Whether you think the human story begins in a garden in Mesopotamia known as Eden, or in present-day east Africa, it is clear that human beings did not start life as an urban creature. Man’s habitat at the outset was dominated by the need to find food, and hunting and gathering were rural pursuits. Not until around 11,000 years ago, did he start building anything that might be called a village. It took another 6000 years for cities of more than 100,000 people to develop.
In terms of human history this may seem a welcome development. It would be questionable to say that nothing of consequence has ever come out of the countryside. The wheel was presumably a rural invention. Even city-dwellers need bread as well as circuses. And if Dr. Johnson and Shelley were right to say that poets are the true legislators of mankind, then all those hills and lakes and other rural delights must be given credit for inspiring them.
But the rural contribution to human progress seems slight compared with the urban one. Cities’ development is synonymous with human development. The first villages came with the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of animals: people no longer had to wander but could instead draw together in settlements, allowing some to develop particular skills. After a while the farmers could produce surpluses, and the various products could be exchanged.
Living together meant security. But people also drew together for the practical advantages of being in a particular place: by a river or spring, on a defensible hill or peninsula, next to an estuary (the mouth of a river) or other source of food. Also important, argue historians, was a settlement’s capacity to draw people to it as a meeting-place, often for sacred or spiritual purposes. Graves, groves, even caves might become places for ceremonies and rituals. Man did not live by bread alone.
But bread, in the broadest sense, was important. People came to cities not just to worship but to trade and the goods they bought and sold were not just farm products but the manufactures of urban craftsmen and skilled workers. The city became a centre of exchange, both of goods and of ideas, and so it also became a centre of learning, and innovation.
Cities were much more than all of this, of course, and they were not all the same. As they developed, some were most notable for their religious role, as the hub of an empire, as centres of administration, political development, learning, or commerce. Some flourished, some died, their longevity depending on factors as varied as conquest, plague, misgovernment or economic collapse.

The first paragraph suggests that early human beings’ living places（）