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World historians are frequently occupied, sometimes almost preoccupied, with civilizations, and understandably so, since those urban and state-based communities were clearly the most powerful, expansive, and innovative societies, later embracing almost the entire population of the planet. And yet it is useful to remind ourselves that other ways of organizing human communities evolved alongside civilizations, and they too made history. Two such regions were Africa south of the equator and North America. They shared environments that featured plenty of land and relatively few people compared to the greater population densities and pressure on the land that characterized many civilizations. And a third was Pacific Oceania, where small numbers of people navigated a sea covering about one-third of the world’s surface, settled the mostly tiny specks of land that rose above the surface of that ocean, and created there a remarkable range of human communities.