conditions for the entire agrarian era. Graphs of average world temperatures over the past sixty thousand years show clearly the remarkable climatic stability of the past ten thousand years, even though variations were greater away from the tropics. The warmer, wetter climates of the early Holocene created a few regions of abundant and diverse plant life that formed rich “Gardens of Eden” for local foragers. In some of these regions, resources were so abundant that foragers could settle down in permanent communities or villages. Recently, nine-thousand-year-old circular stone houses have been
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