Where does the Industrial Revolution fit in history?
The roots of our history lie so far back it is hard to grasp just how long ago it was. If we think of a century on our calendar as a minute on an imaginary clock, 2 and a half minutes ago we had the Industrial Revolution, 5 minutes ago white Europeans began to settle in the Americas. 15 minutes before that, Christianity appeared. Just under 1 hour ago the first civilizations emerged in the river valleys of China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, that is, we learned how to produce enough surplus food to feed more than just our own family, so some people could now do jobs other than farming, we could live in larger groups, cities, we would develop writing to help us manage our more complex lives. 2 hours ago the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution occurred and we learned how to farm and live in one place for the first time. About 6 or 7 hours before that, recognizable human beings of a modern physiological type hunted and gathered in Western Europe. Human like creatures have been hunting and
