Ancient Civilization Research Paper

Homo sapiens, or human beings, have been existed for nearly 300,000 years. For most of that time, however, they had no written history. During this time of “prehistory,” humans spent most of their lives moving from place to place, hunting for food, building crude shelters,protecting themselves from wild animals and from the wrath of nature. Around 3000 BCE, things slowly began to change. For the first time, humans started to settle down in one place. The people of early civilizations needed water for drinking and for their crops, so they settled mostly in river valleys where the land was fertile and suitable for agriculture. Easy access to a river or a sea was important because people need it for food (fishing) or irrigation, transportation and trade. Some of the earliest known civilizations arose in the Nile valley of Ancient Egypt, on the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley region of modern Pakistan, and in the

The first and most extensive trade networks were actually waterways like the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates in present-day Iraq and the Yellow River in China. Cities grew up in the fertile basins on the borders of those rivers and then expanded by using their watery highways to import and export goods (Whipps, B. (2008, February 17). How Ancient Trade Changed the World. Retrieved Novermber 31, 2015, from http://www.livescience.com/4823-ancient-trade-changed-world.html ). The domestication of camels around 1000 BC helped encourage trade routes over land, called caravans, and linked India with the Mediterranean. Towns also began sprouting up anywhere that a pit-stop or caravan-to-ship port was necessary (Whipps, B. (2008, February 17). How Ancient Trade Changed the World. Retrieved Novermber 31, 2015, from