Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume,

take a nice deep breath in,

let it out slowly,

and off we go.

Tonight let's return to a marvelous little book. A short history of the world by H.G. Wells, first published in 1922 by the Macmillan

Company, New York. Let's pick up where we left off.

Chapter 16 Primitive Nomadic Peoples

It was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were settling down to agriculture

and the formation of city states in the centuries between 6,000 and 8,000 BC.

Wherever there were possibilities of irrigation and a steady all the year-round food supply. Men were

exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of hunting and wandering for the routines of society. and

hardships of hunting and wandering for the routines of settlement.

On the upper Tigris, a people called the Assyrians were founding cities. In the valleys of Asia Minor and on the Mediterranean shores and islands

there were small communities growing up to civilization.

Possibly parallel developments of human life were already going on in favorable regions of India and China.

In many parts of Europe, where there were lakes well stocked with fish, little communities of men had long settled

in dwellings built on piles over the water and were eeking out agriculture by fishing and hunting.

But over much larger areas of the old world,

no such settlement was possible. The land was too harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid,

or the seasons too uncertain for mankind with only the implements and science of that age to take root.

...