As I understand it, *homo sapiens sapiens *has been around at least 100,000 years, possibly much longer. But civilizations, like those in the Middle East, India, China, and the Americas, have only been around for the past several thousand years. As far as I know, each of these civilizations came about on its own, not influenced by any of the others. So how do we explain the fact that it happened in different places on the planet at relatively the same time (within a few thousand years)? Why wasn’t there a civilization 100,000 years ago, or 50,000, or 20,000? Why did it happen when it did, in different parts of the world, independently?
The last Ice Age ended only about 10,000 years ago. Before then it would have been difficult to get a civilization going. People would have been barely surviving in hunting societies, agriculture would be impracticable. And it’s generally accepted that you need agriculture to start a civilization.
But why no civilizations before or between the ice ages, or in warmer areas of the planet? What happened, globally, since the last ice age, to change things?
Is it possible that there actually was some sort of civilization before people started branching out from Africa, and they just took it with them?
But the last ice age started before fully modern humans evolved, before the time Homo sapiens sapiens spread out from Africa.
And before you can ask “Why didn’t it happen sooner?”, you have to be able to answer the question, “Why did it happen at all?”.
Depends on what you consider “possible.” We haven’t found even the slightest trace of any such civilizations despite every archaeologist in the world looking intensively for them.
We do know, however, that lots of major changes occurred in climate at the time of the end of the last ice age, and that allowed an intermingling of human societies with plants and animals in a systematic way that there is no evidence for earlier.
The middle east had a particularly favorable set of circumstances, which is why almost all the earliest evidence for agriculture and domestication of animals comes from there, around 10-12,000 years ago. That may or may not have influenced the other older civilizations. There’s debate whether it all started there or was replicated two or three times elsewhere. In any case, the number of independent starts for civilizations is very low.
Various scientists have made guesses that something happened in the brain around 40,000 years ago that made the difference: the ability to develop languages, or create art, or conceptualize thoughts. There have been some genetic tests that kinda sorta maybe back up some change at that time that got exploited at the first good chance. I don’t think most scientists would buy into these notions, but they’re always good for popular science articles.
But lost civilizations? They’re still fiction.
Sorry, I just saw this. It’s not true, though.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html
There were modern humans out of Africa all over the near east and Europe before 75,000 years ago.
Perhaps because the human brain is evolving. Two “brain” genes have been identified gaiining prominence from 37,000 years ago and 5800 years ago. Of course not everyone has the genes, one or both, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of “smart” people to exploit the others.
See http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002987.html
make of that what you will
IIRC, according to a Discovery Channel or NOVA special (no cite), there was a massive human species die-off about 65,000 years ago. It was identified through DNA evidence.
Wikipedia’s take on that population bottleneck.The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred ca. 70,000 years ago, positing that the human population was reduced to a few thousand individuals when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a massive environmental change.
Well, not all over the M.E., but there were what we call “anatomically modern” Homo sapiens in Israel around 100,000 years ago. We don’t appear to have descended from those groups though, as the evidence points to all extant non-African populations having left Africa 50-60,000 years ago.
The answer to the OP’s question is: We simply don’t know. There are a number of hypothesis, but we really don’t know and probably never will. It could be that it just takes a certain amount of time for the population to reach some critical point at which time more complex social structures have to be formed in order for the groups to survive (in competition with other groups).
First let’s clear up that agriculture appeared independently in Mexico and the Middle East and probably in China and New Guinea. India imported agriculture. The second criterion for civilisation, writing, appeared independently in the Middle East, China and Mexico.
So back to the question.
This all seems to be an inevitable consequence of what Anthropologists/Palaeontologists refer to as “The Great Leap Forward”.. Essentially until about 60, 000 years ago humanity was amazingly, well, inhuman. There appeared to be no artwork, almost no innovation, limited trade or travel, minimal clothing and numerous other missing points that we tend to think characterise modern humans. Then somewhere between 60 and 40K years ago the human species blossomed. All of a sudden all around the world we see major artworks from sculpture to paintings to musical instruments. We see a profusion of not just clothing but changing fashions. And none of these changes seem to be gradually developed. There are no crude figurines or badly made clothing. Everything seems to spring into existence fully formed .
For some reason after the last Ice Age humanity seems to have rapidly become human. There are all sorts of hypotheses put forward to explain this sudden change from genetic changes to the development of modern language to population increase to the increased post-glacial productivity. But none of the explanations is very convincing.
Whatever the cause humanity seems to be very different today to what it was 60, 000 years ago, nit physically but mentally. And one of the changes is that since then we have taken to living in increasingly large groups and innovating far more. And one of the consequences of that increased population size and increased innovation has been the adoption of agriculture.
So it seems likely that civilisation couldn’t have arisen much more than 50, 000 years ago because humans simply weren’t mentally capable of it. And civilisation wasn’t likely prior to 25, 000 years ago because the climate was both too cold and too unreliable. It was the coincidence of the stable post-glacial climate and the newly evolved human intelligence that enabled agriculture. And it seems that almost as soon as we had those two factors we immediately set out on the path to civilisation. But without those things humans were really just another species amongst many.
The reason why this always fails to convince me is that humans were in New Guinea for over 50, 000 years before they developed agriculture and in North America for 10, 000 years. Yet both groups developed agriculture within 3,000 years of each other.
The idea that the “certain amount of time for the population to reach some critical point” just happened to co-incide in four different locations across three continents seems so improbale as to be incredible.
Where do you get those numbers? Agriculture in the Americas can be traced back a lot longer than 4,000 years ago, and I doubt that agriculture was developed in N.G. during the Common Era.
You also seem to be assuming that agriculture = civilization. That simply isn’t true.
But keep in mind that I clearly stated we don’t know the reason. I just threw that out there as one possibility.
Jared Diamond explicitly addresses this question in Chapter 6 of Guns, Germs, and Steel: why didn’t agriculture and civilization begin much earlier (or conversely, why did they begin at all)? He lists four possible reasons: 1. A purely hunting/gathering lifestyle was more productive until more recent times. 2. Climate change favoring the growth of cereal grains took place. 3. Grain harvesting and processing on a large scale had to await the invention of more sophisticated tools. 4. Increased population growth made growing food more imperitive.
Black monoliths anyone?
Civilization (‘living in cities’) was impossible until animals were domesticated. Without animals, a city would be limited to the meat from local wild animals within a day or so’s walk.
The first domesticated animal is thought to be the goat (although the dog is strange unknown). When it was domesticated, we can presume examples were traded all around the Old World in (relatively speaking) the blink of an eye.
That blew the whistle for cities to take off in a couple of place all at more or less the same time.
Did the Native American civilizations rely on demosticated animals for their source of meat?
I think it’s been fairly well established that there was a general lack of large food animals left in the New World after the migratory period settled down. Large food animals that can be domesticated, that is.
South American’s managed to domesticate the Llama and the goat, from what I can recall, but in North America there wasn’t a cow breed or similar that could be domesticated successfully until the European “we’re taking all your stuff” tour.
And these genes appeared within a short timeframe, among several discrete areas of the planet? What are the odds of that happening?
And why “exploit,” rather than “lead”?
I should have been more clear in my question. I wasn’t questioning so much whether or not any animals had been domesiticated, but I was questioning the assertion about domesticated animanls being necessary for civilization. So, I was wondering if it is an established fact that Native American civilizations depended on domesticated animals for their source of meat protein.
I dunno. It’s not clear that (wild) American bison is/was any less domesticateable than the (wild) Aurochs was.