The Information Age, 2000 -

Computers have been around for a couple of decades but if one were to designate a dividing line across history, where would it be? This illustrates the problem with dating and classifying history. Just like all my other dating divisions, the century mark is close enough - and more easy to remember, too.

While the naming of this age is more prognostication than history, I think that it is a pretty safe bet that the greater greater ability to get and to share information worldwide will be an even more determining factor than the development of agriculture, bronze, and iron was in earlier ages.

Information sharing is not just computers but satelites communication, cell phones, cable television, and digital photography/video/audio. All of these technologies combine to become a driving force for our age. As of this decade, it only seems that the information tech will become even more important as the decades goes by.

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The Dark Age, 500 - 1000

With the fall of the Roman Empire, Western Europe fell into a period of sharp decline. In every aspect of life - commerce, culture, public safety - the quality of life declined. Every decade, every century, new generations grew to expect life to get harder and harder. Writing and other basic skills retreated to a few monasteries. As Kenneth Clark said in his epic TV series, Civilization, "Civilization survived by the skin of its teeth."

This was not true of the rest of the world. The Eastern Roman Empire survived but did not prosper. From the sands of Arabia, the followers of Mohammad erupted. They took most of the lands of the Empire and the Persian Empire to the east. The Mohammedans were no respecters of learning during this period. They destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria upon the grounds that if the books did not agree with the teachings of the Koran, then they were pernicious and if they did, then they were superfluous.

This wasn't true of the whole world, of course. China reached a peak in the 8th. Century. These were good times for India and Japan, too. In the 10th. Century, the Mongols invaded China in the east and the Vikings rampaged throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. While "the skin of its teeth" figure of speech may be too much, this age was not civilization's best.

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Roman Age, 1 - 500 AD

The Roman Empire never dominated the world like the Europeans did 1500 years later but they certainly put on the best show. The great migrations across the northern Eurasia landmass was held up at the frontiers of Rome's Empire. This impacted the rest of the civilizations: China; Persia; and the rest of the civilized peoples of Central Asia.

Roman influence penetrated deep into Africa. Their influence and outright conquest penetrated deep into the Middle East. Iraq was briefly a province of Rome; Egypt, permanently. Had the Persian Empire not been so embroiled with Rome, it could have pressured the other civilizations to its south (India) and east (China).

This was the age of the spread of Christianity, accelerated greatly by the stability of the Roman Empire.

Even 2 millenia later, no empire has held such a hold on the public imagination as the Roman.

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The Classical Age, 500 BC - 1 AD

This is Herodotus, the Father of History. He lived in the first century of this age. His book's theme was the first major clash of civilizations from Europe versus Asia. This theme served as a backbone. He added ribs and bone to form what amounted to a general history of the world to his time. As one reads his book, one can ponder what lay just ahead.

The next centuries would bring Alexander the Great, the conquest of Persia and Egypt and the spread of Greek civilization to the borders of India and China. To the west, Rome rose in Italy and Carthage in north Africa.

The last century of this age saw Rome rise to the status of super-power in the Mediterranean world.

This was the age of the great classic writers of ancient history. Phoenician explorers circumnavigated Africa. The seven wonders of the ancient world were identified and described.

And Herodotus traveled, measured, chronicled, and pondered just how many ages had preceded his own.

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The Iron Age, 1000 - 500 BC

As iron spread through the civilized world, activity in and among civilizations leveled up. China acquired iron around 600 BC.

In the first century of this age, Kings David and Solomon ruled Israel. Just to the NW, the Phoenicians ranged throughout the Mediterranean. India adopted the caste system. In Mexico, the Olmecs, still in the Stone Age, produced giant heads 9 feet high.

During this age, Assyria revived its super-power status and the Middle East remained as the foremost area of civilization. Its reach activated a coalition of enemies who destroyed it by 600. To the west, the Greeks rose to major-power status. During this period they established colonies around the Agean Sea and west to Sicily and Italy. Athens experimented with democracy.

New: Carthage and Rome were founded in this age. Old: China regressed to a feudal society. The collapse of Assyria brought Egypt a twilight glow of prosperity before the Persians came.

At the end of this age, Confucius was alive in China and Buddha was alive in India. Zoroaster lived sometime during this age.

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The Bronze Age, 3000 - 1000 BC

Metallurgy was important to this age apart from the advantages (military and commercial) that it conferred upon civilization but also what it indicated. Knowledge was just one ingredient to a Bronze Age society. Organization, technical skills, and commercial rewards were necessary to implement and support industrial activity. Civilization itself had to rise to a new level.

During this period the major super-powers in the world were Egypt, Iraq, and China. (I use the general term "Iraq" for the succession of different empires that based their heartland in this area.)

China 's remoteness and protected it from the wars of the civilizations to the west. The Shang Dynasty may have ruled over 5 million people, which made the most populous empire in the world. It entered the Bronze Age by 1500.

Iraq established the first empire based on large scale conquest in the 24th. Century. It extended from the Persian Gulf in the south to the east coast of the Mediterranean in the west, and to the Caspian Sea in the north. It lasted about 2 centuries which isn't bad considering the primitive infrastructure and governance of the times. After 2000 the region became Babylon and became the hub of much inter-civ activity. It conquered and was conquered. The age ended with the Assyrian Empire in control.

This era was Egypt's golden age. The pyramids were mostly built by 2000. Egypt had its first large invasion in the 18th. Century. This changed the character of the state from an isolationist, inward looking society to a more standard warring and conquering empire.

India had a large first-rank civilization in the Indus River Valley until 1500. The Aryan invaders spent the rest of the age conquering the rest of India.

What is most significant about this age is that the historian emerges from almost total reliance upon artifacts, crockery, and excavations to written records. We go from just writing about physical things to writing about people and events.

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The Agricultural Age, 10,000 - 3,000 BC

At the beginning of this age, the the planet has warmed from the Ice Age to the temperatures of today. In Alaska, the ice prison has broken up and the humans began migrating to the rest of the continent. In northern Africa, the lush plains of the Sahara turned into the desert of today. To the retreating peoples, the Nile River valley beckoned.

Climate change caused large stands of wild grain grew thoughout the Middle East. Around 8000 people in northern Iraq began to deliberately plant these grains. The nearby Tigris and Euphrates Rivers provided irrigation. After harvest, the grains were ground into flour which kept for long periods of time.

Historians call this age "The New Stone Age" or in Latin the "Neolithic Age". I don't think that advances in stonework was the determining factor in this era. It was warming of the planet and the subsequent development of farming.

Agriculture provided stability. It supported more people. It allowed people to congregate into cities. City folk were able to perform specialized tasks. Organization for defense and for commerce was needed. And people's imaginations were freed to pursue academic pursuits. Agriculture is the foundation that allows workers of other skills to prosper.

Jericho (yes, the one of the Bible) may be the world's oldest city, dating back to 8000. Posessing all of 10 acres and 2,500 people, it was the must-see metropolis of 7500. By 6000, pottery was developed. In the Far East, humans independently developed the farming of rice.

In the Sixth Millenium, the Sumerians took over the Iraq region and established a network of cities. In 4000 they founded the city of Ur and made it into the largest city in the world.
Egypt united under its first ruler in 3100. The Chinese established their first cities along the Yellow River about this time. Cities began in the Indus River Valley.

Towards the end of this era, the lands around the eastern Mediterranean began civilizations. In 4000 world population reached the unprecedented number of 85 million people. They lived in isolation from other civilizations but this was about to change.

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Here's a related article.

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The Warming Age, 20,000 - 10,000 BC

Immense volumes have been written to expound our knowledge, and conceal our ignorance, of primitive man.
- Will Durant

The attempt to wrap one's mind around pre-historic periods requires one to confront a bewildering array of jargon. Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic describe the development of humans in terms of Stone Ages. Pleistocene and Holocene describe geological periods. As I say in my article on The Age of Agriculture, I don't think that the attributes that these terms highlight are the most important.

The warming planet and the retreat of the great ice sheets may have been indiscernable to the humans of the time. Authorities seem to agree that the process was gradual, rather than the global warming trends of today. In any case, the habitats of such Ice Age animals as the Great Wooly Mammath and the Sabertooth Tiger shrunk and led to their extinction.

The Earth's typography was still substantially different than today. There was no Black Sea; it was dry. The flood waters from the Mediterranean came later. The North Sea filled up. The Sahara in northern Africa with its lush savanas was a center of human activity.

One wonders how the equator regions - the Amazon River - differed from today. Why didn't an equivalent to Egypt in the next area arise along the Amazon? Maybe it did. An ancient civilization lays under the jungle bed just waiting to be found.

Humans did use stone and fire. They domesticated animals, though the horse wasn't domesticated until late in the next age (around 4500 BC). And they painted. A lot of these artifacts were found in caves, thus giving rise to the image of early man living in caves. The supply of available caves would have severely limited the population and restricted them to hilly/mountainous areas. Caves may have just preserved things more than the shelters constructed out in the open. Were the 20,000 BC paintings in the Alamira Cave the work of an amateur while the really good stuff got lost by the wear of time?

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The Ice Age, 110,000 - 20,000 BC

It’s difficult to imagine living on a planet where the weather was so cold, that ice sheets covered much of North America, Europe, and Asia. Thankfully, the configuration of the continents did not permit the extension of the southern ice sheets too far north. In the higher elevations of the continents, great glaciers grew independent of the polar ice. So much of the planet's water was in the great sheets of ice that sea levels dropped. Thankfully, humans knew how to make fire.

Here’s a link to a Wikipedia map of the Ice. (There's no use trying to pop up these maps here. The blogs pages are too small to see the details.)

And here’s a map of the planet’s vegetation. While it is hard to read, here’s a few noticeable items:

• There is no Black Sea
• the Mediterranean is now two lakes; the Italian Peninsula is now an isthmus going all the way down to Africa
• the Red Sea is now a small lake
• land connects Siberia to Alaska
• Australia includes Guinea and the Solomon Islands; and if it doesn’t connect to SE Asia, is sure comes close.

The descriptions of the kind of land are mostly bad; the few good colors can hardly be seen; the only one that seems decent is “Savannah”. Was this where most of the humans lived during this time?

During this age there were 3 species of humans:

1. Homo Erectus had been around for 1.8 million years but died out around 70,000. They had survived previous ice ages; they didn’t survive this one.


2. Neanderthals had been around for 350,000 years but when the great ice sheets disappeared, so did they.


3. Modern Man started around 200,000 years ago. This ought to not be confused with Cro-Magnon Man which appeared 40,000 and died around 10,000. The Cro-Magnons were a subgroup of Modern Man.

This map shows where the three groups lived during the Ice Age. The most interesting feature in this is that the only one of the three groups that migrated was Modern Man.

About 50,000 Modern Man commenced an unprecedented level of cultural and technical achievement in a short period of time. They developed sophisticated hunting techniques (such as using trapping pits or driving animals off cliffs), made clothing out of hides, carefully buried their dead, and even painted their caves.

Neanderthals also had tools and fire but they did not innovate. As the Ice Age ended, the last communities of the Neanderthals died out in Gibralter. The future belonged to Modern Man.

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The Age of Early Man, 200,000 - 110,000 BC

It’s 200,000 years ago and another ice age has just started. Two species of humans continue as before. Neanderthals had been around for 150,000 years; while the older group, Homo Erectus has been around for a couple of million years. But now a new group of humans appears: Modern Man – us.

Humanity has fire, which is a necessity to survive an ice age. They have simple stone tools and weapons.

They face fierce predators. This is the golden age for very large mammals: mammoths, sabertooth tigers, mastodons, and many others. The large size may have protected them from the cold.

Fast forward 70,000 years. Between 130,000 and 110,000 there is an inter-glacial period. The ice sheets recede. The climate approaches what it is like in historic times.
20,000 years may not seem like such a long time compared to the time scales we discuss here but consider that our own civilization goes back only 5,000 years. For 20,000 years, those early humans had plenty of time to develop the same kind of civilization that we experience now. So why didn’t they?

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Pictured is a Homo Erectus, the most primitive of the 3 groups of humans. Source: Wikipedia.

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The Age of Mammals, 65 MYA - 200,000 BC

In the aftermath of the great comet, the small survived. Hot blooded creatures, the mammals dominated. As time went by, the evolved larger and larger. Some animals returned to the sea and evolved into giants. The whales and dolphins started out as amphibians.

Climate slowly grew cooler as the millions of years passed by. Part of this was caused by the drift of the continents.


Antarctica drifted south, all the way to the South Pole. Australia, having split from it during the Age of the Dinosaurs, drifted north. India had also split from Antarctica and moved north, colliding with Asia 55 - 45 MYA. Arabia collided with Asia, too, 35 MYA. All this activity affected Europe, too. It went from being groups of disparate islands to a continent. The collisions caused the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Carpathian Mountains. The North and South American continents closed enough that a land bridge connected them.

2.5 million years ago, the poles began to ice over. This marked the appearance of the first homos erectus – precursors of humans.

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Above is a map of Earth 50 million years ago. Source: Wikipedia.

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The Age of Dinosaurs, 250 MYA - 65 MYA

Ah, yes! The dinosaurs. Animals were big; the weather was hot; their blood ran cold. Little warm blooded mammals eeked out their living on the fringes of the biomass.

The dinosaurs marked the high point of life on Earth before Man. As predatory as lions, tigers, and bears became in the later age, it is difficult to see how any one of them could have fared against the giant T-Rex or the flying Raptor. The movie, “Jurassic Park” probably gives us more the flavor of the age than any monograph can.

The Earth looked vastly different during these times. Here is a map of the planet as it was around 100 million years ago.

The great southern continent of Godwanna had just broken up. India is drifting north; the eastern part of Godwanna drifts north north east and will split up into Australia, Guinea, New Zealand, and other islands. On the other side of the world, North and South America are drifting together.

65 million years ago a comet crashes. A cataclysmic ending to a dramatic age.

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Source of map: Wikipedia.

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The Age of Animals, 400 MYA - 250 MYA

Before the dinosaurs, (if the logic of evolution is to be believed), the animals were less evolved. Scientists posit that the first aquadic life to come to land were those that had developed legs like spiders, scorpions, and primitive insects. What a golden age these first pioneers must have experienced! Continent after continent filled with plants that had millions of years to establish themselves, lay before them. The atmosphere was far more oxygen rich than later. Good times! But then came others from the sea, looking for meat.

The superior species seemed to be the reptile, with mammals living on the edges of life. In fact, the reptile's greatest age was next.

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MYA = Million Years Ago
BYA = Billion Years Ago

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The Age of Fish, 650 MYA - 400 MYA

It is surprising that the earliest microbes appeared just as the Earth was beginning the last fourth of it's 4.5 billion year existence.

In this period, the planet's atmosphere was poison; plants appeared toward the end and transformed the bare continents as well as the atmosphere. Plant photosynthesis takes in carbon monoxide and puts out oxygen.

Meanwhile, in the oceans, the microbes evolved into giant sea monsters, while others made their first tentative presence on the shores.

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MYA = Million Years Ago
BYA = Billion Years Ago

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The Age of Geology, 4.6 BYA - 600 MYA

For 4 billion years, the most advanced form of life on Earth was single celled organisms. From the standpoint of life, this seems like a boring period but the planet was undergoing massive changes. The outer crust was settling; the atmosphere was forming; meteors (maybe even whole planets) crashed down from the sky. Mountains formed. Weather changed.

The greatest ice age in the planet's history occured. Ice and snow covered the entire planet. Then the climate warmed.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.
-Genesis 1:20

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MYA = Million Years Ago
BYA = Billion Years Ago

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The Age of Cosmology, 20 BYA - 4.6 BYA

Cosmology is the study of the origins of the universe. General opinion is that the universe started with a big bang. 100 years from now, who knows what general opinion will be then. As for when it, happened 20 billion years ago, 12 billion years ago or maybe some other time. We really need to be humble here.

Other stars began billions of years before the cosmic gasses in our neighborhood coalesced into our solar system. This period closes with the formation of planet Earth.

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MYA = Million Years Ago
BYA = Billion Years Ago

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The Medieval Age, 1000 - 1500

Ah, yes! Knights, castles, monasteries and crusades. And that's just in Europe!

This age saw the Mongols conquer much of the Middle East and all of China. The Turks destroyed the Byzantine Empire, forcing Gibbon to end his long book "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".

Marco Polo made his epoch journey across from Italy across the Mediterranean to the Levant and then across Asia to China. He met Kublai Khan and governed a province. But even more significantly, he made it back to Italy and wrote a book of his experiences.

Will Durant calls this period "The Age of Faith" but I think that this term is a stretch. This period saw the Cluny Reforms but also the Great Schism in the Catholic Church. The rest of the world seemed to be just as faithful and unfaithful as they were before and since.

This period did differ significantly from the prior 500 years in one major respect: the general decline in learning, culture, and commerce was arrested in this period. While civilization did not advance as much in this age as it did in the Classical and Roman Ages, certainly not as much as in the Renaissance (The European Age), it did stop declining. All in all, a good middle period, a Medieval Age.

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This is a reprint from Jack Le Moine's Blog.

The European Age, 1500 - 2000

Both the name and the time period really fits. There is a coherence to this previous period of history. Starting with the decades just before 1500, the Europeans were embarking on voyages of discovery that eventually covered the whole world. No other civilization had ever conducted an effort that was as sustained and as far reaching as the Europeans did over the past 5 centuries.

This effort morphed into an imperialism that dominated the world. Entire continents (the Americas, Australia) became extensions of European civilization. The United States of America became dominant in the 20th. Century but its cultural roots were from Europe and its language came from England. European culture dominated world civilization long after defacto European power receded. The history of the third world in the last half of the 20th. century was largely reactions to the aftermath of European colonization.

Even figures from civilizations that sought to counter the European/American culture adopted philosophies that originated in Europe. For example, Mao Tse Tung of China, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Fidel Castro of Cuba all adopted Marxism, a philosophy that originated in Europe. While other cultures (The Middle East) clung to their roots, they featured reactions to the dominant European culture.

The last decades of the 20th. Century saw European power and influence wane. Demographic contraction opens questions as to whether the European culture will still be around, at least in Europe, by the end of the 21st. Century. The Europeans unified and dominated the history of the last 500 years.

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This is a reprint from my personal blog.