![[Media/Molino_neolítico_de_vaivén-1.jpg]] *Neolithic grindstone or quern, used to process grain.* The major event in human prehistory (that is, the period before people began keeping written records) is what we've just been alluding to: the development of agriculture. Because this happened thousands of years before people developed writing and began keeping records, historians have once again been forced to speculate and to use information derived by different disciplines. One of the fields that has contributed a lot to speculation about the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture is Anthropology. Anthropologists typically study currently-existing cultures (for example, the remaining small bands of hunter-gatherers living today) and extrapolate from their observations to speculate on what ancient people may have done. While useful, this technique can introduce errors, as we will see. Another issue with the speculating about prehistory that has been done in previous generations, is that it was sometimes motivated by a desire to justify or explain or celebrate the way things turned out. For example, before there were advanced techniques of archaeology or genetic analysis, linguists discovered that many European and Asian languages had evolved from a common source, which they called [proto-Indo-European](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language). During the nineteenth century, a period when Great Britain ran a colonial empire that included India, historians used this linguistic data to tell a story of an "[Aryan Invasion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations)" that brought the [Sanskrit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit) language and civilization to India from Iran, which is close to the edge of Europe. Later the Nazis expanded on this Aryan idea to create an ideology of a Germanic master race. Later discoveries by geneticists and the decoding of very ancient writing in India (which turns out to be Sanskrit centuries before Iranian expansion) have overturned many of these long-held beliefs. We will return to this issue in the next chapter. ---- Next: [[1.10 - Fertile Crescent]] Back: [[1.8 - Beringia]]