Praxis World and U.S. History Content Knowledge (5941)

World history before 1450 C.E. unfolded on a physical stage that shaped where people settled, what they ate, and whom they met. Rivers, climate zones, mountains, deserts, and seasonal winds channeled migration, farming, trade, and conquest, so explaining an early development means explaining its setting as well as its date.

During the last Ice Age, which reached its coldest point about 20,000 years ago, sea levels stood roughly 120 meters (about 400 feet) lower than in historical times. Exposed land joined regions later separated by water, including Beringia, the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Most scholars hold that people entered the Americas at least 15,000 years ago, on foot across Beringia, by boat along the Pacific coast, or both. When the climate warmed, rising seas submerged Beringia, and the societies of the Americas developed independently of Afro-Eurasia for thousands of years.

Environment continued to set the terms of settlement. River valleys such as those of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Huang He (Yellow River) offered water, silt-renewed soil, and transport in dry regions. Monsoons, seasonal winds that bring summer rain to South and Southeast Asia, governed the farming year and later let sailors cross the Indian Ocean on a predictable schedule. The Sahara and the Eurasian steppe were both barriers and highways: each separated farming societies, yet camel caravans eventually crossed the desert, and horse-riding herders carried goods, technologies, and armies across the grasslands from Mongolia to Hungary. Mountains mattered too, dividing Greece into small states and sheltering India behind the Himalayas.

The human story begins in Africa, where fossil and genetic evidence places the emergence of Homo sapiens roughly 300,000 years ago. During the Paleolithic era (Old Stone Age), people lived as hunter-gatherers in small nomadic bands that followed animal migrations and the seasonal growth of plants. Because bands owned and stored little, differences in wealth and rank were slight. Stone tools, the control of fire, language, and cooperative hunting allowed humans to adapt to new environments, and beginning roughly 60,000 to 70,000 years ago they migrated out of Africa to people Asia, Australia, Europe, and finally the Americas. Cave paintings and deliberate burials show symbolic thought long before writing.

The Neolithic Revolution, dated roughly between 10,000 and 4000 B.C.E., was the shift from foraging to the domestication of plants and animals. Historians regard it as the most significant transformation of early human history because it made permanent settlement possible. Farming arose independently in several regions: the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia (wheat, barley, sheep, goats); the Huang He valley (millet) and Yangtze valley (rice) of China, where pigs were also raised; Mesoamerica (maize, beans, squash); the Andes (potatoes, llamas); and sub-Saharan Africa (sorghum, yams). From these centers it spread by migration and imitation.

Farming produced a food surplus, and the surplus reshaped society. More food supported more people, and villages grew into towns. Because not everyone had to farm, specialization of labor appeared: potters, weavers, metalworkers, priests, soldiers, and administrators. Land and stored grain could be owned, inherited, taxed, and seized, which produced social hierarchy, organized warfare, and in time governments. By about 3500 B.C.E. these trends had produced the first cities and states.

The change carried costs. Many historians link plow agriculture and inherited property to patriarchy, the growing authority of men over women in the family and in public life. People living close to livestock and to one another were exposed to epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles, and dependence on a few crops made famine a constant risk. In grasslands and arid zones too dry for crops, pastoralism developed instead: mobile herders of sheep, goats, cattle, horses, or camels traded with settled farmers and often raided them.