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"Before we'd even become Homo sapiens sapiens, humans lived everywhere from South Africa up to Britain and over to China. There were mountain people, coastal people, people who hunted woolly mammoths, and people who'd never seen a woolly mammoth in their lives. Just like we see with distinct groups of other animals, these differences of experience, adaptation, and expectation would have made for real cultural and even physical differences between populations. A few hundred thousand years later, as groups began to settle down and build cities they often enclosed them within massive walls. The ways different cultures interact across those walls could be seen as the central story of civilization. Top archaeologists from around the world have been exploring that story for the past week in public presentations and conversations at the 2015 Dialogue of Civilizations in Beijing."