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[Home]
[Prog summaries - [Ice World]
[The Earth was Born] [Out
of Eden] [In perspective]]
[Out of chaos - [Introduction]
[Divine guidance] [Tools
of knowledge] [Religious conflict]
[Search goes on]]
[Survival - [Introduction] [Exodus]
[New Technology] [Moving
on]]
[The Globe - [Introduction]
[Star Dust] [Water
of life]]
[Find out more]
[Credits]
[Full site with images]
The climate improvement around 50,000 years ago was a key moment in human migration. The earliest genetic lines into Europe date from this time along with an explosion of new technology around the Mediterranean. The stone tools and spears manufactured by modern man became even lighter and more effective.
Although for 250,000 years the Neanderthals had thrived in Europe, they were unable to adapt to the conditions fast enough and lost out in the battle for resources to their more adaptable rivals.
The nomadic hunter-gather existence was vulnerable, but there are still people who live like this today. The Bakhtiari tribe, which numbers more than 800,000, inhabits a 67,000 sq km area straddling the central Zagros Mountains in Iran, lives a similar existence. About a third of the tribe is nomadic migrating seasonally with their sheep, cattle, or goat herds from high plateau pastures, where they spend the summer, west of the city of Isfahan, to lowland plains in Khuzistan for winter herd grazing. They cross mountain passes at about 3,050m, timing their movement with extreme care to minimise the danger of early snowfall, flood, and barren land.
But for most people another form of living beckoned. Human beings began to create agriculture, cultivating a new type of wheat that had appeared at the end of the Ice Age in the Middle East some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and mutated over time to produce wheat for flour (Triticum aestivum). Fixed settlements became a possibility. Instead of makeshift, hurriedly-erected shelters, humans began to build with stone and rock.