c. 7,000 BCE
Agriculture
Mesopotamia
Irrigation canals
Diverted river water carried to fields in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley.
Why it mattered
Farming decoupled from rainfall; the beginning of large-scale public works.
Stone Age
7,000 BCE
4 recorded milestones at this point in the record.
c. 7,000 BCE
Medicine
South Asia
Dentistry with flint drills
Teeth from Mehrgarh in Baluchistan show cavities bored out with bow-driven flint points.
Why it mattered
The earliest known therapeutic dentistry.
c. 7,000 BCE
Agriculture
Andes
Potato domestication in the Andes
Highland farmers near Lake Titicaca selected frost-hardy tubers and learned to freeze-dry them as chuno.
Why it mattered
Gave Andean societies a storable staple at altitudes where grain fails.
c. 7,000 BCE
Agriculture
New Guinea
Banana and taro gardening at Kuk Swamp
Highland farmers drained wetlands to cultivate root and tree crops.
Why it mattered
Independent invention of agriculture in New Guinea.
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Nearby in the record
c. 8,000 BCETechnology
Bricks and mudbrick architecture
Levant and Anatolia
c. 8,000 BCEAgriculture
Maize domestication from teosinte
Mesoamerica
c. 7,500 BCESociety
Catalhoyuk and dense town life
Anatolia
c. 6,500 BCETechnology
Copper smelting
Balkans and Anatolia
c. 6,500 BCEAgriculture
Cheese making
Central Europe
c. 6,200 BCEAgriculture
Irrigated barley of the Zagros foothills
Iran