Science: Middle Asia Digs Suggest a New View of the Dawn of Civilization

For decades, school children have learned that human civilization emerged about 5000 years ago along the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, along the Nile, and along the Indus River in South Asia. But archaeologists working in a broad arc from the Russian steppes through Iran and onto the Arabian Peninsula are finding evidence that a complex network of cities may have thrived across the region in roughly the same era, suggesting a dramatic new view of the emergence of human civilization.

In a feature in the 3 August issue of Science, news writer Andrew Lawler details the discoveries by teams of researchers and the emerging multi-national effort to piece together the array of new evidence into a unified understanding.

Though their efforts are at an early stage, Lawler writes, many of the archaeologists say the finds are rewriting historical accounts of human civilization by offering "a far more complex picture in which dozens of urban centers thrived between Mesopotamia and the Indus, trading commodities and, possibly, adopting each other's technologies, architectures, and ideas."

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