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Aren't you interested in world history and the spread of the Human Species? In my instance, I began an interest in archeology when a neighbor in Oracle, Az asked it I wanted to help her do some salvage work for the Univ. of AZ along a gas pipeline. Of course, one of the questions was where did these people come from? When we moved to Southeast Asia part-time, my interest went with me. One big question is where the Ban Chiang culture came from. Here is a very advanced culture seemingly springing up 7,000 years ago where there were hunter / gatherers before. It is like a detective novel.

We are all about the same and our individual efforts define us, not our heritage, however, heritage is the story of mankind.

We carry a lot of cultural baggage and understanding it and other peoples histories accurately seems very important to me.

"Here is a very advanced culture seemingly springing up 7,000 years ago where there were hunter / gatherers before. It is like a detective novel."

Maybe they figured out agriculture and a few related things 7000 years ago, just like the other people who emerged from being hunter-gatherers.

One of the more-difficult-to-understand (for me) mental fixations of historians and archaeologists is the idea that knowledge has to "move" from one place to another. Middle Eastern people are not exceptionally smart or exceptionally dumb. It is generally recognized that settled agriculture began there several thousand years ago. But then comes the assertion - based on what? A few shards here and there; mostly, I think, a mental prejudice, that sees agriculture spreading out from there, along with alphabets and other inventions. There seems to be a limited capacity for human belief that 58 different cultures, at varying times, all independently invented agriculture, and pottery, and clothmaking, etc., the staples of "advanced" early civilization.

Fortunately, we DO have the fact that agriculture certainly developed completely independently in at least two separate areas: MesoAmerica and the Middle East.

There is no very good reason to believe it did not ALSO independently develop in, say, Western Europe and India and China as well.

I think that there is just a preference for things to trace back to a single origin, which makes everything simpler (and also establishes a "pecking order" among civilizations, which people definitely prefer making, probably for the same reason that people like to root for sports teams even though there's nothing very distinguishable one to the other...Yankees, Red Sox...what's the difference?).