ABSTRACT
Although most of modern humans’ existence has preceded recorded history, people have evidence of or can infer several innovations from that time period. First there was the development of speech, and then the earliest purposeful designs, including sculpted objects and paintings on cave walls, which might be the earliest records of story telling. The oldest evidence of purposeful design made by humans discovered so far is more than 500,000 years old: A pattern carved into a shell discovered in the 1890s in Indonesia. The earliest forms of record keeping were counting systems, which are much older than written language. In what is now Iraq and parts of neighboring countries, Mesopotamia was the site of the earliest known civilizations with regional governmental structures and laws, and a writing system. The Indus civilization occupied a large region along the Indus River in present-day Pakistan and India, and thrived from 4,600 to 3,900 years ago.
