Anthropological Stages

The Pleistocene Epoch (a geological category) stretches from two million years ago to the end of the ice ages about ten thousand years ago. It coincides fairly closely with the Paleolithic period or Old Stone Age (an anthropological category). During this time hominids made stone tools, used fire, buried their dead, made art (cave paintings, fertility statues), and subsisted on nomadic hunting & gathering.

In the Neolithic period or New Stone Age, people -- who were by now physically modern Homo sapiens sapiens -- domesticated plants and animals, built structures, and settled into villages. They made pottery and weaving, and some of their cultures evolved into the first civilizations.

The first civilizations are characterized by having a concentrated urban population with markets and occupational specializations; the use of copper, then bronze, and then iron; the invention of the wheel and of writing.

Civilizations arose more or less independently in the Near East, India, China, Africa, and the New World. The early Near Eastern civilizations included the Mesopotamian (Sumerian language, written in cuneiform); the Egyptian (Hamitic language, written in hieroglyphs); the Phoenician (Semitic language, written in a phonetic alphabet); and the Aegean (Indo-European language, written in Linear A). The Aegean civilization lasted for a thousand years, but then disappeared into the "Greek Dark Ages". From the Greek Dark Ages a distinct Greek culture arose, the Hellenics -- the foundations of Western Civilization.