20,000–9700 BCE: (The Second Age — The Last Glacial Maximum and Its Aftermath, Human Beings Nearly Everywhere Forced to Adapt and Readapt Their Ways of Life …

20,000–9700 BCE: (The Second Age — The Last Glacial Maximum and Its Aftermath, Human Beings Nearly Everywhere Forced to Adapt and Readapt Their Ways of Life to Repeated Shifts Between Cooler and Warmer Climatic Phases and Between Drier and Wetter Rainfall Regimes, and the Global Character of This Crisis of Adaptation): A new global historical age began around the height of the Last Glacial Maximum and lasted until the dawn of the Holocene epoch around 9700 BCE. This was a period of relentless climatic turbulence — repeated shifts between cooler and warmer phases, between drier and wetter rainfall regimes — that forced human beings nearly everywhere to adapt and then readapt their ways of life and subsistence practices. The significance of this period lies not in any single dramatic event but in the accumulation of adaptive responses that peoples across the globe devised to meet environmental challenges no individual community could have predicted. In Africa, as in Eurasia and the Americas, communities reorganized their food procurement strategies, altered their settlement patterns, and innovated new technologies to survive conditions that would have extinguished less resourceful species. The standard narrative treats the Last Glacial Maximum as a story about European cave painters and Beringian land-bridge crossers — but the African chapters of this same global crisis are equally rich, equally consequential, and equally constitutive of the human story. To omit them is not an oversight; it is a choice with ideological consequences.