"neolithic" indicates cultures whose food sources are based on hunting, gathering, and fishing, and relatively

3. "neolithic" indicates cultures whose food sources are based on hunting, gathering, and fishing, and relatively sophisticated stone tools and weapons. • transitional cultures have domesticated plants and/or animals • "bronze age" cultures produce their food with developed technologies such as irrigation agriculture or systematic stockbreeding of domesticated animals.

4. 5500 BCE Noah and the flood?

5. 3500 BCE • Gilgamesh written in UR / Eruk / Iraq /Mesopotamia • Includes segments about Flood • Textbooks mostly consider this the start of Western Civ.

7. The steppes are flat grasslands occasionally broken by hills, rivers, lakes, and seas. The southernmost part of Central Asia, both east and west, is desert, edged by mountain ranges. It is in the steppe, the oases of the desert, and the foothills of the mountains that cultures change most rapidly from 8000 to 2000 B.C.E.

8. Although in southern Central Asia the relative chronological positions of various cultures are generally clear, the absolute chronological dates remain a matter of scholarly debate. Modern "calibrated” carbon-14 dates are up to 500 years earlier than “textbook” dates for Central Asia archeology before 2000 BCE..

9. • ca. 2200 B.C. E. Irrigation agriculture begins to be used in southwestern Central Asia, allowing the population to move from the foothills into oases along the rivers that flow into the Central Asian desert. The new settlements include large • fortified buildings. This new technology, presumably learned from the ancient Near East, permits population growth and • fosters the formation of a new culture: the Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), also known as the Oxus • civilization, beginning ca. 2000/1900 B.C. E. • (Textbook stuff: but which directions did cultures really move?)

10. • ca. 2200/2100 B.C. Several sites in the Southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan contain graves of warriors who are accompanied in death by burials of vehicles with two spoked wheels (defined either as chariots or light carts) and teams of horses. These burials are associated with the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, which has walled towns, usually located in the bends of rivers. The economic base is a mixture of herding (horses, cattle, and sheep) and agriculture. Whether the chariot originated on the steppe, where horses were first domesticated, remains an open question. It is possible that the idea of the chariot eventually reached Shang China along the route where these burials were found. • The warriors on horseback eventually terrorized Europe. The stirrup, which left hands free for using weapons, probably came from India.

20. but the Ottoman Empire (Muslim Turks) controls Constantinople and almost everything not in Europe

22. 1776 CE US expels England but England has taken over India, including what is now Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Maldives

25. 20th century • What happens to India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh? tomorrow their delegates will tell us.

29. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/02/nc/ht02nc.htm Then World War II & Holocaust, followed by creation of UN and Israel and beginnings of the Cold War 1991 CE End of the Cold War: USSR dissolves

32. Questions for the Future • Are small nations better off • In bigger unions, like USA, USSR, EU, UK? • or • As independent states? • Or • As even smaller states, each with its own ethnic identity?

33. Answers • “Futures” paper due March 26.