Nick Szabo  🔑

Recent discoveries suggest a crucial cluster of biological & cultural innovations, probably in the millennia around 20,000 BP, and roughly in the southeast Asian region between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. Among these were domestic dogs, vermin rats, and pottery.

Domestication of dogs & the dawn of pottery probably increased the time clans could remain in one place, perhaps from weeks to months & even, by sea shores, in permanent villages, leading to long-term food storage, which rats & other vermin could take advantage of.

This was during the last glaciation of the ice ages, so the climate likely would have resembled today's northeast Asia more than today's southeat Asia.