Origins of the Major World Civilizations of Eurasia and Northern Africa

What all early empires appear to have in common is that they grew up in great river valleys. After the Paleolithic period, when humans subsisted by hunting and gathering their food and which lasted for some hundreds of thousands of years, there was a technological and social shift that caused or allowed people to settle down in villages, plant crops, and domesticate animals. This was once called the Agricultural Revolution, but McKay et al. cite the work of Jack Harlan on the point that this change came slowly and that people, at least in Egypt, had already known for a long time how to plant seeds and harvest the food thus grown.1

The question is what had changed to cause this change in human social behavior. The answer is not known, but it has been suggested that gradual changes in weather and climate caused by the passing of the final stages of the last Ice Age dried up formerly f

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