Human history
Human history, or world history, is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread to every continent except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Soon afterward, the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia brought the first systematic husbandry of plants and animals, and saw many humans transition from nomadic lives to sedentary existences as farmers in permanent settlements. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.
These developments paved the way for the emergence of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, the Indus Valley, and China, marking the beginning of the ancient period in the 4th millennium BCE. These civilizations enabled the establishment of regional empires and provided fertile ground for the advent of transformative philosophical and religious ideas. Hinduism originated during the late Bronze Age and was followed by the many seminal belief systems of the Axial Age: Buddhism, Confucianism, Greek philosophy, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. Christianity began later as an offshoot of Judaism. The subsequent post-classical period, from about 500 to 1500 CE, witnessed the rise of Islam and China's flourishing under the Tang and Song dynasties while civilization expanded to new parts of the world and trade between societies increased. The political landscape was shaped by the rise and fall of major empires, such as the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic caliphates, and the Mongol Empire. This period's invention of gunpowder and the printing press greatly affected later history.
During the early modern period, spanning from approximately 1500 to 1800 CE, European powers explored and colonized regions worldwide, intensifying cultural and economic exchange. This era saw substantial intellectual, cultural, and technological changes in Europe driven by the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment. By the 18th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology had reached a critical mass that brought about the Industrial Revolution, underpinning the Great Divergence, and began the modern period starting around 1800 CE. The rapid growth in productive power further increased international trade and colonization, linking the different civilizations in the process of globalization and cementing European dominance throughout the 19th century. Over the last 250 years, which included two devastating world wars, there has been a great acceleration in many spheres, including human population, agriculture, industry, commerce, scientific knowledge, technology, communications, military capabilities, and environmental degradation.
The study of human history relies on insights from academic disciplines such as history, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and genetics. To provide an accessible overview, researchers divide human history by a variety of periodizations.
Prehistory
Human origins
Humans evolved in Africa from great apes through the lineage of hominins, which arose 7–5 million years ago. Unlike other primates, hominins developed bipedalism, the ability to walk on two legs. Hominins began to use rudimentary stone tools million years ago, marking the advent of the Paleolithic era. Early hominin evolution coincided with climatic changes in Africa that made the continent drier, colder, and less forested. These changes, and especially the cycle of alternating glacial and interglacial periods that began 3.2 million years ago, may have been key drivers of human evolution.The genus Homo evolved from Australopithecus. The earliest record of Homo is a 2.8 million-year-old jawbone from Ethiopia, and the earliest named species is Homo habilis which evolved by 2.3 million years ago. The most important difference between Homo habilis and Australopithecus was a 50% increase in brain size. H. erectus evolved about 2 million years ago and was the first hominin species to leave Africa and disperse across Eurasia. Perhaps as early as 1.5 million years ago, but certainly by 400,000 years ago, hominins began to use fire for heat and cooking.
Beginning about 600,000 years ago, Homo diversified into several new species, first H. heidelbergensis in Africa and Europe and then the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Siberia. Human evolution was not a simple linear or branched progression but involved interbreeding between related species. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo sapiens, and other unidentified hominins all interbred with one another and hybridized.
Early humans
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago from H. heidelbergensis. Humans continued to develop over the succeeding millennia and became anatomically modern by 125,000 years ago. By 100,000 years ago they buried their dead, wore jewelry, and adorned the body with red ochre. One of the most important changes was the development of syntactic language, which dramatically improved the human ability to communicate.Paleolithic humans lived as hunter-gatherers and were generally nomadic. Signs of early artistic expression can be found in the form of cave paintings and sculptures made from ivory, stone, and bone. The cave paintings suggest a form of spirituality generally interpreted as animism or shamanism. The earliest known musical instruments besides the human voice are bone flutes from the Swabian Jura in Germany, dated around 40,000 years old.
Humans migrated out of Africa in multiple waves beginning 194,000–177,000 years ago. The dominant view among scholars is that the early waves of migration died out, and all modern non-Africans are descended from a single group that left Africa 70,000–50,000 years ago. H. sapiens proceeded to colonize all the continents and larger islands, arriving in Australia 65,000 years ago, Europe 45,000 years ago, and the Americas 21,000 years ago. These migrations occurred during the most recent Ice Age, when various temperate regions of today were inhospitable. Nevertheless, by the end of the Ice Age some 12,000 years ago, humans had colonized nearly all ice-free parts of the globe. Human expansion coincided with both the Quaternary extinction event and the Neanderthal extinction. These extinctions were probably caused by climate change, human activity, or a combination of the two.
Neolithic
Beginning around 10,000 BCE, the Neolithic Revolution marked the development of agriculture, which fundamentally changed the human lifestyle. Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa, in at least 11 separate centers of origin. Cereal crop cultivation and animal domestication had occurred in Mesopotamia by at least 8500 BCE in the form of wheat, barley, sheep, and goats. The Yangtze River Valley in China domesticated rice around 8000–7000 BCE; the Yellow River Valley may have cultivated millet by 7000 BCE. Pigs were the most important domesticated animal in early China. People in Africa's Sahara cultivated sorghum and several other crops between 8000 and 5000 BCE, while other agricultural centers arose in the Ethiopian Highlands and the West African rainforests. In the Indus River Valley, crops were cultivated by 7000 BCE and cattle were domesticated by 6500 BCE. In the Americas, squash was cultivated by at least 8500 BCE in South America, and domesticated arrowroot appeared in Central America by 7800 BCE. Potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes of South America, where the llama was also domesticated. It is likely that women played a central role in plant domestication throughout these developments.Various explanations of the causes of the Neolithic Revolution have been proposed. Some theories identify population growth as the main factor, leading people to seek out new food sources. Others see population growth not as the cause but as the effect of the associated improvements in food supply. Further suggested factors include climate change, resource scarcity, and ideology. The transition to agriculture created food surpluses that could support people not directly engaged in food production, permitting far denser populations and the creation of the first cities and states.
Cities were centers of trade, manufacturing, and political power. They developed mutually beneficial relationships with the inhabitants of the surrounding countrysides, receiving agricultural products and providing manufactured goods and varying degrees of political control in return. Pastoral societies based on nomadic animal herding also developed, mostly in dry areas unsuited to plant cultivation, such as the Eurasian Steppe and the African Sahel. Conflict between nomadic herders and sedentary agriculturalists was frequent and became a recurring theme in world history.
Metalworking was first used in the creation of copper tools and ornaments around 6400 BCE. Gold and silver soon followed, primarily for use in ornaments. The first signs of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, date to around 4500 BCE, but the alloy was not widely used until the 3rd millennium BCE.
Ancient
Cradles of civilization
The Bronze Age saw the development of cities and civilizations. Early civilizations arose close to rivers, first in Mesopotamia with the Tigris and Euphrates, followed by the Egyptian civilization along the Nile River, the Norte Chico civilization in coastal Peru, the Indus Valley civilization in Pakistan and northwestern India, and the Chinese civilization along the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers.These societies developed a number of shared characteristics, including a central government, a complex economy and social structure, and systems for keeping records. These cultures variously invented the wheel, mathematics, bronze-working, sailing boats, the potter's wheel, woven cloth, construction of monumental buildings, and writing. Polytheistic religions developed, centered on temples where priests and priestesses performed sacrificial rites.
Writing facilitated the administration of cities, the expression of ideas, and the preservation of information. It may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and lowland Mesoamerica. The earliest system of writing was the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which began as a system of pictographs, whose pictorial representations eventually became simplified and more abstract. Other influential early writing systems include Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Indus script. In China, writing was first used during the Shang dynasty.
Transport was facilitated by waterways, including rivers and seas, which fostered the projection of military power and the exchange of goods, ideas, and inventions. The Bronze Age also saw new land technologies, such as horse-based cavalry and chariots, that allowed armies to move faster. Trade became increasingly important as urban societies exchanged manufactured goods for raw materials from distant lands, creating vast commercial networks and the beginnings of archaic globalization. Bronze production in Southwest Asia, for example, required the import of tin from as far away as England.
The growth of cities was often followed by the establishment of states and empires. In Egypt, the initial division into Upper and Lower Egypt was followed by the unification of the whole valley around 3100 BCE. Around 2600 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization built major cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Mesopotamian history was characterized by frequent wars between city-states, leading to shifts in hegemony from one city to another. In the 25th–21st centuries BCE, the empires of Akkad and the Neo-Sumerians arose in this area. In Crete, the Minoan civilization emerged by 2000 BCE and is regarded as the first civilization in Europe.
Over the following millennia, civilizations developed across the world. By 1600 BCE, Mycenaean Greece began to develop. It flourished until the Late Bronze Age collapse that affected many Mediterranean civilizations between 1300 and 1000 BCE. The foundations of many cultural aspects in India were laid in the Vedic period, including the emergence of Hinduism. From around 550 BCE, many independent kingdoms and republics known as the Mahajanapadas were established across the subcontinent.
Speakers of the Bantu languages began expanding across Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa as early as 3000 BCE until 1000 CE. Their expansion and encounters with other groups resulted in the displacement of the Pygmy peoples and the Khoisan, and in the spread of mixed farming and ironworking throughout sub-Saharan Africa, laying the foundations for later states.
The Lapita culture emerged in the Bismarck Archipelago near New Guinea around 1500 BCE and colonized many uninhabited islands of Remote Oceania, reaching as far as Samoa by 700 BCE.
In the Americas, the Norte Chico culture emerged in Peru around 3100 BCE. The Norte Chico built public monumental architecture at the city of Caral, dated 2627–1977 BCE. The later Chavín polity is sometimes described as the first Andean state, centered on the religious site at Chavín de Huantar. Other important Andean cultures include the Moche, whose ceramics depict many aspects of daily life, and the Nazca, who created animal-shaped designs in the desert called Nazca lines. The Olmecs of Mesoamerica developed by about 1200 BCE and are known for the colossal stone heads that they carved from basalt. They also devised the Mesoamerican calendar that was used by later cultures such as the Maya and Teotihuacan. Societies in North America were primarily egalitarian hunter-gatherers, supplementing their diet with the plants of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. They built earthworks such as Watson Brake and Poverty Point, both in Louisiana.