Agriculture developed independently in many regions of the world. It was the first profound change in the relationship between fully modern humans and the environment: people evolved into their current form some 200,000 years ago (see human evolution), yet they did not begin to engage in agriculture until about 15,000–10,000 years before the present (bp). Because humans began to alter wild habitats in productive ways long before they developed unambiguous writing systems—an event that occurred in Southwest Asia circa 5100 bp and in East Asia circa 3000 bp—archaeology provides most of the data with which to explore the development of ...(100 of 27369 words)