This course focuses on the development of complex societies and cross-cultural interactions from the origins of humans to approximately 1500 C.E. It aims to trace particular historical processes and attempts to understand how human perspective shapes our subjective record of the past. We will look beyond the outdated and trivial study of history to draw meaningful personal connections to past events and people. Over the year, students will effectively analyze how technology, art, trade, religion, politics, and disease tethered diverging groups of people across vast distances and uncover how geography played a central role in historical patterns of continuity and change. In the end, students should come to develop their own unique and dynamic interpretation of world history.