Prompt 1

Pangaea was the super continent thought to exist 200 to 250 million years ago. The reason it was special is because it made for one area of competition in the centralization of evolution. It broke apart 180 to 200 million years ago. We care about Pangaea today because going from one world to multiple worlds, made for more locations for evolution to take place.
Crosby says that homo habilis existed 2.4 to 1.5 million years ago. Homo erectus came along about 1.8 million years ago, to 700 thousand years ago. Finally, homo sapian sapians, like us, have only existed from about 170 thousand years ago to the present. An interesting fact, the oldest remains of the homo sapian species was found in East Africa and was carbon dated to be 130 thousand years old! The thing that sets humans apart from other animals is the size and capacity of our brains. The storing and altering of behavior is much different in humans than in any other creature. Humans developed faster and have a much larger brain to adapt to climate, lifestyle, and cultural changes that animals do not.
Crosby thought of culture as a system of storing and altering behaviors not in the genetic code but the brain cells themselves. To Crosby culture is so special because it made the members of the genus homo into "nature's foremost adaptable."
People moved into Europe and Asia 50 thousand years ago while 40 thousand years ago they were moving into Australia. However it wasn't until 12,000 years ago that they came to the Americas through the ice free corridor.
The reason that people in the Americas were so isolated was not only the fact that thousands of miles of oceans separated the different continents but also the people were on separate ends of the Neolithic Era. There was less communication in the Americas than there was on the Eurasian continent.
The Neolithic Revolution was the move from stone to metal. It began roughly 25 thousand years ago and evidence shows that some of the process didn't end until 2,500 years ago.
During the Neolithic Period people became civilized and formed civilizations with political systems, agriculture, writing systems. They established cities and laws. They formed a community and worked together to make that community flourish. The days of hunting and gathering were over with the domestication of plants and animals.