Manufacturing Manufacturing industry had its origin in the New Stone
Age, with the application of techniques for grinding corn, baking clay, spinning and weaving textiles, and also, it seems likely, for
dyeing, fermenting, and distilling. Some evidence for all these processes can be derived from archaeological findings, and some of them
at least were developing into specialized crafts by the time the first urban civilizations appeared. In the same way, the early
metalworkers were beginning to acquire the techniques of extracting and working the softer metals, gold, silver, copper, and tin, that
were to make their successors a select class of craftsmen. All these incipient fields of specialization, moreover, implied developing
trade between different communities and regions, and again the archaeological evidence of the transfer of manufactured products in the
later Stone Age is impressive. Flint arrowheads of particular types, for example, can be found widely dispersed over Europe, and the
implication of a common locus of manufacture for each is strong.
Such transmission suggests improving facilities for transport and communication. Paleolithic man presumably depended
entirely on his own feet, and this remained the normal mode of transport throughout the Stone Age. Domestication of the ox, the donkey,
and the camel undoubtedly brought some help, although difficulties in harnessing the horse long delayed its effective use. The dugout
canoe and the birch-bark canoe had demonstrated the potential of water transport, and, again, there is some evidence that the sail had
already appeared by the end of the New Stone Age.
It is notable that the developments so far described in human prehistory took place over a long period of time,
compared with the 5,000 years of recorded history, and that they took place first in very small areas of the Earth's surface and
involved populations minute by modern criteria. The Neolithic Revolution occurred first in those parts of the world with an unusual
combination of qualities: a warm climate, encouraging rapid crop growth, and an annual cycle of flooding that naturally regenerated the
fertility of the land. On the Eurasian-African landmass such conditions occur only in Egypt, Mesopotamia, northern India, and some of
the great river valleys of China. It was there, then, that men and women of the New Stone Age were stimulated to develop and apply new
techniques of agriculture, animal husbandry, irrigation, and manufacture; and it was there that their enterprise was rewarded by
increasing productivity, which encouraged the growth of population and triggered a succession of sociopolitical changes that converted
the settled Neolithic communities into the first civilizations. Elsewhere, the stimulus to technological innovation was lacking or was
unrewarded, so that these areas had to await the transmission of technical expertise from the more highly favoured areas. Herein is
rooted the separation of the great world civilizations, for while the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations spread their influence
westward through the Mediterranean and Europe, those of India and China were limited by geographical barriers to their own hinterlands,
which, although vast, were largely isolated from the mainstream of Western technological progress.
Manufacturing