Geography I think would first have to involve people and their cultural up rise throughout the world. The rise of culture first happen after the ice age, known as the Paleolithic Era. This is when Stone age man first started to develop individualistic culture. This was so because as the big glacier retreated, humans first started to move up into Scandinavia and parts of western Russia, These areas since they were further north and therefore colder demanded a much more complex lifestyle to survive (Fellman/Getis, Human Geography 2nd edition C.Brown Publishers Chicago  1990). Cultural traits such as the bow and arrow, perhaps weaving or the discovery of how to make mud bricks for shelter might have risen to more complex and therefore advanced cultures.  This may relate to the Man-Land tradition which is explained in On Air Waters and Places

It was written by a Greek physician by the name of Hippocrates which contains much information on the affects of the environment on humans. This can be especially seen with the onset of the neolithic period where growth of population became quite apparent and in a much more refined form was the domestication of plants carried through by a more advanced set of tools. By the end of the neolithic age cultural hearths emerged that were the forerunners of civilizations.  These were firstly Mesopotamia and Egypt, latter the Indus Valley , North China and finally Meso-America, and Andean hearth areas.  Now some would argue that these are of the classification of anthropology but geography as I said before involves a very broad topic which in this case includes some of the anthropological field. Now these areas first developed pristine civilizations, that is they did not take their culture from another culture such as the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.  These areas all had a few things in common. They were all of fertile soils. They all were reasonably warm with respect to climate, and they were all relatively clear areas that were in some areas lowland river deltas. The river deltas were the ends of the Major river systems around what the civilizations depended. The fact that they all had some environmental feature in common some would suggest reflects the Man- Land tradition of  the anthropological move from wandering bands of people to tribes, to chiefdoms and eventually states.