01 From Foraging Societies to the First Cities
Trace how human migration and changing food practices supported settled communities, cities, political institutions, and early writing.
Migration and
For most of human history, people obtained food by hunting animals, fishing, and gathering wild plants. communities often moved seasonally or when resources changed, but mobility did not mean isolation: groups exchanged materials and knowledge across wide areas and developed rich social and cultural traditions.
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago. Human populations later migrated out of Africa in multiple movements and gradually settled across the globe. These migrations unfolded over thousands of years and were shaped by changing climates, landscapes, and available food.
The gradual shift to food production
Beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age, some communities increasingly cultivated plants and managed animals. This was a gradual change, not a single invention or a universal replacement of . Practices varied by region, as people developed farming with local plants and animals; , cultivation, and herding often continued side by side.
In Southwest Asia, people cultivated wild grains and eventually domesticated crops such as wheat and barley, as well as animals including sheep and goats. takes place over generations as human management changes plants or animals.
Farming could provide more predictable food, but it required sustained work and tied people more closely to particular land. Its effects varied: populations could grow, stored food could support specialists, and differences in wealth or authority could increase. None of these outcomes followed automatically everywhere.
Settlements before and during farming
More settled life began before fully developed farming in some places. In the Levant, communities built substantial settlements and stored food. Ancient Jericho was a sizeable permanent settlement by the ninth to eighth millennium BCE; its wall, ditch, and tower show that early communities could organize major building projects.
Farming villages developed in different forms. At Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, people lived in closely packed houses, often entering them from the roof. Its long sequence of occupation, from about 7400 to 6200 BCE, provides evidence of settled agricultural life and changing social practices. It is better understood as a large, dense settlement than assumed to be a in the later political sense.
Cities, states, and Mesopotamia
A is a large, densely populated settlement with specialized occupations and shared institutions. A is a political organization that governs a territory and population through institutions such as rulers, officials, laws, and systems of taxation or tribute. Cities and states often developed together, but they are not identical: a could exist without governing a large territory, while a could include many towns and villages.
In southern Mesopotamia, the growth of farming settlements, irrigation, and regional exchange helped support larger communities. By about 3500–3000 BCE, cities such as Uruk had become major centers. Temples and other institutions organized labor, stored goods, and distributed resources. Nearby villages supplied food and materials, while skilled workers, officials, and religious specialists carried out increasingly varied roles.
Mesopotamia was not initially one unified . It contained competing -states, each centered on a and its surrounding territory.
Writing and administration
As cities and institutions grew, keeping track of goods, labor, and obligations became more important. In Uruk, people used clay tokens and other accounting practices before the earliest known writing appeared there near the end of the fourth millennium BCE.
signs were often pictorial and were pressed or drawn on clay tablets, frequently to record economic information. Over time, signs became more abstract, and the script could express a wider range of information.
Writing did not instantly become a tool for everyone. It first served specialized administrative needs and was later adapted for other purposes, including royal inscriptions, literature, and religious texts. Early writing systems also emerged in other ancient societies, so the development of writing was part of a broader history and was not simply a consequence of one civilization’s expansion.