History of People Part 3 – First Civilizations

For most of earth’s history, well at least the last half a billion years, the natural state of the world has remained pretty consistent. Species have come into existence, survived off the natural resources around them for a period of time, then gone extinct when the environment no longer met their survival needs. The natural extinction of species has always been offset by the creation of new species that were better adapted to the current conditions. In all this time none of these creatures significantly changed the environment. 

If aliens visited the earth 100 million years ago and came back 100 thousand years ago they would encounter different creatures and a slightly different environment, but basically the world would seem about the same. However, about 10 to 15 thousand years ago something odd began to happen. One of these creatures started building permanent structures, planting crops and domesticating other animals for their own use. They began to fundamentally change the environment in which they were living. This is a look at why that happened and how understanding that development can tell us something about ourselves.

The really interesting thing about this is our own species has been around maybe 300,000 years. There’s still debate on that number, but we had been around a pretty long time before we created the first primitive settlements. For the vast majority of human history we were nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small bands of people following prey with the seasons. To those imagined alien visitors we wouldn’t have stood out all that much from all the other animals on the planet. Sure, we did things other animals didn’t do. We made fire for warmth and cooking meat, and fashioned the skins of dead animals into clothing. Still on the whole, our impact on the planet was negligible.

Nothing I’ve written so far is new. If you were an especially attentive student in your middle school world history class you might recall the agricultural revolution. This describes the transition from a nomadic hunting and gathering lifestyle to a sedentary farming existence. This is usually presented as humans discovering agriculture, but like most things in history, it’s more complicated than what the textbooks portray. These ancient hunter-gatherers where intimately knowledgeable about their natural surrounding and would have understood how seeds work for thousands of years. It’s also an over simplification to think the transition to agriculture happened all at once. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years with the knowledge of how seeds worked, yet only slowly transitioned to agriculture around 12,000 years ago, why?

The idea that we need to constantly look for ways to make incremental improvements to our technology is a recent phenomenon. Even 300 or 400 years ago most people lived their whole lives with little to no obvious advancement of technology in their lives. Historically most advancements were a direct response to a need rather than research and development for its own sake. If what you were currently doing was working, there wasn’t a strong drive for innovation.

We’ve traditionally looked at the transition to agriculture as natural advancement in human civilization, but that notion has been challenged in recent years. There is now a school of thought that our earlier nomadic lifestyle was actually easier than a settled farming life. Farming, especially in a pre-mechanized world, was labor intensive. It’s been theorized that hunting and gathering afforded people more leisure time. Agriculture also comes with a lot of risks and other challenges. The fields have to be tended and are often at the mercy of the weather. All the while, until harvest time you’re relying on the remains of the prior year’s crop for subsistence. Drought, floods, epidemics of pests or fungal diseases can destroy a season’s crops and bring famine. Hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet. If the weather hurt one type of food source, it was possible another would take its place. So, if hunting and gathering was so great, why did they abandon it?

The transition to sedentary agricultural began right as the last ice age began to recede. Humans were forced to adapt to new ways of surviving when the Ice Age began a 100,000 years earlier. Now with the glaciers in retreat and increased rainfall resulting from warmer weather and an increase in liquid water the conditions for life improved around the globe. During the ice age a band of people could quickly exhaust the natural food supply in an area, forcing them to stay on the move. The warming earth meant there was increasing food supplies available, making moving a less frequent necessity. This led to increasing populations which in turn made a nomadic life more difficult from a practical stand point.

In earlier times there were only sporadic small bands of 20 to 30 members. However, after hundreds of years of a warmer and wetter environment there was an increasing number of bands with several hundred members. Not only did this complicate moving, but made it more likely neighboring bands would run into each other, further limiting their ability to move about freely. The greater availability of food and less frequent moving allowed some resourceful members of their community to specialize in crafting weapons and tools rather than being directly involved in acquiring food. It also encouraged building sturdier more permanent housing.

You might think this sounds like sounds a lot like the formation of the first villages. Until recently it was assumed that the first villages formed as the Agricultural Revolution began. However, more recent evidence suggest that it was villages that came first, and agriculture followed. These early villages were able to sustain themselves through their traditional hunting and gathering. But as their populations continued to increase along with competition from neighboring villages there were times of scarcity. It was just a matter of time until some of these villages started planting seeds they collected from the wild closer to where they lived and began to practice herding some of the useful animals. It’s not surprising this happened pretty much anywhere early people lived.

We begin to see a ripple effect of new developments associated with the establishment of villages. Once a warmer climate and the development of agriculture could provide enough food without needing everyone to contribute to that effort increasing specialization resulted. Initially this resulted in advancements in useful items needed for survival. Weapons, farming tools, clothing, and pots for both cooking and storing food. Eventually this extended beyond strictly utilitarian items to art, music and religious temples.

Another way of looking at these developments is that people began acquiring stuff. In earlier times they couldn’t have more possessions than they could carry with them. However, now that they had all these doodads of village life it meant they had stuff worth stealing. At some point one village looked at all the neat stuff their neighboring village had, and it occurred to them they could just go and take it. This revelation gave rise to the need for weapons, not only for hunting, but for proto-military use. It followed that cities also began constructing defensive structures and walls, as well as a military hierarchy.

These early military organizations were mirrored by the need to organize the production of food. Farming required a coordinated effort to plant, harvest, process and store the crops for later use. Another universal aspect of early villages was the development of a governing hierarchy. Initially this took the form of a village chief or elders. Over time this transitioned into the position of king in early civilizations. The primary function of the king was the security of the village, both from raiders and in food. As these societies became more complex the role of royalty likewise expanded to maintain social order.

The exact form of early civilizations varied, but these general patterns repeated in many places. The Middle East, particularly in the fertile crescent of modern Iraq and Syria, are where we find the earliest villages and later civilizations. Egypt and India saw the same pattern arise at nearly the same time. It wasn’t long until early human civilizations had spread to much of Africa, Asia, and parts of Europe. It wasn’t all success though. These early farmers didn’t have an understanding of soil nutrients and often saw their fields become less productive over time. Over harvesting of local timber could also spell the demise of a previously prosperous town.

The first great civilizations were established by 3,000 B.C.E. or 5,000 years ago. These cultures generally formed along the flood plains of river valleys where the soil was continually replenished by the sediment from upstream. In other places civilizations flourished in highly nutritious volcanic soils. In either case they had to manage the resources available to them or they could quickly become unsustainable. They had to be able to defend themselves, but equally important was establishing trading relationships that allowed them to develop beyond what their native lands could provide.

Earlier I discussed what alien visitors would encounter if they came to earth. Pretty much anytime prior to 15,000 years ago those aliens would have experienced a planet in its natural state. Within 6,000 years those same aliens would see a world dotted with villages who were transforming their environment in ways never before seen. 6,000 years after that many parts of the world had developed a series of interconnected civilizations that would have been unimaginable during the first 200,000 plus years of humanity. Only 5,000 years later is us. 

It’s easy to think of the initial transition from a nomadic hunter-gather lifestyle to settled agriculture as a decision someone made. The reality is it was thousands of small reactions to their environment that played out over thousands of years. They would not have had a sense that they were participating in a fundamental change in how people would live from then on. They just saw there seemed be more food available this year so there wasn’t any need to move on for a while.