Last Ice Age in the context of "Holocene"

Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread to every continent except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Soon afterward, the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia brought the first systematic husbandry of plants and animals, and saw many humans transition from nomadic lives to sedentary existences as farmers in permanent settlements. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.

These developments paved the way for the emergence of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, the Indus Valley, and China, marking the beginning of the ancient period in the 4th millenium BCE. These civilizations enabled the establishment of regional empires and provided fertile ground for the advent of transformative philosophical and religious ideas. Hinduism originated during the late Bronze Age and was followed by the many seminal belief systems of the Axial Age: Buddhism, Confucianism, Greek philosophy, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. Christianity began later as an offshoot of Judaism. The subsequent post-classical period, from about 500 to 1500 CE, witnessed the rise of Islam and China's flourishing under the Tang and Song dynasties while civilization expanded to new parts of the world and trade between societies increased. The political landscape was shaped by the rise and fall of major empires, such as the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic caliphates, and the Mongol Empire. This period's invention of gunpowder and the printing press greatly affected later history.

Atra-Hasis (Akkadian: 𒀜𒊏𒄩𒋀, romanized: Atra-ḫasīs) is an 18th-century BC Akkadian epic, recorded in various versions on clay tablets and named for one of its protagonists, the priest Atra-Hasis ('exceedingly wise'). The narrative has four focal points: An organisation of allied gods shaping Mesopotamia agriculturally; a political conflict between them, pacified by creating the first human couples; the mass reproduction of these humans; and a great deluge, as handed down in a remarkably similar manner in various other flood myths of mankind. Numerous archaeological discoveries suggest the occurrence of a real historicaly catastrophe in the background, closely timed with the relatively sudden rise in sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. As several later myths – "even those where real floods are unlikely to have ocourrent" – also the epic links its flood story with the intention of the upper gods to eliminate their "imperfect" artificial creatures.

The name "Atra-Hasis" first appears on the Sumerinan King List as a ruler of Shuruppak in the times before that flood. The oldest known copy of the epic tradition concerning Atrahasis can be dated by colophon (scribal identification) to the reign of Hammurabi’s great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646–1626 BC). However, various Old Babylonian dialect fragments exist, and the epic continued to be copied into the first millennium BC.

The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period from the egalitarian lifestyle of (semi-)nomadic hunter-gatherers to one of agriculture, settlement and increasing social differentiation.

Archaeological data indicate that the food producing domestication of some types of wild animals and plants happened independently in separate locations worldwide, starting in Mesopotamia after the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago. It greatly narrowed the variety of high-quality food available, leading to a deterioration in human nutrition compared to what was previously available through hunting and foraging. However, the efficient production of large quantities of calorie-rich crop allowed humans to invest their efforts in other activities and was therefore "ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization" with its process of industrialization and economic growth up to the limits.

The Appalachian temperate rainforest or Appalachian cloud forest is located in the southern Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States and is among the most biodiverse temperate regions in the world. Centered primarily around Southern Appalachian spruce–fir forests between southwestern Virginia and southwestern North Carolina, it has a cool, mild climate with highly variable temperature and precipitation patterns linked to elevation. The temperate rainforest as a whole has a mean annual temperature near 7 °C (45 °F) and annual precipitation exceeding 140 centimeters (55 in), though the highest peaks can reach more than 200 centimeters (79 in) and are frequently shrouded in fog.

Due to variable microclimates across different elevations, the rainforest is able to support both southern and northern species, including some which were forced south during the Last Ice Age. Dominated by evergreen spruce and fir forests at higher elevations and deciduous cove forests at lower elevations, the ecosystem contains thousands of plant species, including epiphytes, orchids, and numerous mosses and ferns. It is also home to many animals and fungi, including endangered and endemic species, reaching the highest diversities of mushrooms, salamanders, land snails, and millipedes in the world.