Human "place-making" began over a million years ago when early humans made the hearth the center of social life. By 450,000 years ago, they were using caves in southwest Asia and sometimes buried their dead beneath the floor, linking memory-making with place-making. Hunter-gatherers started settling seasonally around 24,000 years ago, with permanent stone settlements by 13,000 BCE. Large, co-resident communities became common in the Holocene. The Neolithic (9600-6000 BCE) saw major social, economic, and cultural innovations, including architecture, monuments, and symbolic systems. Neolithic societies, with their complex economic relations, proto-urban patterns, and ritualistic architecture, were the first "imagined communities," deeply tied to memory and social symbolism. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40163]