farming and warfare mainly contributed to men's higher status.
• "The motion of the goddess": in some places, the powerful goddesses of earlier times were gradually relegated to the home and hearth. They were replaced in the public arena by dominant male deities, who now were credited with power of creation and fertility and viewed as the patrons of wisdom and learning.
• Egypt, while clearly a patriarchal, afforded its women greater opportunities than did most other first civilizations.
• The necessity of "state". To organize, to manage , to mediate and to protect.
• Invention of writing.
• Comparing Mesopotamia and Egypt
• Mosopotamia was far more vulnerable to invasion than the much more protected space of Egypt.
• Elite literate culture in Egypt, developing in a more stable, predictable, and beneficent environment, produced a rather more cheerful and hopeful outlook on the world.
• Deforestation of Mesopotamia depicted in the mythology, which eventually resulted in sharply decreased crop yields. Log-term result of intense irrigation also led to salinization of the soil added to the disaster.
• Egypt, by contrast, created a more sustainable agricultural system, which lasted for thousands of years and contributed to the remarkable continuity of its civilization.
• Mesopotamia civilization, Sumer, was organized in a dozen or more separate and independent city-states. Egyptian civilization began with the nerger of several earlier states, or chiefdoms into a unified territory that stretched some 1,000 miles along the Nile.
• Cities in Egypt were less important than in Mesopotamia, although political capitals, market centers, and major burial sites gave Egypt an urban presence as well.
• The focus of the Egyptian state resided in the pharaoh, believed to be a god in human form.
• They also interacted frequently with each other and with both near and more distant neighbors.
• Goods, cultures were exchanged. In the Hebrew sacred writing, the Old Testament, a Mesopotamia principle of "eye for an eye" can be found. (in the story that destroyed the world)
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First Post

yay - I'm done!