We have now analyzed the world system into a number of processes of lesser range and magnitude. But we also know that the world system is not a free-standing or autonomously propagating process. It is likely to be, in a nesting fashion, part of some larger-scale arrangement. That larger arrangement, too, is likely to be subject to evolutionary tendencies. What might be that arrangement?

These are "sweeping" but important questions: is there a large process of which world system evolution (with a period of 8000 years) is a part? how might world system evolution place in the larger scheme of the evolution of the human species (homo sapiens sapiens)? how do we explain the origins, or the inception, of the world system, and what is the larger framework in which that system must be situated?

These are "good" questions. Could it be that at first, human (homo sapiens sapiens) evolution wrought the differentiation of humanity from nature. Could that pre-historical period, extending for over 30,000 years, be thought of as having comprised four phases? It might have begun with the adoption of a fully efficient human language, including the use of syntax. Such a cultural breakthrough, we might suppose, would in turn promote kinship linkages and family groups in a next phase of that evolution. Then, at the peak of the last ice age, humans would have been driven into caves and other permanent settlements. Finally, some 10,000 years ago, we might have reached the start of agriculture in to-day's Middle East, and soon elsewhere. This celebrated Agricultural Revolution laid down the necessary preconditions for the next step in human evolution: the rise of civilization.

What is not in doubt is that the centuries before -3000 mark a strategic turning point, toward sociiality. They might be seen as the start of world system evolution, and of all the arrangements that over time have come to make up our major social institutions. But they also signaled the onset of civilization, a deeper change that extended not only to society but also to culture, human nature, and to human relations to the environment. We might define (singular) civilization (a word whose root is the same as that for city) as a condition of humanity characterized by urbanity, or a culture of urban living, one that might be contrasted with barbarism in a condition of nature. City life is made possible by agricultural surpluses, so that the city becomes the first large-scale human cultural artifact and urban life marks the differentiation of culture from society in human evolution. It is a characteristic of human evolution to have entered upon civilization (and history proper) with the onset of urbanization, over 5000 years ago, and it is a stage that we are still living through, and are likely to continue in well into the future.