These changes happened independently in many parts of the world. They did not happen in the same order though. For example, the earliest farming societies in the Near East did not use pottery. No one is sure if Britain had agriculture, or if permanent villages existed there at all. Early Japanese societies used pottery "before" developing agriculture.
In the "Paleolithic Era" there were many different human species. According to current research, only the modern human reached the "Neolithic Era".
Vere Gordon Childe gave the name "Neolithic Revolution" to this process in the 1920s. He thought that it was as important as the Industrial Revolution (which happened in the 18th and 19th century).
Ancient history was the time from the development of writing to the fall of the Roman Empire. The fall of the Roman Empire caused chaos in Europe, leading to the Middle Ages (also called the Dark Ages or the Age of Faith).
Sumer was the world's first known ancient civilization. The Sumerians took over the fertile crescent region of Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE. By 3000 BCE, many cities had been built in parts of Sumerian Mesopotamia. They formed independently and each had their own government. They were called city-states and often fought with each other.
Sumer grew crops on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. A surplus in food led to a Division of labour. This means that some people were able to stop growing crops and do other jobs, since enough crops were already grown. This brought a split in society. Today, such a split is called "social pyramid". In a social pyramid, people are grouped into social classes based on their wealth and power. In Sumer, the king, priests, and government officials were at the top of the social pyramid. Below them were the artisans, merchants, farmers, and fishers. At the bottom of the pyramid were slaves. Slaves were often prisoners of war, criminals, or people working to pay off debt.
In Sumer, only the sons of the rich and powerful learned how to read and write. They went to a school called "edubba". Only the boys who went to "edubba" could become scribes.
The Sumerians created the world's first system of writing; it was called cuneiform. The oldest versions of one of the world's first literary works, the "Epic of Gilgamesh", go back to this time. They also invented sun-dried bricks, the wheel, the ox plow, and were skilled at making pottery. They are also thought to have invented the sailboat.
Other civilizations around this time were also built along major river systems. These civilizations are called river valley civilizations. River valley civilizations were the most powerful civilizations in this time period because water was needed to have an agricultural society.
These civilizations were similar to Sumer in that:
In the river system of Mesopotamia, after the Sumers, two other great civilizations rose to power: the Babylonians with their king Hammurabi (famous for the Codex Hammurabi) and the Assyrians. Just to the east was the long-lasting civilization of Elam.
Ancient Egypt grew along the Nile river and was its most powerful in the second millennium BC. When it was its biggest, it went all the way from the Nile delta to a mountain called Jebel Barkal in Sudan.
It was created around 3500 BC and probably ended at about 30 BC when the country was invaded by the Roman Empire.
The society of ancient Egypt depended on a balance of natural and human resources, especially the irrigation of the Nile Valley so that Egyptians could grow crops. They are also known for writing in hieroglyphs, building the famous pyramids, other sorts of tombs and big temples and for their military.
There was a great difference between classes in this society. Most of the people were farmers but they did not own the agricultural products they produced. These were property of the state, temple, or noble family that owned the land. There was slavery, but it is not clear how it was practiced.
The rulers of ancient Egypt tried to keep their people happy by religion that made them respect the rulers and their past.
The religion of Judaism formed about 1500 BCE in context with the Egyptian and Babylonian civilization.
The first dynasty of Ancient China, the Shang Dynasty (商朝), has been carbon dated through Turtle shells with writing on them to back to about 1500 BC. They say China began as city-states in the Yellow River valley. At the end of the Zhou Dynasty lived the greatest Chinese philosophers: "Kong Fuzi", founder of Confucianism, and Laozi, founder of Daoism. The Qin (秦) emperor Qin Shi Huang in 221 BC created the first centralized state in China based on his political philosophy of legalism and made everyone write the same way. He fought against "Confucianism". He also started a precursor of the Great Wall. In 202 BC the Han Dynasty took over and developed an empire of similar strength as the Roman Empire and towards the end of its rule influenced by India introduced Buddhism in China.
The Indus Valley Civilization started from about 2600 BC to 1900 BC. It marked the beginning of the urban civilization on the subcontinent. It was centered on the Indus River and its tributaries. The civilization is famous for its cities that were built of brick, had a road-side drainage system and multi-storied houses.
During the Maurya dynasty started in 321 BCE, most of the Indian subcontinent was united under a single government for the first time. Ashoka the Great who in the beginning sought to expand his kingdom, then followed a policy of ahimsa (non-violence) after converting to Buddhism. The Edicts of Ashoka are the oldest preserved historical documents of India, and under Ashoka Buddhist ideals spread across the whole of East Asia and South-East Asia.
The Gupta dynasty ruled from around 320 to 550 AD. The Gupta Empire included only Central India, and the area east of current day Bangladesh, however this empire never included present-day Pakistan to the west. Gupta society was ordered in {accordance with Hindu beliefs. Historians place the Gupta dynasty alongside with the Han Dynasty, Tang Dynasty and Roman Empire as a model of a classical civilization.
The Maya civilization is a civilization that started in Central America. They lived mostly on the Yucatán Peninsula in what is now known as Mexico, but also Honduras, Belize and Guatemala. They were the only known civilization of pre-Columbian America to have a fully developed written language. They also made great achievements in art and architecture and had a very advanced system of mathematics and astronomy.
The area where the Maya civilization developed was inhabited from around the 10th millennium BC. The first Maya settlements were built there in about 1800 BC, in the Soconusco region. This is in the modern-day state of Chiapas in Mexico, on the Pacific Ocean. Today, this is called the "Early Preclassic period". At the time, humans began to settle down permanently. They started to grow livestock. Pottery and small clay figures were made. They constructed simple burial mounds. Later they developed these mounds into step pyramids. There were other civilizations around, especially in the north, such as the Olmec, the Mixe-Zoque, and Zapotec civilizations. These people mostly lived in the area of the modern-day state Oaxaca. The exact borders of the Maya empire in the north are unclear. There were probably areas where Maya culture overlapped with other cultures. Many of the earliest significant inscriptions and buildings appeared in this overlapping zone. These cultures and the Maya probably influenced one another.
There has been a long history of contact between Papuan peoples of the Papua New Guinea and the Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people seem to have lived a long time in the same environment as the now extinct Australian megafauna. Stories about that are told in the oral culture of many Aboriginal groups.