Humans and Ideas
In Big Era Six, Europe emerged as a center of technological and scientific advance, a hotbed of ideas and inventions that contributed greatly to the building of denser networks of human interaction. It is important to note, however, that Europe enjoyed this role only because its thinkers and experimenters were able to build on the legacy of scientific and technological exchanges that had been part of Afroeurasian history for several millennia. As we have suggested in the discussion for the previous Big Eras, between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, a new synthesis of Arab, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Indian knowledge about nature, society, and the cosmos gradually appeared. Beginning in the twelfth century, Europeans gradually adopted this synthesis of learning and increasingly contributed to it.