Shadowing Practice: We Finally Know More About Humanity’s First Civilization - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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You probably think you know human history, but you don't.
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What we know is only a fraction of the story.
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Much of the rest is invisible to us, like dark matter.
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We can't see it, only the effects of its presence.
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Invisible like the wind, silently shaking trees and leaves.
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Almost every trace of the most important chapter in our history has vanished and will forever stay hidden.
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We only see the world that emerged from it.
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The age when our ancestors underwent a fundamental transformation, began cultivating the earth, built settlements, and created civilization.
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We have no writing from this period, no words or eyewitness accounts.
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We don't know their names, how their world felt, sounded, or tasted.
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Only traces in stone, bone, and clay remain.
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But recently, with new techniques for DNA sequencing, dating ancient detritus, mathematical models,
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aerial and LiDAR archaeology, we're getting a faint idea of what this world might have looked and felt like.
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Let's use these newest insights, educated speculation and our imagination to visit the dark matter of our history,
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the time before a single word was written down.
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First, we need to change how we think about our past.
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It's sort of madness that we're all pretending to live in the year 2026.
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It awkwardly splits our history into a before and after at a rather random point in the grand scheme of things.
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2026 years ago, humanity was very much deep in the middle of things.
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And this makes it harder to think about our past properly.
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The year zero should be where civilization began 12 000 years
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ago this is the start of the holocene our current geological period
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and the end of the last ice age
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when earth's climate turned from cold and erratic to warm
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and stable the human era begins here enabling our ancestors to
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lay the foundation for what it means to be human today
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if we just add 10 000 years to our calendar suddenly our perspective feels incredibly different.
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You, fellow human, are living in the year 12 ,026.
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You look back on over 12 ,000 years of history.
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And while the people living back then may seem impossibly distant, they were exactly the same as we are today.
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Modern humans experiencing the same emotions, wants and dreams.
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This is why every year we create our human era calendar
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that celebrates all of humanity but more on
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that at the end of the video okay now
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that the stage is set let's dive in to the dark
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matter of history to where it all began the beginning of
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civilization the year zero of human history in the hills of southern anatolia
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and northern syria the first truly connected human cultural world emerges.
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This is Karahan Tepe, one of the first villages known to us.
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Today is the first day of our timeline, day one of the year zero.
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12 ,026 years ago from you watching this.
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Hundreds of people have come together from tribes around the region for the greatest gathering in history so far, an epic event for everyone involved.
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They're celebrating the first great construction of humanity 7 000 years before the pyramids
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how would they have felt
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if they'd known what it would lead to eventually with tools of stone
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and wood they begin to carve shapes into bedrock t -shaped
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columns multiple meters high decorated with strange animals naked humans proudly presenting their fertility figurines of birds
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or beasts we don't know how exactly they did this or why it's the first religion being born here
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what are the names of the long lost forgotten gods they're trying to please
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or are they just following a human desire to express their inner worlds all we know for sure is
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that this is a project of epic scale for the stone age
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and the beginning of a new era for the whole planet never before did
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so many humans collaborate on something
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so hard a brutal effort like this requires a lot of energy
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and a new kind of organization and specialization that's never existed before
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while some carve bedrock all day others gather grain bake bread brew beer
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or hunt antelopes to feed the builders of the new world an avalanche of amazing progress is set in motion
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that will only gain speed from here.
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Over millennia, humans have learned that if you put the tasty parts in the ground, they come back again next year, larger, richer.
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Now, with the climate finally stable, communities start to cultivate them in earnest rather than simply gathering from the wild.
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Opening up the ground, ripping out plants they don't desire, sowing the food of today to have more in a distant tomorrow.
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The roots of agriculture are here, with permanent settlements, community, ritual, belief all growing around it.
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At night they come together in what must feel like cathedrals to drink beer, dance and sing, love each other,
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squabble, and chan vows to unknown gods whose names we'll never know.
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This is why we think this is the true first millennium of our history.
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Among the people of Tash Tepele, a name that we've given them, a completely new way of life has emerged and is slowly spreading.
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More villages are emerging from which more epic constructions are started, like Gobekli Tepe, the largest we've found so far.
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Slowly but steadily, farming turns from a seasonal activity into a lifestyle.
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And as it does, more food means more people, new specialists, longer trade networks, the first craftsmen, artists and overseers.
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From bread to living on dead ancestors.
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10 ,000 years ago, the third millennium of the human era begins.
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Perhaps 5 to 10 million of us inhabit our world.
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Progress was not a straight line.
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Different communities experimented with different ways of living, and some paths succeeded while others disappeared.
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Exchange networks, already old, grow busier.
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Tools, beads, seashells, and above all obsidian, the jet -black volcanic glass that flakes into razor edges, travel hundreds of kilometers.
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You could call it the black gold of the Stone Age.
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It ties distant villages into a single web of contact.
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The permanent villages grow larger and more elaborate.
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We don't know exactly why so many people clustered together, more hands for the harvest,
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kinships, festivals and prayers to forgotten gods, trade, safety and numbers.
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But the largest communities humans have ever formed emerge around this time.
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Let's travel west to Çatalhöyük, a metropolis of hundreds of people, around 8 ,500 years ago.
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The village has a unique architecture and way of life.
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There are no streets or alleys, only houses hugging each other closely, accessible only by wooden ladders and bridges and holes in their roofs.
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Surrounded by farmland and feral goats and sheep, the first animals raised for food.
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The insides were beautifully decorated.
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Paintings of animals adorn rooms.
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Plastered ball skulls are set into walls, painted in striking red ochre.
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And figurines of animals and of naked females, maybe they were goddesses, maybe our ancestors just admired the female form as many of us do today,
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we don't know.
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Life in these houses feels eerily similar to our life today.
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Families ate meals of bread and nuts, ate cheese and drank beer, complained about a noisy neighbor or admired a strong lad who beat back a leopard.
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And they honored their dead in a, well, fascinating way.
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If a loved one died, they buried them in their homes, deep below the floorboards.
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After a few years, their bodies were exhumed and their heads removed, decorated and painted.
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Each one did it in their own unique way, some sculpting faces with plaster, others using colorful stones.
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Why do all of this?
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Maybe to keep your family and their memory alive, to have them to tell great stories of the mystic world beyond theirs.
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Whatever the reason was, the living and the dead remained close.
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From gathering grain to war and domination.
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In the fourth millennium of the human era, farmers began spreading in different directions from southwest Asia,
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carrying plants, animals, technologies and new ways of life with them.
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Across Europe and Asia, they encountered communities who'd lived by hunting, fishing and gathering for thousands of years.
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Different groups met, traded materials, shared technologies, and sometimes competed for the same landscapes.
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In some regions, hunter -gatherers and farmers lived alongside one another for centuries.
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In others, farming gradually became the dominant way of life.
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Different farming tribes established themselves, but the relationships between them were not always peaceful.
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We found skeletons bearing wounds from arrows, clubs and other weapons, and grim mass graves.
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Bodies tipped in together, some with arrowheads still lodged in the bone, some filled with men struck down from behind, others with whole families.
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We don't know how violent the transition to farming was, or how common it really was, but violence was part of the dark matter of history.
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As communities grew larger and more permanent, new challenges emerged.
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Food had to be stored.
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resources managed and social tensions resolved villages
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and towns had to permanently protect themselves it's incredible to think how many wild stories we're missing from that time
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the first epic siege one culture attacking another defenses along the perimeters
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heroic victories devastating defeats on a much smaller scale still but more personal More intense for the people who lived through it.
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But there was more to their lives than war.
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How the people of this time truly felt and what they believed in.
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How they argued, made peace, feasted, played with their children and mourned their lovers.
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Almost none of it survives.
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Around 8 ,000 years ago, farming communities had spread across much of Southwest Asia and into Europe.
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New forms of life seem to be flourishing.
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But history rarely moves in a straight line.
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The Dark Matter Apocalypse Around the year 3800 of the human era, a sudden catastrophe happened in North America.
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The receding glaciers of the last ice age had created one of the largest lakes in Earth's history, larger than the Caspian Sea today.
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It was held back by supermassive ice sheets, which formed a gigantic dam.
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A dam of ice in a warming world.
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Oh well.
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Surprising no one, the dam melted and suddenly failed.
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The whole lake suddenly drained into the ocean, global sea levels rose by one to two meters, and the great conveyor belt that carried warm water northwards slowed down.
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Across the North Atlantic and Europe and into the Near East, the climate turned colder and drier in some regions by several degrees.
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Rain patterns shifted, summers grew longer and harsher, and a drought lasting well over a century parched the land.
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This was bad.
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Humans had spent the last few thousand years learning to depend on predictable rainfall to grow crops, and suddenly this was over.
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For some communities, this turned into an existential crisis.
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But people were resilient and adapted, finding new ways to sustain themselves.
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Some leaned harder on their animals, some turned to sea for food, others shifted their settlements from plains to neighboring mountains.
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Or they just left, looking for a completely new home.
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We know that during this time all over the world, migration towards rivers and lakes sped up, bringing agriculture and technology with them.
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Some of the most consequential journeys led into the Nile Valley, where farming villages took root and slowly laid the ground for the rich civilization that would one day rise there.
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And in Mesopotamia, something remarkable began.
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Over the generations, communities started to bend the rivers to their will, digging canals, steering water onto their fields, storing the grain it produced.
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It was one of the great leaps in human organization, and over the long run, it would make them the richest people of their age,
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their surpluses feeding a population boom that much later would give rise to the first true city -states.
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It must have been such a time of drama and suffering but also hope and persistence.
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After a century or two the climate stabilized and the droughts ended.
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Humanity found itself once again in a new position.
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Agricultural societies had mastered their first proper test and now they would make their next big jump forward.
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The end of the dark matter era.
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Around the year 5 ,000 of the human era, 7 ,000 years ago, the speed of progress changes and so does the pace of our story now.
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A steady food supply allows populations to grow, some villages expand to impressive sizes.
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By around 6 ,000 years ago, in what's now Ukraine, people of Trapilya culture built true mega settlements.
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Places like Talyanki, vast concentric rings of houses home to thousands of people farming wheat barley
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and peas and keeping animals as these centers of humanity grow
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and become more and more common trade between them explodes with materials
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and goods ideas are being exchanged
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and progress picks up pace again copper the plow the wheel
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we're now traveling to uruk in the year 6800 one of
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the first real cities in the history of the world it houses tens of thousands has monumental temples
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and genuine urban life a village can live from memory a city can't
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so a new social class emerges administrators they count the grain distribute resources collect taxes
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that enable the expansion of their cities
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to manage all that they invent the first accounting system mark on clay balls and tablets counting barley or sheep, slowly transforming into actual writing.
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It's here that the dark matter period of history ends, with a note scratched into wet clay, the first name in history, Kusim.
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A signature on a tablet recording barley for beer, handed over at a temple.
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It's not much, we don't know anything else about Kusim, how he was feeling when he received the beer, if he had any of it that day, or what it tasted like,
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what his life was like in the first city to ever grace our planet.
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We finally have a name which stands for all the forgotten ones in the dark matter of history,
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all the lives, experiences and accomplishments which paved the way for our civilization today.
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That's why the Human Era Calendar is our most cherished project every year.
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It starts counting not 2 ,000, but 12 ,000 years ago at the dawn of human civilization.
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We want to include all of humanity and remind you that your story is part of the human era as well.
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Our 12 ,027 calendar just dropped,
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and this year we honor the dark tales and legends that helped us make sense of the world before science.
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Each month takes you on a journey through forgotten worlds and human imagination.
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It's not just a year's worth of Kurzgesagt art for your home, it's a declaration of human expression and creativity in a time of meaningless AI slop.
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That's also why our calendar comes with a postcard that features one of six concept sketches from our illustrators.
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Pair the calendar with our human era calendar artbook to collect every calendar illustration we've ever made.
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Or bundle it with our new space video artbook.
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Both artbooks are jam -packed with behind -the -scenes sketches, stories and fun facts from the Kurzgesagt team.
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Your purchase funds our independent science channel, gives our artists and researchers the time good work requires,
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helps us release new free educational videos for everyone, and spark curiosity for science.
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Treat yourself
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or gift the 12 ,027 human era calendar to someone you
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want to inspire through the whole year support art about humans by humans for humans
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you want to listen to the beautiful soundtrack without my annoying
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voice well it's up to you just select the audio track interlingua down here
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and watch the video again as a music video.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “We Finally Know More About Humanity’s First Civilization”. This video has 140 sentences and 2588 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:14. The speaker talks at a natural 150 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 79% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| calendar noun | /ˈkæl.ən.də/ | Any system by which time is divided into days, weeks, months, and years. |
| emerge verb | /ɪˈmɝd͡ʒ/ | To come into view. |
| humanity noun | /hjuˈmænɪti/ | Humankind; human beings as a group. |
| civilization noun | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | An organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political, or technical… |
| gather verb | /ˈɡæðɚ/ | To collect normally separate things. |
| epic noun | /ˈɛp.ɪk/ | An extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, celebrating the feats of a deity, demigod (heroic epic), other legend or traditional hero. |
| grain noun | /ɡɹeɪn/ | The harvested seeds of various grass food crops, especially wheat, maize, rye, barley, and rice. |
| clay noun | /kleɪ/ | A mineral substance made up of small crystals of silica and alumina, that is ductile when moist; the material of pre-fired ceramics. |
| distant adjective | /ˈdɪstənt/ | Far off (physically, logically or mentally). |
| millennium noun | /mɪˈlɛnɪəm/ | A period of time consisting of one thousand years. |
| stable noun | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | A building, wing or dependency set apart and adapted for lodging and feeding (and training) ungulates, especially horses. |
| bone noun | /boʊn/ | A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates. |
| naked adjective | /ˈneɪkɪd/ | Bare, not covered by clothing. |
| pace noun | /peɪs/ | A step taken with the foot. |
| agriculture noun | /ˈæɡ.ɹɪˌkʌl.t͡ʃɚ/ | The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the growing and harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of livestock. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| beat back verb | To fight against and cause to recede. |
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| hold back verb | To act with reserve; to contain one's full measure or power. |
| live through verb | To survive a difficult period or event |
| open up verb | To open. |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
| rip out verb | To remove by ripping |
| slow down verb | To decelerate. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was written · is set · being born |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has vanished · have come · have felt |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 12 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, can't, we'll. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, mathematical /ˌmæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪ.kəl/, theirs /ðɛɚz/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, organisation /ˈɔː.ɡə.naɪˌzeɪ.ʃən/, imagination /ɪˌmæd͡ʒəˈneɪʃən/, sheep /ˈʃiːp/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, agriculture /ˈæɡ.ɹɪˌkʌl.t͡ʃɚ/, organisation /ˈɔː.ɡə.naɪˌzeɪ.ʃən/, imagination /ɪˌmæd͡ʒəˈneɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like calendar, emerge, humanity.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.