China’s Neolithic Zhaobaogou culture, found primarily in the Luan River valley in Inner Mongolia and northern Hebei, begins in about 5400, produces sand-tempered, incised pottery vessels with geometric and zoomorphic designs.

The culture also produces stone and clay human figurines.

Neolithic culture thrives along the Danube at such sites as Starcevo, located on the north bank of the Danube in Vojvodina, opposite Belgrade, Serbia.

It represents the earliest settled farming society in the area, although hunting and gathering still provided a significant portion of the inhabitants' diet.

The pottery is usually coarse but finer fluted and painted vessels later emerged.

A type of bone spatula, perhaps for scooping flour, is a distinctive artifact.

The Korös is a similar culture in Hungary named after the River Korös with a closely related culture that also used footed vessels but fewer painted ones.

Both have given their names to the wider culture of the region in that period.

Parallel and closely related cultures also include the Karanovo culture in Bulgaria, Cris in Romania and the pre-Sesklo in Greece.

The Vinca culture emerges around 5500 on the shores of lower Danube.

As in all prehistoric cultures, the majority of the people of the Vinca network are occupied with the provision of food.

The economy is based on a variety of subsistence techniques: arable agriculture, animal husbandry, and hunting and gathering all contributed to the diet of the growing Vin a population.

Vinca agriculture introduces common wheat, oat, and flax to temperate Europe, and makes greater use of barley than earlier cultures.

These innovations raise potential crop yields, and in the case of flax allow the manufacture of clothes in materials other than leather and wool.

There is also indirect evidence that Vinca agriculture made use of the cattle-driven plow, which would have had a major effect on the amount of human labor required for agriculture as well as the types of soils that could be exploited.

Many of the largest Vinca sites occupy regions dominated by soil types that would have required the use of the plow to farm.

Areas with less arable potential were exploited through transhumant pastoralism, where groups from the lowland villages moved their livestock to nearby upland areas on a seasonal basis.

Cattle was more important than caprids (i.e.

sheep and goats) in Vinca herds and, in comparison to the cultures of the period, livestock was increasingly kept for milk, leather and as draft animals, rather than solely for meat.

Seasonal movement to upland areas was also motivated by the exploitation of stone and mineral resources.

The especially rich permanent upland settlements established would have relied more heavily on pastoralism for subsistence.

The Vinca subsistence economy, increasingly focused on domesticated plants and animals, continued to make use of wild food resources.

The hunting of deer, boar and auroch, fishing of carp and catfish, shell-collecting, fowling and foraging of wild cereals, forest fruits and nuts made up a significant part of the diet at some Vinca sites.

These, however, were in the minority; settlements were invariably located with agricultural rather than wild food potential in mind, and wild resources were usually underexploited unless the area was low in arable productivity.

The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, which has its beginnings around 5500 BCE, was initially named after the village of Cucuteni in Iasi County, Romania, where the first objects associated with it were discovered.

Members of this culture belonged to tribal social groups, scattered over an area of southeast Europe encompassing territories in present-day Romania, Moldova, and southwestern Ukraine.

The important physical features of the land were rolling plains, river valleys, the Black Sea, and the Carpathian Mountains, which were covered by a mixed forest in the west, which gave way to the open grasslands of the steppes in the east.

The climate during the time that this culture flourished has been named the Holocene climatic optimum, and featured cool, wet winters and warm, moist summers.

These conditions would have created a very favorable climate for agriculture in this region.

A copper ax found at Prokuplje in present Serbia indicates that human use of metals started in Europe around seventy-five hundred years ago (~5,500B CE), many years earlier than previously believed.

The first evidence of European metallurgy dates from the sixth and fifth millennium BCE, and was found in the archaeological sites of Majdanpek, Yarmovac, and Plocnik, Serbia.

The earliest copper smelting is found at the Belovode site, these examples include a copper ax, dated from 5500 to 5000 BCE and belonging to the Vinca culture.

Settlers move into the hitherto deserted swamps at the head of the Persian Gulf near the beginning of the second half of fifth millennium BCE and gradually spread northward up the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley called Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers.

The fisher-hunter cultures of the Arabian littoral are responsible for the extensive middens along the Arabian shoreline, and may have been the original Sumerians.

They seem to have dwelt in reed huts.

Eridu (modern Abu Shahrain, one hundred and ninety-six miles (three hundred and fifteen kilometers) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq) appears to be the earliest settlement in the region, founded in about 5400 BCE, close to the Persian Gulf near the mouth of the Euphrates River.

Because of accumulation of silt at the shoreline over the millennia, the remains of Eridu are now some distance from the gulf at Abu Shahrain.

Eridu was the first city in the world, according to the Sumerian kinglist.

The Sumerians claimed that their civilization had been brought, fully formed, to the city of Eridu by their god Enki or by his advisor (or Abgallu from ab=water, gal=big, lu=man), Adapa U-an (the Oannes of Berossus).

The first people at Eridu brought with them the Samarran culture from northern Mesopotamia and are identified with the Ubaid period, but it is not known whether these were Sumerians (associated later with the Uruk period).

Eridu was formed at the confluence of three separate ecosystems, according to Gwendolyn Leick, supporting three distinct lifestyles that had come to an agreement about access to fresh water in a desert environment.