9700–5500 BCE: (Global History Period Three — From the End of the Younger Dryas to the Sixth Millennium BCE, Climate Shifts Bringing About Major Changes in N…

9700–5500 BCE: (Global History Period Three — From the End of the Younger Dryas to the Sixth Millennium BCE, Climate Shifts Bringing About Major Changes in Natural Environments and Forcing Peoples Around the Globe to Significantly Readapt Their Ways of Obtaining Food, the Defining and Most Historically Consequential Response Being the Progressive Shift Toward Deliberate Protecting and Tending of Particular Food Sources — the Earliest Cultivation of Food Plants and the Protecting and Herding of Certain Animals): A third big thematic period in Ehret’s periodization of global history extended from around 9700 to around 5500 BCE. With the end of the Younger Dryas, climate shifts ensued in many parts of the world, bringing about major changes in natural environments and forcing peoples widely around the globe to significantly readapt their ways of obtaining food. The defining and most historically consequential response of these times was the adoption of a new kind of subsistence strategy — the progressive shift over time, more and more, to the deliberate protecting and tending of particular food sources. This meant the earliest cultivation of food plants, along, in several regions, with the protecting and herding of certain animals. This is the transition that changed everything — the shift from foraging to farming, from taking what nature offered to shaping what nature produced. And Ehret frames it not as a single revolution with a single origin but as a global process with multiple independent centers, driven everywhere by the same cause: climatic change that disrupted existing subsistence patterns and forced human communities to innovate or starve. The Holocene did not bring abundance. It brought disruption, and from that disruption came the most consequential transformation in the history of our species. The people who made this transformation were not visionaries. They were survivors, doing what they had to do to feed their families in a world whose rules had changed. And they did it independently, in Africa, in the Levant, in China, in New Guinea, in Mesoamerica — proving once again that the capacity for transformative innovation was not the property of any one people or any one continent, but a universal human response to universal human need.