Mousterian assemblages in Eurasia show greater variation through space and time, but are still relatively static compared to the rapid technological changes that characterize the technologies developed by AMH. After the beginning of the Middle Stone Age in Africa about 250,000 years ago, there is evidence for a rapid and accelerating tempo of technological change among AMH populations, beginning with blade-based technologies, more sophisticated bifacial tools, the first appearance of microlithic tools, as well as formal bone,

ground stone, weaving, ceramic, and other technologies. Progressing through the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages, technological change among AMH often occurred very rapidly, marked by nearly constant Kinase Inhibitor Library cell line innovation and ingenuity. see more Such innovations include the first widespread evidence for art and personal ornamentation, tailored clothing, boats, harpoons, the domestication of the dog, and much more. By 10,000 years ago, humans were domesticating a variety of plants and animals independently in various parts of the world (see Goudie, 2000 and Smith and Zeder, 2014), a process of experimentation and genetic manipulation that led to a fundamental

realignment in the relationship of humans to their local environments. With better technologies and increasingly productive methods of food production (combined with foraging), human populations expanded and developed increasingly complex social, economic, and political institutions, again almost simultaneously

in multiple parts of the world. These processes fueled additional innovation and ever-greater human impacts on local and regional ecosystems. As early states evolved into kingdoms, empires, and nations, the stage was set for broader social and economic networks, leading to exchange of goods and ideas, exploration, competition, cooperation, and conflict, the results of which still play out today in a globalized but highly competitive world. next Since the 1960s, archeologists have debated the nearly simultaneous appearance of domestication, agriculture, and complex cultures in widely dispersed areas around the world, areas with very different ecologies as well as human colonization and demographic histories. Traditional explanations for this Holocene ‘revolution’ have relied on environmental change, population pressure, and growing resource stress as the primary causes for such widespread yet similar developmental trajectories among human societies around the world (e.g., Binford, 1968, Cohen, 1977, Cohen, 2009 and Hayden, 1981; see also Richerson et al., 2001). All these stimuli may have contributed to cultural developments in various regions, but today, armed with much more information about the very different colonization, environmental, and developmental histories of human societies in various areas, such explanations no longer seem adequate.