Massive spread of blond-haired, light-eyed individuals across Northern Europe; a possible explanation for this rapid spread is this: during that period, the extreme cold meant that populations in the coldest areas ate only meat. Unable to gather fruit and vegetables, males had to embark on often dangerous hunts, while females remained in the villages (in warmer areas, however, women might also be engaged in gathering various fruits and vegetables, also exposing themselves to mortal risks). Under these conditions of “unequal” mortality, male mortality was much higher in Europe, and for every man, there were significantly more women, who literally had to compete for the few available men. Evidently, these men preferred to impregnate women with light hair and eyes, favoring the transmission of the genes that cause this “anomaly.” Without such a selection process, rather than a few centuries, blonds would have needed 850,000 years to prevail over Moors in a given area.

Domestication of cereals, especially Triticum Dicoccum, and legumes, in a vast area spanning eastern Anatolia, northern Iraq, Palestine and western Iran

Mesopotamia. Accountants recorded the quantities of objects with small clay tokens of various shapes, which were then placed in a sealed clay container, inscribed with a symbol indicating the number of tokens inside (to avoid breaking the container). This is perhaps the birth of symbols to indicate things, and therefore of numbers, and perhaps even writing.

North America and Europe. With the extinction of large mammals like mastodons and mammoths, species whose numerous and invasive presence contributed to maintaining deforested grasslands are disappearing. This has resulted in a marked increase in forests at high latitudes, since there are no large mammals to knock down or damage young trees. Since grasslands keep the planet cooler than forests (because forests absorb solar heat better), the absence of mammoths and mastodons is not good news for global warming.

The cultivation of various plants and their domestication first spread to the Fertile Crescent and then independently to other parts of the world, such as China, Mesoamerica (Mexico), South America (Ecuador, Peru), and the Mississippi Valley. Of the 200,000 wild plant species, only a few thousand are edible by humans or have been, and only a few hundred have been domesticated. Today (10,000 years after the invention of agriculture), only a dozen or so account for 80% of annual crops (by weight). These are: wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybeans, potatoes, cassava, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, sugar beets, and bananas.

Start of sheep farming

Bethlehem, Judea. Someone sculpts a figurine of a man and a woman wrapped in amorous embrace: the Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine.

Fertile Crescent. Domestication of the sheep.

The current process of desertification begins in the Sahara: from a thriving savannah with gazelles, giraffes, zebras, elephants, and cattle, in just over a thousand years it becomes an arid desert. Humans must find an alternative to hunting, and cattle ranching offers a viable option.

Cyprus: Shared burial of a man and a cat. This is the first evidence of humans and cats cohabiting.

Holocene (Cenozoic period, Quaternary era)

Last glaciation (Wurz), completely ended only after 8000 BC

First use of fire lit by man (Second Fire) i.e. anthropogenic

In 10,000 BC, the world was home to thousands of civilizations, all but or completely isolated from one another. By 1450 AD, their numbers had declined dramatically, and more than 90% of the world’s population lived in a single macro-civilization in Afro-Eurasia. The remaining 10% of the world’s population was divided among the civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Andes, Australia, and Oceania. Over the next three centuries, the Afro-Eurasian macro-civilization engulfed the other four worlds: Mesoamerica in 1521, the Andes in 1532, Australia in 1788 (and Tasmania, the last outpost, in 1803).

Northern Syria. First cultivation of wild cereals. This was “game farming,” not planned and organized to sustain society. The process of biological domestication, which also included the transition from a fragile to a tough stem, would not be completed until 7000 BC, or a full three thousand years later. This implies a transition that was not linear or staged, but rather a process of approaching and distancing from agriculture, ultimately culminating in the domestication of cereals.

There are between 5 and 8 million hunter-gatherers in the world.

Only a few thousand years have passed since humans arrived in North America, but already 70% of large mammal species have become extinct because of humans: buffalo, horses, antelopes, sloths, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, lions, etc.

A meteor shower hits North America. This event, evidenced by the discovery of nanodiamonds in the geological layer, may have contributed to the extinction of mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and giant sloths.

The Gulf Stream, for unknown reasons, slows down or stops and causes a cooling across the globe: in England the average temperature is around -5C against the current +11C

Signs of what may have been the use of wine have been found in Franchthi Cave, Greece.

Russian and Mongolian hunter-gatherers of Central Asia herded reindeer. Along with dogs, they were the first species bred by humans.

The emergence of local cultural worlds during the Mesolithic increases the likelihood that relatively autonomous societies will abandon seasonal dispersal and adapt to a permanent top-down hierarchical system.

Arlington Springs Man: A woman found in the Channel Islands off Southern California, these are the islands where the Pygmy Mammoth thrived… it thrived until the arrival of man.

Mesopotamia. First evidence of organization into tribes rather than bands. Note, however, that for millions of years, the entire human race was organized ONLY into bands. Over the last 13,000 years, a gradual process of organization into more complex hierarchies began, leading to tribes, dominions, kingdoms, and nation-states.

Between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago (the estimated date is 15,000 years ago with an uncertainty of 2,000-3,000 years), several species of large mammals became extinct in the Americas. Until then, the American West resembled the African Serengeti, with herds of elephants, horses, and even camels hunted by lions, jaguars, and saber-toothed tigers. Here too, as with Australia and New Guinea, the culprit was most likely the arrival of humans and intensive hunting. In some cases, there is evidence of extinctions in areas like the Grand Canyon, only a few centuries after humans arrived. We’re talking about species that had thrived for millions of years and had survived at least 22 previous ice ages unscathed.

Americas. Gomphothere elephants (four-tusked) in South America and mastodons (15 tons) in North America became extinct soon after the first humans arrived on the continent, 17.5 and 16.5 million years later, respectively. Both had already become extinct on the rest of the continents 2.7 million years earlier. Along with them, saber-toothed tigers also disappeared in North America.

Phlegraean Fields, Campania. The eruption of the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff is the second most important in the Campania region (the first occurred in 37,000 BC). During the eruption, several dozen square kilometers of magma were emitted from a center located in the Phlegraean Fields, covering an area of approximately 1,000 square kilometers. Deposits associated with the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff eruption are found in the Naples-Phlegraean Fields area and in the Campanian Plain, extending as far as the Apennine foothills. The Neapolitan Yellow Tuff eruption was accompanied by the formation of a caldera, causing the subsidence of an area encompassing part of the Phlegraean Fields and the Bay of Pozzuoli.

First vases made in Japan.

Breakthrough of the glacial barrier by Lake Misoula in the Scrablands, Northwest America

Invention of the bow and arrow in Europe

Although Neanderthals were structurally and anatomically adapted to the cold, they actually did not settle further north than Germany, while the hominid populations arriving from Siberia lived in much colder climates. This is not surprising considering that Neanderthals did not possess sewing technology (needle and thread) and did not have warm homes or other technologies essential for surviving in cold climates. The populations that populated Siberia in these years and began to move westward and descend into Europe were likely responsible, through intensive hunting, for the disappearance of the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, as well as the giant elk.

The southern end of the glacier, which covers much of North America, reaches Staten Island (just south of Manhattan). The movement of the ice erodes the landscape down to the bedrock, still visible, for example, in Central Park. The subsequent retreat of the ice will outpace the repopulation of some species, such as earthworms. When Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned!

Extinction of Neanderthal man or his partial fusion with Homo sapiens

According to a study conducted by Bryan Hockett of the Nevada Bureau of Land Management, a pregnant Neanderthal woman needed at least 5,500 kcal per day, more than double that of a modern woman. A polar explorer’s requirement, equivalent to 10 large cheeseburgers a day, which would make any follower of a modern paleo diet more than obese. For those who want to try it, it’s worth remembering that unfortunately cheeseburgers didn’t exist, so the same study suggests the following Neanderthal paleo diet: 2.7 kg of bison, half a kilo of venison ribs and aurochs tail, 60 grams each of brain, liver, and tongue, 120 grams of stomach, a whole rabbit, and 60 grams of marrow. After removing the inedible parts, this equates to 2.5 kg of meat per day, 40% of which is fat.

First fired clay objects (small objects) produced in the area of the modern Czech Republic.

First rudimentary evidence of weaving techniques in the area of the modern Czech Republic.

The first fired clay objects (small objects) were produced in the area of the modern Czech Republic. Rudimentary evidence of weaving techniques has also been found in the same places. However, this is generally not considered sufficient evidence to prove that the human groups in the area were sedentary.

In South-West Germany, the Hohlenstein Stadel statuette, a half-man chimera with a lion’s head made of ivory, was manufactured.

Duvanny Yar, Kolyma River, Siberia. A Silene stenophylla seedling accidentally falls into a squirrel burrow 38 meters deep in the Siberian tundra. After 32,000 years, a team of Russian scientists from the Pushkino Research Center will bring it back to life and make it sprout. The flower, beyond the researchers’ wildest expectations, blooms, and instead of being gobbled up by gigantic mammoths, it will find itself cared for better than a child, photographed and published in the American scientific journal PNAS. The previous record was held by a date palm, whose seed—dated 2,000 years old—will be recovered from the ruins of the fortified citadel of Masada, in the Dead Sea desert in Israel.