Where do we come from? How did our ancestors settle this planet? How did the great historic civilizations of the world develop? How does a past so shadowy that it has to be painstakingly reconstructed from fragmentary, largely unwritten records nonetheless make us who and what we are?

These 36 lectures bring you the answers that scientific and archaeological research and theorizing suggest about human origins, how populations developed, and the ways in which civilizations spread throughout the globe. It's a fascinating 36-lecture narrative that covers human prehistory from our beginnings more than 2.5 million years ago up to and beyond the advent of the world's first preindustrial civilizations. Along the way, you'll explore a fascinating set of civilizations, including Homo habilis (the first tool-making hominid); the Cro-Magnons, among the first known artists as well as hunter-gatherers; Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia and the intricate patchwork of city-states between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; and the mysterious Harappan civilization of the Indus. Woven through this narrative is a set of pervasive themes: emerging human biological and cultural diversity, the impact of human adaptations to climatic and environmental change, and the importance of seeing prehistory not merely as a chronicle of archaeological sites but of the stories of the people who created them.