Centuries before the first pharaohs, when the great kingdoms had not yet emerged, primitive tribes formed the earliest societies in the valleys of the great Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers, in Anatolia, or on the edges of deserts and mountains. Sedentary villages already existed millennia before the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals, inhabited by hunter-gatherer clans who led a nomadic life only when climatic changes affected the resources of their territory. These people organized communities that engaged in intense trade in the midst of the Stone Age, exchanging the most diverse products-sometimes transported more than two thousand kilometers from their place of origin without the aid of any animals, and sometimes navigating rivers and seas. Before pottery, before the widespread use of copper, before the domestication of the horse, before the plow... complex hunter-gatherer societies gathered wild grains to make wheat and barley flour, drank beer, ate bread... and built shrines and temples, which archaeology has only just begun to uncover. At the dawn of time, the first chapters of human history unfolded; it was an era in which only one animal had been domesticated: the dog. However, humanity was not left to fend for itself; powerful gods watched... and sometimes intervened.