Word: copper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...primitive clock and transporting goods with their new invention: the wheel. Furthermore, they could record these deeds in the world's first written language. Along the Lower Nile, Egyptians were beginning to construct monumental buildings and decorate stone palettes and other objects with hieroglyphs; craftsmen worked skillfully with copper and silver. In China and Mesopotamia merchants were keeping track of their accounts with primitive numbering systems. In the southwestern Pacific, islanders were sailing double-hulled canoes, having mastered the rudiments of offshore navigation...
...Neolithic society -- from the Old to the Late Stone Age -- a change that University of Frankfurt prehistorian Jens Luning calls "the revolutionary event in human history." It marked the transition from subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture and the domestication of animals; the stockpiling of food; extensive use of copper; the manufacture of increasingly sophisticated tools and pottery. A dependable food supply in turn led to a population explosion: by about 4000 B.C. there were an estimated 86.5 million people on earth, about eight times as many as there had been 2,000 years earlier...
...wine and pottery with the Greek mainland and Crete. In Crete fashionable women sported ankle-length dresses, with necklines low enough to make Madonna blush. (The art of weaving originated more than a millennium earlier.) And in the Balkans metallurgists were hard at work crafting elaborate tools of lead, copper and iron and spectacular ornaments of gold...
While the Neolithic period was just flowering in Europe, it had long since come and gone in the Middle and Near East, and a transitional epoch, known as the Chalcolithic (copper and stone) period was approaching its zenith. The first Chalcolithic culture appeared suddenly -- and mysteriously -- in the Near East in about 4000 B.C. and quickly spread toward the Indus River basin and the Mediterranean...
...transportation improved, thanks to the wheel, sailing ships and the domestication of donkeys, connections between far-flung villages and towns expanded dramatically. A flourishing international trade developed in copper ore, gold, ivory, grain, olive oil, wine and other wares. Explains anthropologist Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara: "This was the beginning of a global economy...