The periods humans today use as a scale follow the discoveries of tools found during archaeology.
So, most pre-human or near pre-human period is the Palaeolithic period, or the Old Stone Age, which is a significant part of human history.
Then there's the Mesolithic era which was around 15,000 years ago. And those stones were smoother than the ones from the Palaeolithic era, then 10,000 years ago stones were more polished and had a smoother look to them so we named this period the Neolithic period.
The most important innovation in human history would be agriculture, around 10,000 - 15,000 years ago, humans would have to travel and migrate to follow food sources.
Then Neolithic humans came up with the idea of agriculture, we started domesticating animals, breeding them, raising them for milk and meat, and we started planting vegetables nearer to their homes. And this helped with being less nomad-like.
Our estimate was that the world carrying capacity of the earth for humans when we were hunter-gatherers was a population of 10 million,
around the time of the last ice age. It is because a tribe of 100 hunter-gatherers needed around 50-100 square kilometres of forage land to gather enough food to supply the whole group because you would have to walk many kilometres a day to gather enough.
So having a larger place to forage increases the chances of you getting more food.
The creation of agriculture, allowed a much larger population density because most of the food is easily accessible, and after agriculture, the carrying capacity of the earth was 250 million, 25 times more than before agriculture.
Because of the Romans, we know that in 2000, years after agriculture was founded, the earth's population increased to nearly 28x. And that growth increased to the current population of 7 billion. And without agriculture, we would not be able to have this many people on Earth.
One theory is that agriculture happened a couple thousand years after the ice age, it allowed land to be arable (meaning can support plants), and able to support agriculture, but then what about the other ages when we weren't in an ice age.
Another theory is that anatomically accurate humans only appeared 200,000 years ago. And maybe they didn't have enough brainpower to learn to grow plants.
Another theory is that after the human population got too much for the groups of hunter-gatherers to be able to survive. The theory states that maybe for every human born, another would not have enough to survive, since there was a limited amount of food. And maybe a tribe of humans said let's try planting some plants near their homes and domesticating out of necessity. And after they started doing that, their population density increased.
Anyway, since agriculture was being learned and used by humans, we were becoming less nomadic, and since we could settle down and stay in a location nearly for as long as we lived, we started to become more protective, by building defences,
and instead of the men and women out gathering food for the village, they could just have a few people working in the fields while the other people maybe constructed housing, and crafted weapons for war.
Not only they would be able to have a bigger population, meaning more warriors to fight if they were to be attacked, but instead of patrolling a large area of land, they would only have to worry about their "property", since their property was their fields meant for growing and cattle grazing.
While hunters and gathers might treat the land they roam as their territory.
Whoever invented agriculture, it had a massive impact on our societies as without it, agriculture paved the way for large civilizations that could not exist purely on hunter-gatherers. As our modern civilization would not continue due to needing agriculture to thrive. As most of us would not be around without the food that agriculture, and technological advancements that followed.
Most believe that agriculture came from multiple different places, and spread like wildfire, mostly from the modern-day Middle East: Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Southern Turkiye.
We believe that agriculture started here, around 10,000-15,000 years ago. We believe that rice came from China, with estimates of 6000-13,000 years ago, the Potato coming from the Andes mountains.
And the time frame, of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago might jump back a few thousand years in the future as we might discover new and exciting evidence that anatomically accurate humans appeared many centuries ago.
For most of human history, not only we were making tools and weapons from jagged sharp stones, but also chasing animals around looking for food, and having an unreliable food source to feed our family.
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