{"id":1240,"date":"2019-11-30T13:57:02","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T21:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=1240"},"modified":"2019-11-30T13:57:03","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T21:57:03","slug":"good-questions-some-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2019\/11\/30\/good-questions-some-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Questions: Some Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I\u2019ve had a fair number of snarky, insulting, crude, demeaning, scatological, and condescending comments on my blog posts over the years. Meh. Hey, I can be pretty snarky myself, though I do my best to avoid the rest of those adjectives. But every so often, somebody who is leaning towards the fantasies of the archaeological alternos asks some good, honest questions, in a sincere effort to see both sides, and those questions are golden. This happened some time back, and I promised the questioner a whole article in reply. Alas, life intervened in ways that were both good and bad, and I\u2019m only just clawing my way back onto a keyboard. Anyway, dear Scott, this is me keeping my promise at long last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question: If you consider\nthe fact that modern humans as we know them have been around for 200K years (at\nleast), then why does it take so long for us to form civilizations and figure\nout the basic necessities for doing so? After all look how quickly our own\ncivilization advances in technological capabilities today.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tl:dr version: civilizations did not\nrise until recently because, for most of H. sapiens<\/em> prehistory, human\ngroups were small, mobile, and doing just fine as they were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n \n \nNow for the long-winded version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At the heart of this question is a\ncommon misunderstanding of what archaeologists mean by \u201ccivilization,\u201d and the processes\nthat would lead to that happy state. In fact, it\u2019s exactly the same\nmisunderstanding that 19th<\/sup>-century Western scholars started with:\nthe presumption that the human experience was from the beginning an indomitable\nmarch of progress, aimed at becoming more and more like 19th<\/sup>-century\nWestern scholars. Civilization was seen as the proud result of humans ever\nstriving to better themselves, to discover and innovate and create, to raise\nhumankind above the level of the beasts. A whole lot of archaeology has\nhappened since then, however, and that inspiring picture has long been\nabandoned. Alas, the alternos are still stuck in the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To archaeologists and other students of\nthe human past, however, \u201ccivilization\u201d represents a certain position on a\nspectrum of social complexity. By definition, it is a state-organized society,\nat a level of social complexity that results from increasing population density\nunder a whole slew of other conditions. A pristine<\/em> or foundational <\/em>civilization\n(that is, one rising where no civilization has existed before) is not the\nresult of a conscious and hopeful striving towards betterment, but of\nshort-term steps taken to solve the problems of feeding, organizing, and\nprotecting an increasingly dense population, during which leaders emerge and a\npower hierarchy takes shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In fact, a major distinguishing characteristic of the fully formed ancient states\/civilizations\u2014along with cities supported by food-producing hinterlands, organized religion, record-keeping, infrastructure, and job specialization\u2014was strongly marked social stratification<\/em>, headed by a small and powerful hereditary elite. To put it cynically, the advent of civilizations was another step in the process of domestication. Agriculture involved the domestication of plants and animals. Civilization involved the domestication of most humans, in the service of a few; and it appears that life for folks at the bottom of the civilizational social pyramid was generally harder than the lives led by their hunter-gatherer ancestors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, there is a huge archaeological literature on the processes leading to civilization\/state formation, mostly beyond the scope of a blog post, but the short answer to Scott’s question is this: the conditions for the advent of civilizations did not come together until well after the development of large-scale food production, including but not limited to agriculture, in tandem with the growth of large, dense, sedentary populations. The issue is, how and when did this come about?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n \n \nThe archaeological evidence clearly\nshows that, for most of human prehistory, our H. sapiens<\/em> ancestors lived\nin small, mobile groups elegantly and efficiently adapted to their survival\nrequirements. We have ample evidence to show that, though social complexity was\nlow, cultural, creative, and cognitive skills were highly developed. Send a\ntime machine back to kidnap an Aurignacian baby, and she\u2019d be glued to a\ncellphone in a few years like any other twenty-first-century kid. They were\nsmart, socialized, and very good at what they did. Why would they change what\nclearly worked for them for many thousands of years, until conditions arose\nthat made new adaptations necessary?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The process that would eventually lead\nto the great Bronze Age civilizations started in some areas as early as the\nEpipaleolithic, when the most recent Ice Age was winding down.  In some areas of the world, the process\nstarted much later; and in some areas, it never got going at all. For\ndiscussion of how it looked in the Fertile Crescent, see a previous article<\/a>. In summary, this era saw the beginning of a great\ndemographic shift, involving factors like sedentation, use of a broader range\nof wild food resources, food storage, and a higher birth rate. The great\npopulation explosion had its modest beginnings at this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n \n \nHere is the crux of the matter. None<\/em>\nof the pristine civilizations sprang up suddenly out of nowhere. For each one,\narchaeology can trace its roots back to less complex agricultural societies,\nand even further back to pre-agricultural communities, sometimes in impressive\ndetail. This is one of the reasons why sites like Gobekli Tepe, Jericho, and\nCatal Huyuk are so exciting, for the light they shed on early stages in the\ncomplexification process. But nowhere is there any sign of the large, dense,\nhighly structured populations necessary for state-organized civilization until\nthe rise of the cities in the fourth millennium BC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note: a recurrent theme among the\nalternos is that archaeologists think early H. sapiens<\/em> were, to put it\nbluntly, too dumb to create civilizations. In fact, the alternos thereby implicitly\ndevalue the real and impressive accomplishments of less complex societies,\nancient and modern. At the same time, ironically, they tend to attribute the\nreal and impressive accomplishments of the great Bronze Age states to external\ninfluences, like aliens, Nephilim, Denisovans(!), or the unevidenced Lost\nCivilization. As archaeologists, we give credit where credit is due\u2014to the\nancient peoples themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the next post, I\u2019ll look at Scott\u2019s\nnext (and closely related) excellent question: Isn’t it also possible that\nevidence for these cultures have been rubbed to powder by the ice sheets, or\nlie off the sunken shores due to the sea level rise at the end of the ice age?<\/em>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why did civilization take so long to arise?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,20,21],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-science","category-skepticism","tag-origin-of-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}