ORIGINS OF CIVILIZATION TIMELINE
The First Pots

 

The researchers are confident that they have dated the earliest pottery from the site to 20,000 to 19,000 years ago, several thousand years before the next oldest examples. “These are the earliest pots in the world,” says Harvard’s Ofer Bar-Yosef, a coauthor on the Science paper reporting the finds. He also cautions, “All this does not mean that earlier pots will not be discovered in South China.”

Traces of 10,000-Year-Old Rice Beer Found in China  

 Oldest Mummies

 

Meet the Chinchorro mummies, the oldest ones in the world

 

 Scientists discover oldest evidence of bread

2018

 Until now, the oldest evidence of bread came from Turkey; those finds are 9,000 years old.

Scientists have discovered the earliest known evidence of bread-making, from a 14,000-year-old dig site.

The bake would have looked like a flatbread and tasted a bit like today's multi-grain varieties, they say.

Our ancestors may have used the bread as a wrap for roasted meat. Thus, as well as being the oldest bread, it may also have been the oldest sandwich.

The find, from the Black Desert in Jordan, pushes back the first evidence for bread by more than 5,000 years. 

 OLDEST SANITATION SYSTEM Rather than growing organically, Harappan settlements were laid on a similar grid pattern, with large communal buildings and the world’s earliest sanitation system—a degree of urban planning not to be seen again in the subcontinent until the 18th century, when Sawai Raja Jai Singh laid out plans for the "pink city" of Jaipur. Brick houses, some multi-storey, opened only to inner courtyards and smaller lanes. Each house had access to covered drains along the main roads, suggesting a fairly egalitarian society. The Harappans also had granaries, dockyards, reservoirs, irrigation canals and public baths.

 

Were there mummies in Bronze Age Britain?
Bone analysis suggests the practice was common in ancient Britain

2015

Tightly wrapped mummies conjure up images of ancient Egypt, but very few people would think of ancient England. Now, scientists have presented evidence that the practice of preserving bodies might have been widespread in the Bronze Age Britain, from 2500 B.C.E. to 800 B.C.E. To find out whether the ancient English mummified their dead, archaeologists examined skeletons from burial sites across the island and compared them with well-preserved mummies from Yemen and Ireland (where they were preserved in a peat bog). Mummification—preserving dead tissue by removing internal organs and treating the flesh with chemicals or smoke—prevents bacteria from feasting on the recently deceased. In dry climates, the flesh stays preserved for centuries. But in the damp soil of the United Kingdom, even mummified tissue eventually decays. The bones that remain, however, show no scars from microbial attack, unlike the skeletons of the unpreserved. A microscopic analysis of 34 individuals from Bronze Age burial sites across Great Britain reveals that only some skeletons at each site suffered bacterial degradation. The remaining bones came from mummified bodies, the researchers conclude in a paper recently published in Antiquity (but not yet on the journal's website). Skeletons buried during other historical periods don't show the same intact bones, so the phenomenon appears to be unique to the Bronze Age, say the scientists. "The idea that British and potentially European Bronze Age communities invested resources in mummifying and curating a proportion of their dead fundamentally alters our perceptions of funerary ritual and belief in this period," the researchers say in a statement.
Cádiz Cádiz, the oldest continuously inhabited city in Spain and one of the oldest in western Europe, was founded by the Phoenicians. Cádiz is sometimes counted as the most ancient city still standing in Western Europe. The city is dotted with numerous parks where exotic plants flourish, including giant trees supposedly brought to Spain by Columbus from the New World.

Eyed Needles Were Invented around 40,000 Years Ago in Eastern Eurasia, Archaeologists Say
 

 

The Development of Agriculture

The development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming.

 

 

 In Mexico, squash cultivation began around 10,000 years ago, but corn (maize) had to wait for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its wild ancestor, teosinte. While maize-like plants derived from teosinte appear to have been cultivated at least 9,000 years ago, the first directly dated corn cob dates only to around 5,500 years ago.

 

Cattle (Bos taurus), goats (Capra hircus), sheep (Ovis aries), and pigs (Sus domesticus) all have their origins as farmed animals in the so-called Fertile Crescent, a region covering eastern Turkey, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. This region kick-started the Neolithic Revolution. Dates for the domestication of these animals range from between 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.

 Expansion of farming in Western Eurasia 9600 to 4000 BCE

Were the Azores home to an ancient civilisation?

BBC REEL

 
7,000-Year-Old Canoes Reveal Early Development of Nautical Technology  
 ANCIENT OIL LAMPS HISTORY

 

 

The oldest golden treasure in the world The oldest golden treasure in the world excavated only in 1972, has not been found in Mesopotamia or Egypt, the earliest written civilizations in human history. To everyone's surprise, it was discovered in northeastern Bulgaria, near the attractive, modern city of Varna and is more than 6,000 years old.

Stone Age Hunting Megastructure Discovered in Baltic Sea

A team of archaeologists from Germany has discovered a submerged Stone Age megastructure in the Western Baltic Sea at a water depth of about 21 m. The structure was likely constructed by hunter-gatherer groups more than 10,000 years ago and ultimately drowned around 8,500 years ago; since then, it remained hidden at the seafloor, leading to a pristine preservation that will inspire research on the lifestyle and territorial development in the larger area.

 
Homo sapiens Reached Northern Europe by 45,000 Years Ago, Scientists Say   
Researchers find the earliest evidence of domesticated maize   
The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming   
List of oldest buildings in the Americas

 

 

CALLACPUMA

4,750-Year-Old Monumental Stone Plaza Discovered in Peru

 

 

 

  A team of anthropologists from the University of Wyoming, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of New Hampshire has discovered a 4,750-year-old megalithic circular plaza measuring 60 feet/18 meters in diameter at Callacpuma in the Cajamarca basin of Peru. This is one of the earliest known monumental and megalithic structures in the northern Peruvian Andes and one of the earliest examples in the western hemisphere.

 

Venus of Brassempouy

About 25,000 years old, it is one of the earliest known realistic representations of a human face.

 

 

Modern Humans With Bows and Arrows Invaded France 54,000 Years Ago

 

Around 54,000 years ago, a group of anatomically modern humans forayed into southern France, intruding deep into the stamping ground of Neanderthals. And they came prepared, bearing the first bow and arrow technology to reach Europe – a good 10,000 years earlier than we assumed. Not that it helped them survive.
Neanderthals Created Stone Tools Held Together by Ochre-Based Adhesives, Scientists Say  
Lahuradewa, India

The site is noted to have been occupied as early as 9,000 BCE,and by 7,000 BC it provides the oldest evidence of ceramics in South Asia.

Excavations reported one of thw earliest archaeological sites in the world for cultivation of rice, with Lahuradewa Period IA giving samples that were dated by AMS radiocarbon to the 7th millennium BC

 

The Indus Valley civilisation is 2,500 years older than previously believed 

May 30, 2016

 

 

 The Indus Valley civilisation may be even older than initially thought.

A group of researchers in India have used carbon dating techniques on animal remains and pottery fragments to conclude that the Indus Valley settlements could be 8,000 years old—2,500 years older than previously believed

 

Chopani Mando

Remains of pottery and rice have been found from 7000-6000 BC

Chopanimando is an important archaeological site, which indicates transition of humans from food gathering society to food production society

History of Rice Cultivation  The current scientific consensus, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, is that Oryza sativa rice was first domesticated in the Yangtze River basin in China 13,500 to 8,200 years ago. From that first cultivation, migration and trade spread rice around the world - first to much of east Asia and then further abroad and eventually to the Americas as part of the Columbian exchange.

 

 

The earliest recorded metal employed by humans appears to be gold, which can be found free or "native". Small amounts of natural gold have been found in Spanish caves dating to the late Paleolithic period, 40,000 BC

 

 

 

Certain metals, notably tin, lead, and at a higher temperature, copper, can be recovered from their ores by simply heating the rocks in a fire or blast furnace, a process known as smelting. The first evidence of this extractive metallurgy, dating from the 5th and 6th millennia BC, has been found at archaeological sites in Majdanpek, Jarmovac and Plocnik, in present-day Serbia.To date, the earliest evidence of copper smelting is found at the Belovode site near Plocnik. This site produced a copper axe from 5,500 BC, belonging to the Vinca culture.

 

 NOTES TO VERIFY
 There was indeed contact during what we call “ prehistory “. Genetic evidence ( and physical evidence) suggests that ancient humans from the Japanese islands traveled down the west coast of America several thousands of years ago. Physical evidence of that journey was left in the Channel Islands and in Peru. Additionally, a 5 thousand year old “rocker” skull was discovered in a cave in Brazil. The skull is a direct link to the South Pacific Islanders. Chickens came from those travelers from the South Pacific. These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ancient contact. Tobacco and coca leaves were discovered in an Egyptian pharaohs tomb. Both of those items are indigenous to the “New world” exclusively.
 

 

 

 

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