We have widely scattered “seed points” for human civilization all leaning towards a 3k BC start up. Egypt, Mesopotamia,India, China and now Peru. We could always mumble about nomads transferring concepts between the Old World sites, but now we have a New World site with very nearly the same level of sophistication at the same point in time! If we leave out flying saucer abductions,
“monolythic seeding” ala “2001: A Space Oddessy”, some witchdoctor throwing the bones wrong, and pure dumb luck (5 times in a row with the SAME answer at the SAME time ain’t luck, someone is cheating!) what caused all of these civilizations to spin up at the same time?
HSS had apparently been meandering around the world for nearly 100,000 years with a toolkit only marginally superior to his predecessors. Yet within the blink of an evolutionary eye, urbanized, pyramid/temple-building,
socially-structured civilizations start sprouting up like weeds in a flower bed, quite literally all around the world! Why? What pulled the trigger of the starting pistol?
Agriculture. Once you move from nomadic hunter/gatherer societies to more-or-less geographically fixed ones with more-or-less reliable food supplies, it makes sense that you’re going to start developing trade with other “permanent” societies (not that intersocietal trade was necessarily unknown in pre-agricultural societies, either), expanded manufacture of goods, urbanization, the works. (Don’t forget that the illusion of independent simultaneity in the fourth and third centuries was probably assisted, at least in such known trading partners as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, by trade networks: cultures changed to take advantage of and as a result of trade opportunities, just as they do today.) Ancient civilizations didn’t just appear out of nowhere; they had some thousands of years of proto-urbanization behind them.
So how did agriculture develop in different and distant societies? Around 12K–10K BCE, was stationary agriculture independently rediscovered several times or was there transmission between cultures?
One problem with the OP. The levels of technological sophistication were not the same around the world. In the field of construction, the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Indians were ahead of American civilizations in terms of both scale and sophistication. Furthermore, the phrase “at the same time” is somewhat deceptive. We can’t pinpoint the start of civilization; it isn’t clearly defined and even if it was, we could only tell when each individual location got “civilized” to within a margin of several centuries. In short, there is no evidence for a global “trigger of the starting pistol”.
I don’t know about climate. Seems any major climate change that made agriculture possible in one place would make it impossible somewhere else.
I had a thread related to this a few months ago, I hypothesize that there was a global culture some time in prehistory that was more advanced than what we currently believe existed during that time frame - I’m not talking Atlantis, spaceships, any of that junk, but something comparable to the primitive river valley civilizations that popped up later. This protoculture may have been wide-ranging enough to spread it’s ideas over most of the world, the Incans were able to manage a pretty big empire with stone age technology, I don’t see why it couldn’t happen before. After the fall of this hypothetical civilization some traces of it’s knowledge remain, language, myths, architectural styles remembered and passed down in the areas where it used to have settlements. Population density later reaches the point where the old knowledge becomes more useful and next thing you know a half dozen civilizations with a lot in common show up in river valleys across the world.
Can you provide a way for this global culture to bridge the communication problem?
Speed of communication is directly proportional to the possible workable size of a culture/civilization. The Romans were probably the culture with the fastest communication and largest area ruled in pre-modern times, and they had problems with outlying provinces asserting their independence even then. If they weren’t situated where they were, with the Mediterranean as a major highway, they would have been lucky to keep control of just Italy and southern Gaul for longer than a century or two.
So how does this global civilization overcome that communications gap? And why didn’t any of those four “archetypal” civilizations have a language that was related to any other? Indo-European/Semitic/Hamitic/Native American…four different language families. Five, actually, if you include the Harappa and Mohenjo-daro sites as a separate pre-Aryan civilization.
It may just be an artifact of the failings of our techniques to extrapolate changes in languages, but Indo-European, Semitic, Hamitic, and most of the language groups appear to have a common ancestor.
As far as communications - the Incans did well with relay runners. Smoke signals, drummings, semaphore, and heliograph could all have been used as well.
On the topic of climate, scientists put the end of the last ice age at roughly 10,000 years ago, long before the time ranges that we are talking about. However, there might have been minor but still significant global changes in climate around the 3000B.C. date. However, there is not any evidence of such a climate change, so I’m going to hold with random chance until I see some factual data that contradicts it.
There’s one problem that I have both with the OP and Badtz Maru’s theory. We have evidence of five civilzations springing up in roughly the same time period. However, these five represent only a small portion of the world’s and area and population. Certainly, life was more of a struggle to survive all over the world around 3000 B.C. then it is in more recent civilzations. For any primitive society, food supplies, natural disasters, and warfare are going to be a problem. If there really was ancient knowledge being passed down, I feel that any group of people anywhere would have put it to good use. This doesn’t necessarily mean building a great pyramid, because some cultures didn’t have the resources to do that. But any knowledge of architecture, for example, would be used to build houses and maybe other buildings. Yet there are some areas of the world where solid stone architecture never appeared. The Incas built some impressive buildings and roads, but indigenous people of the Amazon basin nearby never developed such things.
"Oldest evidence of city life in the Americas reported in Science, early urban planners emerge as power players
"The ancient Peruvian site of Caral may have been one of the first urban centers in the Americas, thriving more than a thousand years before other known cities, according to a study in the 27 April issue of the international journal, Science.
"New radiocarbon dates indicate that Caral’s immense stone structures were built between 2600 and 2000 B.C. This inland metropolis is therefore roughly the same age as smaller maritime-based societies on the coast, previously thought to preceed more complex societies.
“'The size of a structure is really an indication of power,” said Haas. "It means that leaders of the society were able to get their followers to do lots of work. People don’t just say ‘hey, let’s built a great big monument,’ they do it because they’re told to and because the consequences of not doing so are significant.’
"Haas and his colleagues, Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University, and Ruth Shady Solis of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima, used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of reed fibers from shicra bags found at Caral. (“Shicra” is the indigenous word for “woven.”) Because the reeds live for only one year, the dates were extremely specific.
"Workers used the bags to carry rocks for building enormous structures called platform mounds, which were partly ceremonial and partly residential for high-status citizens. Instead of reusing the bags, workers placed them, rocks and all, inside the structures’ retaining walls. " and more–
No, they do not. The Nostratic hypothesis has never gained acceptance among linguists. I believe this has been noted before.
This is no way overcomes the hurdles, evidentiary above all, to your pan-global culture.
In re Jois: come on now, you’ve read Diamond and you should be able to look at the dates. There’s no earthly way to characterize the emergence of civilization as coming at the same time, even accepting these new Peruvian dates – 2000BC ain’t 7OOOBC for example. No reason to connect them.
Too true, of course, Peru has to be an entirely separate and much later event and nothing tops Diamond for detailing the process. Lately, I’ve been thinking in terms of water resource management, either the organization falls into place (by whatever means) to manage those resources or doesn’t, but without it nothing larger than a tribal structure emerges.
The Hydraulic hypothesis. It’s been roundly critiqued to my understanding, but may have some merit. However to my understanding doesn’t do much to explain the Americas.
Not sure one can really derive a single theory of causation to civilization.
Well, dang! I didn’t know someone had come along and hogged The Hydraulic Hypothesis without me! And I just learned about the Maritime Hypothesis, too. The Peru discovery put paid to the Maritime Hypothesis. No good way of getting around Diamond is there!
IMHO the answer, as has been mentioned, is agriculture.
The important thing is to look at what these areas had in common. (I am leaving Peru out because I haven’t made any studies of the area. What I do have shows that it is climatically very similar to the other areas so this information is likely to apply to Peru as well). All the areas are large river valleys bordering on or running through desert areas. From 8,000 to 3,000 BCE they were significantly wetter than today (but were already bordering on semi-arid). All of these areas had native populations of grains(wheat, rice, rye, maize). Humans had been cultivating the wild cereals in a form of primative agriculture for centuries. This varied from just throwing a portion of the wild cereals back and returning to the area a year later, to actual seed selection, sowing, weeding etc. Serveral groups still do this kind of basic agriculture today (although generally with tubers rather than grains). Many of these early farmers were still nomadic or semi-nomadic cycling between different “fields” at different times of the year.
As the climate warmed and dried out, the native range of these cereals changed. In many places the humans were forced to adapt to a new lifestyle or migrate. However in these 4 Afro-Eurasisian river valleys the folks adopted irrigation instead. People still haven’t agreed if this was a coincidence and the same discovery was made more or less simultaneously (if events within 1000 years give or take can be called simultaneous) or if migratory Eurasians passed this information from one to another. There is some evidence for each.
I personally find the idea of multiple discovery to be more compelling. I mean all of these places are very similar. Each was becoming more arid and the farmers would see their crops dying. They would likely know the cause from past experience, not enough water. Just a short distance away there would be more than enough water. It would only take a couple of people to make the logical leap and the shift to irrigation would begin.
Badtz Maru: As you say a climate change that makes agriculture more likely in one place, makes it less likely than in another. It is no surprise than that all these areas are relatively similar.
ITR Champion: The climate change was less significant than you seem to be implying. It was also more gradual. It is also still taking place. The growth of the Sahara and desertification of many areas bordering on deserts are the effects we are seeing today. Of course humans are changeing the equation, but you see areas like North Africa where in Roman times were major grain producers and a few hundred years later are no longer exporting grain. Several Major farm complexes in Tunisia are no longer capable of growing the crops they once did.
I’m inclined to agree with you, but there are also several other factors to consider as well. First, population levels. Along with climate considerations, availability of grains/fruits, water resources, etc., there has to be some “critical” minimum population level that “forces” people into a sedentary agricultural mode of existence (let’s leave out shifting or “slash and burn” agricultural for the sake of the discussion).
Another has to do with storage capabilities. I remember reading that the transition from hunter/gatherer socities to agricultural ones varied considerably - for some, the transition was rather rapid as population pressures forced those socieities to adopt an agricultural lifestyle (limited range of foodstuffs/other resources available in a given geographic area - forces society to store grains). For others, the transition was more gradual (a much wider range of foodstuff/other resources in a given geographic area allowing them to maintain aspects of a hunter/gatherer lifestyle longer even with increases in population - more/wider variety of food allowing for less need to store food over time).
IMHO, I also tend to agree with Collounsbury that there isn’t one causal factor that led to the emergence of the aforementioned civilizations, but I do think that there werea congruence of several key factors that allowed them to emerge where and when they did - such as similarities in the climate, resource availibility, and population pressures, for example.
I think what is being missed here is the most important question and the one that we are now unable to answer “Why were the Pyramids built?”
Perhaps the best way to approach this question is by looking at the impact the pyramids have had. When the first pyramids were built (the step pyramids at Sakkara) they were then known as the tallest man-made structure in the world. Subsequent pyramids dethroned it of the title with the Great Pyramid being the pinnacle of the design. It wasn’t until thousands of years later that it was dethroned of its title.
While I was visiting Luxor last year, the theme that was drummed up the most was the quest for immortality. Egyptians lived their lives in preparation for death. I couldn’t stop feeling that these “Pharoah-Gods” got exactly what they wanted. Millions of people still flock to see their temples and tombs and the Pramids have attracted people for thousands of years.
Perhaps that is as simple as it gets. The Pharoahs with their impressive education most certainly understood human nature. Thus, they were able to become “immortal” and have influence over millenia.
A final aside. We should all be focusing on finding Imhotep’s tomb. Since he was the only non-Pharoah in Ancient Egypt who received the adulation of a Pharoach and since he is now being reveled as the father of medicine, architecture, engineering, etc., his tomb should be magnificent, untouched, and could provide us with answers to many of our questions.
Fucking Pyramids. And people wonder why I hate taking them by them when they visit. In fact I hate being forced into the motherfucking Egyptian Museum too.
No, its just not relevant to any question discussed here. As for why, because they could. Monumental architecture.
Then you either had a bad tour guide or filtered everything through preconceptions.
Whatever, they got jack for publicity for a good thousand years when few to none “flocked” to the big pointy wastes of good stone.
Oh this is rich. Impressive educations? Understood human nature? Influence over millenia? You need to learn something about this from serious literature.
However, we do have something recent and interesting:
in Troy et al. Genetic evidence for Near-Eastern origins of European cattle in Nature 410, 1088 - 1091 (2001) we have some intriguing evidence on the multiple nature of domestications. The article in question, from last week’s Nature, is a genetic examination (based on mta and incorporating nucleate analyses) of the genetic history of modern domesticate cattle, in particular European but also Indian, African and Mid East. The analysis appears to preclude European inputs to cattle domestication. The authors note that “ancient [European non-domesticate bovine] sequences cluster tightly in a phylogenetic analysis and are clearly distinct from modern cattle” and suggests that there were two seperate domestication events, one in India and one in the Middle East region. They indicate “Network analysis of modern Bos taurus identifies four star-like clusters of haplotypes, with intra-cluster diversities that approximate to that expected from the time depth of domestic history. Notably, one of these clusters predominates in Europe and is one of three encountered at substantial frequency in the Near East. In contrast, African diversity is almost exclusively composed of a separate haplogroup, which is encountered only rarely elsewhere.”
It appears in general the data support the Diamond argument in re domestication occured where it was possible, not for lack of trying on the part of homo sapiens.
Now what does this imply in regards to social formations and rise of settled civilization?
Shades of Elliot Smith and the traveling sun worshippers!!
I suspect there is more than a little diffusionism in human (pre)history, and a fair amount of invented-in-place parallelism. In general, the answer to any such either-or question is “all of the above.”
I was wondering if you guys read Nature and if you could tell me where were the OOA and MREH people with commentaries to counter the arguments about cattle mtDNA, where’s Hansen? Ah, well, that’s probably antoher story!
Beate Scherf, an animal genetic resources expert in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Rome office said, “When you transfer improved breeds from developed to developing countries, they probably won’t produce as in their country of origin.” The very short article in April 2001 Discover magazine points out that native livestock has adaptations that breeds developed in other countries would not have. This probably applied all the way back to early times.
And all the way back we have been networkers, travellers, traders so adapting an idea seen someplace else right back here at home would not have been unusual at all.
