Chapter 12

                                         Columbus/Timur 

• The focus on Columbus and his voyage is a single most important event of the fifteenth century 
• A central Asian Turkic warrior named Timur was also apart of the last major pastoral invasion    

                         The shapes of Human Communities

• Bands of hunter-gatherers agricultural peoples,  newly emerging chiefdoms or small states, pastoral communities, and established civilizations and empires were all societies existing in the 15th century
• Despite agricultural advance some areas of the world still hosted gathering and hunting societies known as Paleolithic

                                 Paleolithic Persistence 

• Paleolithic people lived in all of Australia, Siberia, the arctic coastlands, some of Africa and America 

Australia had 250 separate groups still hunting and gathering at this time a pattern which continued well after europeans arrived in the  late 18th century

                                    Agricultural Village Societies

• Australia's people mastered and manipulated their environment with the practice of fire stick farming

• Fire stick  is when a pattern of fires are deliberately set which they described as cleaning up the country

• North America had a very different type of gathering and hunting society with affluent gathering and hunting communities ( Chinookan, Tulalip, Skagit)

• Northwest coast peoples had permanent settlements with sturdy houses, economic specialization  

•  Agricultural revolution unfolded across the globe, the numbers of these groups of people diminished severely

• Much more numerous were people who were fully agricultural yet developed no city or state based societies

                                           Time-lapse

• 1345-1521 Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica

• 1368-1644 Ming Dynasty in China

• 1370-1405 Conquest of Timur

• 15 Century Spread of Islam

• 1405-1433 Chinese maritime voyages