Communities grew denser and more complex, requiring strong leadership to manage resources effectively, and systems of writing to keep track of who produced what. Then, some 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm, exchanging their gathering and hunting for domestication and permanent settlement. Where do popular treatments of human history come from? What’s their history-and what if they’re wrong?
Sometimes, they immortalized these hunts-carved on rock faces or painted in glorious murals across the walls and ceilings of caves in places like Sulawesi, Chauvet, and Lascaux. These early humans shaped flint and other stones into cutting blades of increasing complexity and used their tools to hunt the mega-fauna of the Pleistocene era. Over the next 100,000 to 150,000 years, this sturdy, adaptable species moved into new regions, first on its home continent and then into other parts of the globe.
Roughly 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens first evolved somewhere on the African continent.
The standard history of humanity goes something like this. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity A sweeping new history of humanity invites us to imagine how our own societies could be radically different.
