World history and anthropology are in fact not so distant as was once thought. Historians are trained to examine written documents; their work is in the library rather than the field, that is, with reports of what has happened rather than undertaking first-hand observation, although the category 'oral history' has rather blurred this issue, since history normally involves written records, not oral accounts. Many aspects of contemporary life clearly began in the Bronze Age. Writing, metals, urban society, 'civilization', the religions of conversion, especially the monotheistic ones, and all that they implied. But humankind had existed long before and it was both this long durée of oral cultures and the relatively rapid change with literacy that world history aims to emphasize. One virtue of anthropology for world history is that it considers preliterate societies not simply in a mass as 'primitive', waiting for the advent of civilization that they were unable to achieve themselves.