Native American economy: Pomo people fishing (California, 1816) Fishing and gathering food When people first came to North America, maybe about 15,000 BC, they were probably mostly following the fish along the coast, and fishing is what they spent most of their time doing. In California, and along the East Coast, people like the Iroquois also gathered [...]
When did people start to fight wars? Why do people fight wars? This woman, in the last stages of pregnancy, was tied up, beaten, and dumped in a lake by attackers. (Kenya, about 8000 BC) People seem to have fought wars as soon as there were people. Even groups of chimpanzees will cooperate [...]
Sumerians - Head of a woman from Warka, about 3000 BC About the same time as the first Pharaohs were coming to power in Egypt, around 3100 BC, a group of people we call the Sumerians were living in Mesopotamia. That's the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, in West Asia (modern Iraq). The Sumerians themselves [...]
Stone Age West Asia: A building at Gobekli Tepe (ca. 9000 BC) Stone Age West Asia By around 10,000 BC, people in West Asia were beginning to settle down in one place instead of traveling around, even though they were still hunting and gathering and fishing. What is gathering? Probably this was because the end of the Ice Age was [...]
Ancient history timeline: Building at Gobekli Tepe in what is now Turkey (ca. 9000 BC) Beginning of farming Around 10,000 BC, with the end of the last major Ice Age, people all over the world - not everyone, but a lot of people - began to shift from fishing and hunting and gathering to farming as their main way of getting food. Farming [...]
Sibidu Cave, South Africa. People lived here from about 77,000 BC until about 38,000 years ago. In the early years of human history, beginning with the earliest humans about two million years ago, every place in the world was in the Stone Age, and all the people in the world got their food by hunting and gathering. For a [...]
Nazca lines - a giant monkey drawn on the desert floor After the Chavin state collapsed about 250 BC, two new states formed in Peru - the Moche in the north and the Nazca in the south. So by about 100 BC, the Nazca were between the Moche and the Mapuche to their south, in what is now Chile, and [...]
Guarani people performing a dance in the 1800s When the first Tupi people expanded their territory from Central America to reach the coast of Brazil about 900 BC, some of them kept on moving south along the Atlantic coast. About a thousand years later, maybe about 1 AD, some of those Tupi people moved inland. They abandoned [...]
Venus of Santarem (Brazil, ca. 1400-1000 BC) When did people get to Brazil? The first people probably arrived on the Atlantic coast of South America about 15,000 BC. Probably a second wave of people followed them around 11,000 BC. More about people reaching the Americas How did they get there? The first people to reach Brazil [...]
Arawak history: Arawak family in Trinidad, ca. 1500 AD The Arawak arrive in Venezuela The Arawak probably first arrived in South America with the second wave of people, around 15,000 BC. They were probably fishing people with canoes or boats, travelling south along the Atlantic coastline following the fish. The Arawak settled first in what is now Venezuela, [...]
