I have done some recent research that has provided some interesting facts about the origins of mankind, and the fun possibilities of improving gameplay for C2C
Please take a minute to read these articles, they have some good material on the spread of culture, influence, and technology.
The only humans left on Earth
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/03/the-only-humans-left-on-earth.html
'During the last 40 years we learned that more than 90 per cent of the ancestry of European and Asian peoples is traced to Africans who left that continent less than 150,000 years ago. Those living outside Africa before that, including the Neanderthals, seem to have lost their cultures and identity as they were absorbed.'
'The book is most interesting as he describes the surprising turns of the last few years: a 100,000-year record of gradual increases in sophistication of engraving and pigments within Africa now includes a few Neanderthal sites; genes of the archaic Neanderthals themselves have been found to make up about 2.5 per cent of the genomes of the majority of people living outside Africa, including mine; Denisova cave in the low Altai mountains of Siberia has provided the genome of yet another archaic lineage, whose living descendants include aboriginal peoples of Oceania and Australia. We have entered an era in which never-before-suspected human groups can be discovered with barely any anatomical trace, using forensic methods.'
Continents Influenced Ancient Human Migration, Spread of Technology
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110919113846.htm
'Genetic data carries the signature of ancient migrations.Using advanced genetic analysis techniques, evolutionary biologists at Brown University and Stanford University studied nearly 700 locations on human genomes drawn from more than five dozen populations. They say that technology spread more slowly in the Americas than in Eurasia and that the continents' orientation seems to explain the difference. After humans arrived in the Americas 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, genetic data shows, the migrating populations didn't interact as frequently as groups in Eurasia.'
"If a lack of gene flow between populations is an indication of little cultural interaction," the authors write in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, "then a lower latitudinal rate of gene flow suggested for North American populations may partly explain the relatively slower diffusion of crops and technologies through the Americas when compared with the corresponding diffusion in Eurasia."
Rethinking "Out of Africa"
http://edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa
'At the moment, I'm looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans—the leading idea over the last 20 years. This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa. But we're having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia.'
'Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in Homo sapiens? Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They had distinct behavior and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it's useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn't necessarily preclude interbreeding.'
'A further big surprise was that not only were there distinct humans in Siberia maybe 50,000 years ago, but when whole genome scans were done against modern humans, it turned out that there was one group of living humans that seemed to be related to the Denisovans, that had Denisovan DNA in them, and these people are down in Australasia. They're in New Guinea, Australia, and some neighbouring islands, so that's also very unexpected.'
'The extraordinary thing is the level of DNA is about the same in a modern European, a modern Chinese and a modern New Guinean. One possibility is that an interbreeding event happened early on in southwest Asia. As modern humans first emerged from Africa, they met some Neanderthals—maybe only 25 Neanderthals and 1,000 modern humans. That would be enough. And then that DNA gets carried with those modern humans as they spread out from that area and diversify.'
'And there were further surprises from a specimen that I and collaborators published on a few months ago. It's the oldest fossil from Nigeria, from a site called Iwo Eleru. It's about 13,000 years old, and yet if you look at it, you would say from its shape that it's more than 100,000 years old. This reminds us that we have a very biased picture of African evolution, with many unknown areas, and there could be relics of human evolution hanging on not only outside of Africa in the form of the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and over in Flores, this strange creature nicknamed the 'Hobbit'. In Africa itself, archaic humans could have lingered in parts of the continent as well. From some recent genetic analyses, there is evidence of an input of archaic DNA into some modern African populations as recently as 35,000 years ago. So even in Africa, the process was more complicated than we thought.'
Mystery human fossils put spotlight on China
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-mystery-human-fossils-spotlight-china.html
Dated to just 14,500 to 11,500 years old, these people would have shared the landscape with modern-looking people at a time when China's earliest farming cultures were beginning, says an international team of scientists led by Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, of the University of New South Wales, and Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology.
"These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species, one that survived until the very end of the Ice Age around 11,000 years ago,"
"The discovery of the red-deer people opens the next chapter in the human evolutionary story – the Asian chapter – and it's a story that's just beginning to be told," says Professor Curnoe.
I also think the discovery of agriculture comes too late in C2C
Wikipedia - timing of the rise of agriculture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture
'It was not until after 9500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be grown and harvested on a significant scale.
At around the same time (9400 BC), another study argues, parthenocarpic fig trees appear to have been domesticated.[13] The simplicity associated with cutting branches off fig trees and replanting them alongside wild cereals owes to the basis of this argument.[14]
By 7000 BC, sowing and harvesting reached Mesopotamia, and there, in the fertile soil just north of the Persian Gulf, Sumerians systematized it and scaled it up. By 8000 BC farming was entrenched on the banks of the Nile River. About this time, agriculture was developed independently in the Far East, probably in China, with rice rather than wheat as the primary crop. Maize was first domesticated, probably from teosinte, in the Americas around 3000-2700 BC, though there is some archaeological evidence of a much older development. The potato, the tomato, the pepper, squash, several varieties of bean, and several other plants were also developed in the New World, as was quite extensive terracing of steep hillsides in much of Andean South America. Agriculture was also independently developed on the island of New Guinea.[15]
In Europe, there is evidence of emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, sheep, goats and pigs that suggest a food producing economy in Greece and the Aegean by 7000 BC.[16] Archaeological evidence from various sites on the Iberian peninsula suggest the domestication of plants and animals between 6000 and 4500 BC.[16] Céide Fields in Ireland, consisting of extensive tracts of land enclosed by stone walls, date to 5500 BC and are the oldest known field systems in the world.[17][18] The horse was domesticated in Ukraine around 4000 BC.'
Currently when I play from the prehistoric age, it seems like timing is way off in my C2C games to be able to develop these technologies.
I hope this adds to the conversation. I argue that exploring, migration, and surviving are the most important concepts of the prehistoric age. They led to culture and technology as ways of improving the odds and passing down accumulated know-how.
