In the Indian world, confirmation of village life can be found in nearly every region of Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and elsewhere between 8000 and 2000 BCE. The most notable sites are Mehrgarh in today’s western Pakistan and Shorapur Doab in southern India, both of which indicate plant and animal domestication. Chinese Neolithic locations date from about 7500 BCE, Hemudu along the lower Yangze River and Yangshao and Longshan near the Yellow River being the most prominent. The Ban Chiang site in northern Thailand, one of several Neolithic locations in that country, dates back to roughly 4500 BCE. Evidence from stone tools suggests that Neolithic culture came to the Philippines from Indonesia sometime after 3000 BCE. Phung Nguyen culture along the lower reaches of the Red River in northern Vietnam dates from 2000 BCE. Across much of Japan, Jomon or cord pottery culture began as early as 7500 years ago, while more recent and more sophisticated Yayoi culture materialized about 250 BCE and lasted nearly a half millennium. Farming did not arrive in Siberia until around 3000 BCE.
The larger Asian farming population and decreasing crop production due to soil exhaustion forced villagers to seek new lands. As more and more villages with greater and greater numbers of people moved across arable lands in Asia, those most productive lands became scarcer and scarcer. Since only 3 percent of the earth’s land is arable and the remaining 97% is composed of forest, desert, or tundra, farmers eventually created an unsustainable standard of living. As Asia’s arable land became insufficient to continue farming life as it had been traditionally lived, Neolithic ways began to be eclipsed by two new ways of life: Pastoral Nomadic and Civilized.
Pastoral Nomadic Culture
Nomadic herding of animals as a livelihood for a small part of humanity likely began not long after the advent of farming. However, the mature pastoral nomadic existence that developed to the north of civilization in Asia—across the Eurasian steppe—resulted from two basic causes: (1) the vanishing of hunting territory, which occurred because growers in Neolithic and Civilized settings consumed lands favorable to foraging; and (2) the domestication of the horse and camel about 2000 BCE, which made possible mobility across the steppe grasslands. Not only did hunters and gatherers get pushed off their lands by farmers, thus requiring these foragers to find another occupation; but planters also forced many of their fellow planters to the margins of agricultural subsistence, compelling many of them to take up a fresh line of work. In both cases, that new livelihood often involved herding on lands with only minimal access to water.
In Asia, pastoral nomadism is associated with the Eurasian steppe, grassy grazing land north of China and India that stretches east from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. This includes most of today’s Central Asia, southern Siberia, and Mongolia, where bands of a hundred or so kinfolk migrated via horse, camel, or wagon, leading the herd to the most likely locations offering water and fodder. Typically they herded sheep, goats, yaks, and cattle for the products they turned out, such as milk and its products, as well as meat for food, hides for clothing and yurts, and animal waste for fuel. These nomads characteristically came from Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Uighur, Hun, or Xiongnu backgrounds by the beginning of the Common Era. By that time, the Indo‐Europeans from the steppe had migrated into India, Iran, or Europe. These nomads remained significant political and economic influences in Asia into the twentieth century.
Life on the steppe consisted of constant battles. The most common clash pitted nomad against nature. The sky provided the most essential product, rainwater, without which animals and humans perished. The rain also made possible the feed that sustained animals and herders. This meant migration as either water or fodder became insufficient in a particular area. Heat, cold, and wind also habitually challenged human and animal existence. As bands moved around the steppe in search of shelter or provisions necessary for survival, they encountered other bands in search of the same, often resulting in violent clashes. Quite often as well, fighting among band members added to the list of brutality that bands characteristically suffered. And eventually, pastoral nomads and civilized cultures collided. Although the two different ways of life regularly interacted to their mutual benefit, usually involving trade, they also often clashed.
These struggles had many causes, including famine on the steppe or instability in civilized settings. Most civilizations employed terms of scorn to characterize their nomadic neighbors, the most common one being “barbarian.” Typically civilizations kept the nomads at bay, but occasionally nomads conquered and sometimes ruled their civilized neighbors. Life of the pastoral nomad changed very little from the introduction of the horse down to the twentieth century. The last emperor of the last dynasty in China was a Manchu, originally a pastoral nomadic/semi‐agrarian people from Manchuria, and their Manchu Qing Dynasty survived until 1912.
Civilized Culture
No one knows for sure where or when civilization began, but most historians would today agree that it did not originate in Asia east of Afghanistan. As it stands at present, city life probably began in either Mesopotamia or Egypt sometime just after 4000 BCE. Perhaps further archaeological research will one day unearth evidence of earlier urban life elsewhere, conceivably in India, China, or another Asian location. Based on current scholarship, evidence of civilization in India can be traced back to roughly 3000 BCE and in China to about 2000 BCE, and there are other possible but as yet unverifiable sites that may have developed civilized ways even earlier. But it is fairly clear that it began as a result of farmers being pushed to the margins of land where rainfall became unreliable. A lack of water produced a search for it, and all four early civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China—emerged along rivers flowing through terrain with minimal annual rainfall. Irrigation solved the water problem, at least temporarily.
Four river valley civilizations.
What is civilization? Typically civilization includes a cluster of characteristics. It is urban; has rudimentary bureaucratic government that operates with the aid of writing; and can impose and collect taxes, provide for the community’s defense, and dictate the community’s common agenda. Whatever the program, it would be carried out by a society divided by specialization, the most significant cause of inequality. At the top of the hierarchy would be the political leader, usually a monarch of some kind, who would be assisted by bureaucratic advisors and be given leadership legitimacy by a priesthood. Below these elites, urbanites of every description provided all sorts of goods and services. Merchants, artisans, engineers, police, clerks, laborers, shamans, and other occupations emerged to meet the demands principally of their urban neighbors. Urbanites also serviced the needs and wants of the rural population, whose surplus agricultural output supported the city dwellers.
The farmers produced enough food surpluses to support the urban population chiefly because engineers made available an abundance of water via irrigation works. Not only did rivers provide water, enabling farming to occur in an arid or semi‐arid environment, but also these natural waterways regularly flooded, depositing fresh topsoil on farmland, thereby swelling the agricultural output. Moreover, the constant reinvigoration of the fields by routine flooding eliminated the farmer’s need to find new fertile fields. In the beginning, at least, civilized life seemed to generate win‐win situations. True, not everyone was relatively equal as in Paleolithic, Neolithic, or Pastoral Nomadic times, but during early Civilized times everyone’s standard of living had vastly increased. And as established civilizations developed and new civilizations emerged, ways of life within an urban culture produced a diversity of occupations and outlooks. The differences between civilizations also substantially diverged, producing distinctively remarkable uniqueness that resulted in some civilizations being more complex, prosperous, inventive, and enduring, while others either did less well or came to emulate many of the ways of their more successful neighbors. By the advent of Chinese civilization, some 25 to 35 million human beings inhabited the earth, most living in Asia. Only a small percentage of the world’s population lived in civilized cultures at that time. Gradually, however, most people would come to reside within the compass of Civilized societies, while Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Pastoral Nomadic peoples steadily