H.Sapiens goes back to about 160,000 years ago. Presumably, if you could clone one and raise it as a modern kid you’d have a modern adult human, unremarkable from anyone else you bump into on the subway.
But we didn’t learn to “bang the rocks together” and start farming until about 10-15,000 years ago. It seems odd, given the hallmark of humanity is our extreme cleverness, that we should remain completely satisfied with being essentially cave-dwelling, dead-burying monkeys for 145,000 years. I know the 20th century showed uncharacteristic technological advancement, but that’s a long time to show no progress at all when you consider humans’ natural curiosity and ingenuity. Or am I underestimating just how hard it is to build a civilization out of nothing?
In ther words, if it only takes 12,000 years to go from learning to farm to The Simpsons, well we could have done that a dozen times before we actually got off our asses and did it.
My impression is we really dont know how creativity and intelligence works at the fundamental level.
For all we know, it could take only one minor change in our brain structure, chemistry,whatever to make the difference between dumber than dirt and space exploring primates.
Another possibility is of the chicken and the egg or bootstrapping variety. If you are raised in a complex society its easy to become socially complex. If you arent, maybe its not. Many internal and external factors may be required to be “just right” for that to happen the first time, only after which things really start moving. It might just take many years for those perfect conditions to all come together at the same time in the same place, even if the human brain/body was ready to go the whole time so to speak.
We didn’t take up agriculture until we had no freaking CHOICE. It’s hard work. It makes you vulnerable to weather, predators, and others of your own species who don’t yet “get” the notion that THESE foodplants, unlike all the others, are in some sense off limits to them, that they are “yours”. Hence it leads to wars. A conflicting need for a large supply of workers smacks into the risk of scarcity of food.
Meanwhile, hunter-gatherers work (even NOW when confined to some of the least fertile chunks of real estate on the planet) something akin to 12 hours per WEEK. You pick it, it’s already there. You wander on. You learn to track and trail and kill some animals you didn’t have to raise & feed.
Farming started in areas such as the Tigris/Euphrates fertile crescent where an area of plentiful resources was circumscribed by considerably less abundant areas. Agriculture tends to yield concentrated populations — eventually towns and whatnot — and top-down social hierarchies and military escapades, so agricultural society supplanted h/g groups. But not because it was more fun.
**AHunter3:**Nice post/username.
Thank you, I forget sometimes how different humans are from the vast majority of other beasts out there. It is indeed unnatural to manipulate the environment with long-term vision the way we do. Other critters stake out territories and burrow and store food for the short-term, but I forget how…alien…the concept is of investing one’s life in a tilled acre. On one hand I can see how us doing it at all was a fluke since the vast technological benefits would never have been a motivation, but then…145,000 years before it finally caught on? What happened? Unless billfish is onto something with brain-chemistry changes it seems as if we would have become super-duper hunter gatherers, what with all the extra spare time we’d have over the farmers.
Well, you know, there is an art to chipping flint, making baskets, and all those other “primitive” things. It’s a long long way from living like chimps (even if they, too, have a limited material technology, largely confined to smashing nuts open with rocks and using sticks and grass blades to “fish” for termites) to spears and producing fire on command. I don’t think it’s appreciated just how much had to be learned to achieve even stone age technology. You had to learn to make stone tools, storage containers (to allow travel), clothing, shelter (most primitive humans didn’t live in caves, and even those that did likely didn’t full time), and enough cooperative hunting and gathering to live long enough to not only pass it on, but make the next advancement. There were languages to develop, social systems to tweak, and so on. All of that before you even get to agriculture, because for darn sure you need even more tech to be a farmer than a hunter-gatherer.
So our ancestors were probably pretty darn busy most of their lives, between survival and everything else. Looking back some of the advances seem pretty obvious to us, but remember, a lot of stuff we take for granted was completely new. Spears and flint knives don’t drop out of the sky by themselves, someone had to invent them and someone else had to perfect them.
A lot of things happened to the human race around 40,000 years ago, and no one really knows why. People started living longer, on average. Art of all types became much more common. Tool production got dramatically more varied and sophisticated. But population density was still extremely low.
The theory goes (can’t remember where I read it, it was a few years ago) that eventually, the population in the most productive areas grew large enough that it provided an incentive for people to start producing their own food. Like AHunter3 said, it had to be a rather strong incentive, because early food production couldn’t really keep up with the hunting/gathering lifestyle in terms of productivity per person per amount of time – provided there weren’t too many people.
Even then, agriculture didn’t catch on everywhere. You still needed to have the right kinds of plants available and all of that.
I’ve also pondered over this conundrum and these are my conclusions:
(1) Fully modern humans did not arise until 50 or 60 thousand years ago, and
(2) The discovery of agriculture had to wait until the stable climate of our current interglacial period.
As for (1), human remains may look modern back to 100 to 200 thousand years ago, but those creatures were missing something, some mental capacity that all modern humans have. It may have been some component of language, memory, or symbolic reasoning, but they were not capable of the cultural sophistication of modern man. The Great Leap Forward at about 50k years ago marks, IMHO, the first appearance of us. Somewhere in the world, real modern humans evolved that missing piece and their greatly enhanced capacity for cultural adaptation allowed them to explode into the world and replace the pre-us creatures.
As for (2), the questions remains: Why did we sit on our asses for 30 or 40 thousand years without developing agriculture? The fact that agriculture developed in multiple sites around the world within the stretch of a few thousand years shows that the fault was not in us; it must have been the climate.
Hunter/gatherers are very observant of the plants and animals in their local, but it takes generations to build up the very detailed database of ethnobiological knowledge required to fully exploit an environment. The earliest modern humans were hampered by the wild, rapid climate shifts of the last ice age. It probably happened many thousands of times that tribes noticed the benefits of tossing around grass seeds or capturing baby goats. But then a climate shift would hit, their proto-crops would fail, the familiar animals would migrate away, and the tribe would have to re-learn how to make a living. It wasn’t until the stabler climate of the current inter-glacial that tribes could remain in a consistent environment long enough to go through all the stages of agricultural development.
Who says humans were “quiet”? Over the span listed by the o.p., hand tools and weapons and the techniques used to make them became significantly more complex.
However, there are some watershed events that precipitated civilization and technological innovation as we know it. One is agriculture; in order to support a large established population, and the attendant leisure time to engage in innovation, one must have a year-round supply of edible foodstuffs. In addition, the less processing one has to do to make food edible (or the better the tools for processing), the more time that leaves for experimentation. To that end, the development of grain cultivars like wheat, chickpeas, rice, various edible fruits and nuts, et cetera were key to developing civilizations, and this required an iterative co-evolution of agricultural species and farming techniques. Combined with this is processing tools, like the scythe and grinding wheel.
Another is the domestication of animals, not just as high caloric density sources of proteins and fats throughout the year, but also as beasts of burden for agriculture, processing, and transportation. Again, this domestication occurred in stages over long periods of time, but ultimately multiplied the ability of people to do work and transport goods.
A third is the development of some form of vehicular language, i.e. a lingua franca or shared pidgeon that allows widely separated groups to communicate novel concepts and tools, ensuring that technical innovation is not lost or isolated, and that the opportunity for subsequent enhancement is multiplied by the number of users. While human beings appear to have had complex language for some time, the vocabularies were likely different enough that communication of abstractions from one region to another was limited.
Finally, written language capable of conveying abstract ideas and concepts is critical to maintaining knowledge between generations. Although techniques and tools may be passed between generations by teaching and example, the fundamental principles may be lost without documentation.
There is no factual answer to the question in the OP.
200k years ago, anatomically modern H. sapiens. There is some debate whether there was a great leap forward (maybe fully articulate language) about 60k years ago that differentiates us from our earlier ancestors. But we really don’t know.
We learned to “bang rocks together” about 2M years ago to make tools. Farming has little, if anything, to do with that stage of development. It took a lot of refinement to get to the point of making farm implements.
We were not solely cave dwellers. But surface lodging does’t really stand the test of time pre-stonework.
Every advance required the tools developed prior. There are hundreds of concept advances in something as simple as a pair of pliers. Each required the prior generation to develop on. Metal Tongs go back thousands of years. But modern pliers with the two setting hinge and teethed bite with that specific ideal curve are fairly recent.
Also, when communication between villages means an annual festival, sharing of ideas just doesn’t happen often so we are limited to working with a single master-apprentice braintrust. They may make an extraordinary find and never tell anyone before the huns overrun the village and kill all able bodied men before picking their brains for tech.
Today we have an idea, we blog about it and someone else patents it within fifteen minutes. We may just be stuffing the patent files with so much junk that we will again stifle advancement.
Maybe not compared to other animals, but humans can increase in population rather quickly. If a small group wanders into an empty environment they will probably “fill it up” within a few centuries and begin to compete with each other for food. It certainly would not take tens of thousands of years to reach a critical population density for agriculture to begin. During the ice age there were probably many, local population explosions, but these did not lead to the development of agriculture because a drought or extended cold spell would hit and the population would crash and/or migrate before it could discover and learn to exploit the local potential crop plants.
When I took anthroplogy, lo these many years ago, the books of the time proposed that the invention of agriculture required a little bioengineering to come up with plants that were suitable to be farmed. The plants of the time did not have a ‘tough brachia’ and so the grain kernals did not stay attached during the reaping process. It required active selection of the plant species to come up with suitable variants. Must have taken a while to work that out. I’ll be darned if google fails to help me support this theory though.
If you come from a hunger/gatherer society that has worked for you, your parents, and, if you happen to have met them, your grandparents you’re not likely to switch to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. That would probably seem as crazy to them as me telling you to switch to a hunter/gatherer style of living. Why did it take so long for us as a species to develop agriculture? Well, because we didn’t have much of a need for it.
One theory is that human beings became such efficient hunters that the population boomed and the food supply was depleted. Under this model agriculture was adopted out of necessity rather than because it was superior to hunting.
How did they suddenly learn how to become farmers? Well, it’s possible that our pre-agriculture ancestors were cultivators. Cultivators are different from farmers in that they’re not sedentary and they don’t directly control planting and harvesting. What they do is provide conditions in the natural environment that will allow useful plants to thrive. If you and I are part of the same hunter/gatherer band there’s a good chance that we tend to come back to the same areas different times of the year. One year we notice our berry bushes aren’t producing as much as they normally are because these other bushes are encroaching on their territory and blocking the light. So we simply cut down those interfering bushes and when we return next year the berries are thriving.
A factual answer exists - we just have all the facts so we have to stir in some speculation.
I find the great leap forward to be a very compelling indication that something very significantly new had appeared in humanity. In every existing human society, even the most “primitive” there is art, decoration, and the making of sophisticated, complex tools. The fact that there is little or no indication of this kind of behavior before 40-60k years ago is hard to explain away. I believe that humans before this time did not go beyond the making of simple stone and bone tools because they simply were not capable of it.
What about that theory that our creativity and consciousness is derived from eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. Maybe around 15,000 years ago we found the mother load.
This is exactly my argument, but probably more eloquent. We had to sit around twiddling our thumbs until the ice age ended. Even the micro-sized climate changes within our current inter-glacial have caused civilizations to rise and fall. In the ice age they could not even get close to starting.
Well, of course. And I assume you mean we don’t have all the facts.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And keep in mind that we keep discovering new stuff all the time that pushes back the date of first decorative items. We have shell beads that were obviously made to be strung together from over 70k years ago.
Now, there is some significant evidence that we went through a population bottleneck about 75k years ago, and that might have had a significant effect on our evolution separating us from our earlier ancestors.
