Pirates me hearties, pirates!

[Jester]

I think, to even start to come up with a "big regions" map of world civilizations, you'd have to block off a whole series of areas. My off-the-top-of-my-head list would be this, trying to keep geographical and cultural areas intact without utterly running totally roughshod over history:

Chinese cultural area
Indian subcontinent
Central Asia
Persia/Mesopotamia/Arabia/East Africa (possibly several regions, possibly not)
The Mediterranean
Atlantic Northern Europe
Slavic Eastern Europe
Sub-Saharan Africa
Andean South America
Mesoamerica
East Coast/Great Lakes North America
West Coast America
Australasia

Now, these all change considerably over time, and there are plenty of borderlands that might just as well be their own areas. Some areas only appear recently as densely inhabited spaces (Southern Cone Latin America, Brazil, Plains of North America) But at least that list doesn't lump a billion Indians and a billion Chinese together as "eastern" or "oriental" or whatever.

-Jester