14 ms·

Civilization Is Older Than We Thought

153 points by throwkeep 5y ago

robwwilliams 5y ago
Good overview and hypothesis that proposes pushing back the pastoral-agricultural transition to 20000 y before present. Long interludes that can be read quickly.
- Glavnokoman 5y ago
  Too long for my taste. The guy must be paid per character. That information might have been packed into 10th of the article size. Really annoying style.
  - kijin 5y ago
    The guy works for the Long Now Foundation. He doesn't care if his articles take a couple of microcenturies to read.
treeman79 5y ago
20,000 years ago the ocean levels were 130 meters lower. Imagine all the coastal settlements that are lost
- avdempsey 5y ago
  That claim struck me as extraordinary, but sure enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  The North Sea was Doggerland 8500 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland You could walk from the Netherlands to Britain. Before that, the Mediterranean Sea was a dry depression. When the Atlantic barrier collapsed, you can imagine the wall of water filling the basin and chasing early humans uphill.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    The Mediterranean has been full throughout human prehistory. Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive. We know there was a cataclysmic meteor strike toward the west end of the Persian Gulf, well after it had filled in.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive. Evidence of catastrophic flooding is debated and inconclusive. That the black sea’s level used to be much lower is not, all water levels were much lower at the glacial maximum, and gradually rose as the ice age ended, nearing stable historical sea levels around 7.5kya (5500 bce).
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        I am corrected: Yes,the Black Sea level was much lower, and rose. But how quickly? E.g., if the Bosporus was blocked, and later broke, the water could rise very quickly, over weeks, not years. It could fall, instead, if the sea had filled in, and then suddenly drained by a similar process. But the subject is complicated by the unknown inflow from rivers, and from meltwater of retreating glacier. Hydrology is complicated.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    The Zanclean Flood (refilling of the Mediterranean) happened about 5 million years ago. That predates not only Homo sapiens sapiens, nor the Homo genus itself, but even Australopithecus itself.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- kibwen 5y ago
  Not just that. The Persian Gulf, in the heart of the cradle of civilization, is an average of 50m deep, never more than 90m. That's 250,000 square km of prime real estate (a river valley fed by the same rivers that would eventually produce Sumeria) that would have been well above the water line when civilization was just getting started. No wonder every culture has a flood myth.
  - mc32 5y ago
    How quickly did coastal areas get reclaimed by the seas? If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood, though given geography, it’s likely some areas got reclaimed at accelerated rates. In any event we’d need some evidence before accepting that this was the genesis of the myths.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      It seems like somewhere between 1m-5m per century depending on time and place[1]. At 5m that would be noticeable in a lifetime in a coastal estuary, you would see dwellings from your childhood swallowed by the sea by middle age. Interestingly, Sumerian myths said that the Akkadians arrived from the sea and brought with them the knowledge of city building. Certainly begs some interesting questions. [1]https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-age https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-ag...
      - mc32 5y ago
        We need to know how people settled. Was it permanent dwellings, limited-lifespan dwellings (wattle/reed), seasonal dwellings, or nomadic dwellings. If people kind of moved from season to season, or as local resources get depleted, then water creeping up is kind of just accepted as "they way things happen." If it was settled for hundreds of years and then water crept up, sure, I can see that being considered a flood if it happened quickly enough. I guess we may have to live with guesswork as I doubt we'll have convincing answers.
        5y ago
- sliken 5y ago
  A story about similar, for those who haven't seen it: https://xkcd.com/1190/ https://xkcd.com/1190/
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Not sure there were that many coastal settlements in the first place. Ultimately you need access to drinking water and being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea. You can be next to both. Coastal settlements provide excellent food sources, and greatly limits various health issues (lack of salt, iodine, …). Consuming fish blood would also help, it’s going to be much closer to isotonic than seawater. Depending on land structures, coastal settlements would also often benefit from much higher precipitation rates, providing freshwater. That’s essentially the story of Polynesian settlements, islands would be settled if they either had natural springs or enough precipitations.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    Thats why those settlements are usually all located on a river that goes into the the sea. (but for actual drinking water, smaller springs are preferrerd and can be found almost everywhere, except the dessert, too) So you have drinking water - and can do extensive fishing, in the river as well in the sea - and in the very fish rich area in between. Also with a river you can more easily connect inland. (have you never played civilisation?)
darkhorse13 5y ago
As more and more evidence piles on, I wonder how long it will take for mainstream archaeology to accept these ideas.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Mainstream archeologists have already integrated many of the "suggestions" the article makes. It's bad enough that were I less charitable, I'd think the author was putting up strawmen that have been outdated for decades. Instead, I think they just read the wrong books, probably from some stodgy British academic that hasn't left the country since there was a British empire. Take this concluding sentence as an example: > The old paradigm of agriculture and civilization beginning after the last ice age, and proceeding on a materially overdetermined set course of progress, seems to rest on increasingly shaky theoretical grounds If you find an archaeologist arguing that, you've found a time traveler from the 60s at the latest. Archaeology isn't easy and it's gotten a lot of things wrong over the years. However, methodologies are constantly improving and the best info is the stuff we have today rather than the stuff we had 50 years ago. That's what these sorts of articles should be calling for improvements in.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Those archaic archaeologists are not just holed up in department basements, ignoring recent discoveries. From their basements they are curating Wikipedia articles, defending them tooth and nail against unwelcome hints of currency.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      Wikipedia's a bit of a mixed bag, especially around the early neolithic stuff. If you look at the east Asian articles, some of them are still using antiquated terms like mongoloid and caucasoid. The southwest asian stuff is theoretically underdeveloped and last time I checked reflects an 80-90s bent, citing people like Hodder. Other regions have very underdeveloped articles. NA is probably the best with the rather excellent chronologies, but not much besides.
edgyquant 5y ago
I have been fascinated with Göbekli Tepe since I first heard of it. I really do think we need to rethink our idea of civilization and that it likely stretches back (as loose groups) tens of thousands of years. However, the common definition of civilization as it stands does not include sites like these. Göbekli Tepe Is thought by archaeologists to be a a pre-Neolithic or early Neolithic and that it is more of a site where tribes, who were otherwise hunter gatherers, would meet for religious purposes. Jericho is another where we have an actual city that is thought to be made up of non farmers who were otherwise sedentary. This doesn’t meant that the article is wrong about farming being crucial to Göbekli Tepe but it does mean that archaeologists aren’t seeing all of the signs of a true civilization which they tend to care more about writing than farming per say. I do think writing as we know it stretches back just not as an alphabet but more as tally marks and cave painting. A lot of information can be exchanged that way and we do have records of cultures going back >20,000 years using these. I think if you went back a few tens of thousand years you would see culture that are a lot closer to civilization than we like to think. But again, they wouldn’t fit the current definition of civilization.
- babesh 5y ago
  The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral works in a prehistoric (pre-writing) culture. Transmission of culture was done orally and visually just as they are today. Culture wasn't just technology. It was also origin stories of the tribe, origin stories of the universe, and so on. A lot of information can be exchanged orally and visually without writing.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Definitely I guess my point is more that our definition of what constitutes writing seems to be arbitrary when we do have “writing” that goes back ~20k years it just isn’t letters representing sounds. I mentioned tally marks and we’ve found them all over the place. If our definition has to be that people use an alphabet to record sentences then civilization under the definition of writing + multiple city states may not be moved back. But I think that doesn’t capture a large (like 2-3 times as long) span of time in which there were “civilizations” and it’s really a shame.
ineedasername 5y ago
For the Göbekli Tepe site mentioned in the article you can use Google maps [0] and drop the little yellow man on some of the dots where pictures were taken. There's some panoramic pictures that show it much better than the article [1] [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2234784,38.9216386,306m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2234784,38.9216386,306m/data... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2233037,38.9225345,3a,75y,180.16h,66.92t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipN4RnWxCpXOeb-xDj3aVbSbbEaE7K1_ULXCCN61!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipN4RnWxCpXOeb-xDj3aVbSbbEaE7K1_ULXCCN61%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya286.4572-ro0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2233037,38.9225345,3a,75y,18...
rtx 5y ago
When you read about these early Iraqi and IVC cities. You see a complex society that can only come about thousands of year of staying in a community.
timepaas1977 5y ago
Look up Dwarka city that’s submerged under water! Age old civilizations that knew city planning, rock cutting and other advanced technologies who knows.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  For example Pavlopetri in Greece, about 5 000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlopetri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlopetri
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rand0mx1 5y ago
  Dwarka city which was part of Indus Civilization or Mythological Dwarka city of Lord Krishna?
- pratik661 5y ago
  The oldest artefacts/ruins of Dwarka can be reliably dated to 1500 BC, which is well past the age of city building in that region. Most of the ruins are from the Vedic age (although it may have been a Harappan city before). The article refers to complex structures built before 10,000 BC, which is approximately established to be the age of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent/Anatolia (from which it is theorized to spread into Europe and S.Asia)
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I wonder if there's a general principle when you can assume any scientific finding that makes currently alive humans seem special, will underestimate how non-special we are. And if you can plot that against some metric does it asymptotically approach how special we really are?
clarge1120 5y ago
“... with [these assumptions] in mind we can conclude...” The exploration of what could have been is reminiscent of how an historian might piece together a narrative from available evidence. The historian, out of necessity, must fill in the blanks where there is no evidence, but also keep the narrative going. I am not convinced the author made the case, but it is an interesting story.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

153 points by throwkeep 5y ago

Good overview and hypothesis that proposes pushing back the pastoral-agricultural transition to 20000 y before present. Long interludes that can be read quickly.

Glavnokoman 5y ago
Too long for my taste. The guy must be paid per character. That information might have been packed into 10th of the article size. Really annoying style.
- kijin 5y ago
  The guy works for the Long Now Foundation. He doesn't care if his articles take a couple of microcenturies to read.

treeman79 5y ago

20,000 years ago the ocean levels were 130 meters lower. Imagine all the coastal settlements that are lost

avdempsey 5y ago
That claim struck me as extraordinary, but sure enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level
redis_mlc 5y ago
The North Sea was Doggerland 8500 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland You could walk from the Netherlands to Britain. Before that, the Mediterranean Sea was a dry depression. When the Atlantic barrier collapsed, you can imagine the wall of water filling the basin and chasing early humans uphill.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The Mediterranean has been full throughout human prehistory. Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive. We know there was a cataclysmic meteor strike toward the west end of the Persian Gulf, well after it had filled in.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive. Evidence of catastrophic flooding is debated and inconclusive. That the black sea’s level used to be much lower is not, all water levels were much lower at the glacial maximum, and gradually rose as the ice age ended, nearing stable historical sea levels around 7.5kya (5500 bce).
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      I am corrected: Yes,the Black Sea level was much lower, and rose. But how quickly? E.g., if the Bosporus was blocked, and later broke, the water could rise very quickly, over weeks, not years. It could fall, instead, if the sea had filled in, and then suddenly drained by a similar process. But the subject is complicated by the unknown inflow from rivers, and from meltwater of retreating glacier. Hydrology is complicated.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  The Zanclean Flood (refilling of the Mediterranean) happened about 5 million years ago. That predates not only Homo sapiens sapiens, nor the Homo genus itself, but even Australopithecus itself.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
kibwen 5y ago
Not just that. The Persian Gulf, in the heart of the cradle of civilization, is an average of 50m deep, never more than 90m. That's 250,000 square km of prime real estate (a river valley fed by the same rivers that would eventually produce Sumeria) that would have been well above the water line when civilization was just getting started. No wonder every culture has a flood myth.
- mc32 5y ago
  How quickly did coastal areas get reclaimed by the seas? If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood, though given geography, it’s likely some areas got reclaimed at accelerated rates. In any event we’d need some evidence before accepting that this was the genesis of the myths.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    It seems like somewhere between 1m-5m per century depending on time and place[1]. At 5m that would be noticeable in a lifetime in a coastal estuary, you would see dwellings from your childhood swallowed by the sea by middle age. Interestingly, Sumerian myths said that the Akkadians arrived from the sea and brought with them the knowledge of city building. Certainly begs some interesting questions. [1]https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-age https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-ag...
    - mc32 5y ago
      We need to know how people settled. Was it permanent dwellings, limited-lifespan dwellings (wattle/reed), seasonal dwellings, or nomadic dwellings. If people kind of moved from season to season, or as local resources get depleted, then water creeping up is kind of just accepted as "they way things happen." If it was settled for hundreds of years and then water crept up, sure, I can see that being considered a flood if it happened quickly enough. I guess we may have to live with guesswork as I doubt we'll have convincing answers.
      - 5y ago
sliken 5y ago
A story about similar, for those who haven't seen it: https://xkcd.com/1190/ https://xkcd.com/1190/
ekianjo 5y ago
Not sure there were that many coastal settlements in the first place. Ultimately you need access to drinking water and being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea. You can be next to both. Coastal settlements provide excellent food sources, and greatly limits various health issues (lack of salt, iodine, …). Consuming fish blood would also help, it’s going to be much closer to isotonic than seawater. Depending on land structures, coastal settlements would also often benefit from much higher precipitation rates, providing freshwater. That’s essentially the story of Polynesian settlements, islands would be settled if they either had natural springs or enough precipitations.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Thats why those settlements are usually all located on a river that goes into the the sea. (but for actual drinking water, smaller springs are preferrerd and can be found almost everywhere, except the dessert, too) So you have drinking water - and can do extensive fishing, in the river as well in the sea - and in the very fish rich area in between. Also with a river you can more easily connect inland. (have you never played civilisation?)

darkhorse13 5y ago

As more and more evidence piles on, I wonder how long it will take for mainstream archaeology to accept these ideas.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
Mainstream archeologists have already integrated many of the "suggestions" the article makes. It's bad enough that were I less charitable, I'd think the author was putting up strawmen that have been outdated for decades. Instead, I think they just read the wrong books, probably from some stodgy British academic that hasn't left the country since there was a British empire. Take this concluding sentence as an example: > The old paradigm of agriculture and civilization beginning after the last ice age, and proceeding on a materially overdetermined set course of progress, seems to rest on increasingly shaky theoretical grounds If you find an archaeologist arguing that, you've found a time traveler from the 60s at the latest. Archaeology isn't easy and it's gotten a lot of things wrong over the years. However, methodologies are constantly improving and the best info is the stuff we have today rather than the stuff we had 50 years ago. That's what these sorts of articles should be calling for improvements in.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Those archaic archaeologists are not just holed up in department basements, ignoring recent discoveries. From their basements they are curating Wikipedia articles, defending them tooth and nail against unwelcome hints of currency.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    Wikipedia's a bit of a mixed bag, especially around the early neolithic stuff. If you look at the east Asian articles, some of them are still using antiquated terms like mongoloid and caucasoid. The southwest asian stuff is theoretically underdeveloped and last time I checked reflects an 80-90s bent, citing people like Hodder. Other regions have very underdeveloped articles. NA is probably the best with the rather excellent chronologies, but not much besides.

edgyquant 5y ago

I have been fascinated with Göbekli Tepe since I first heard of it. I really do think we need to rethink our idea of civilization and that it likely stretches back (as loose groups) tens of thousands of years. However, the common definition of civilization as it stands does not include sites like these. Göbekli Tepe Is thought by archaeologists to be a a pre-Neolithic or early Neolithic and that it is more of a site where tribes, who were otherwise hunter gatherers, would meet for religious purposes. Jericho is another where we have an actual city that is thought to be made up of non farmers who were otherwise sedentary. This doesn’t meant that the article is wrong about farming being crucial to Göbekli Tepe but it does mean that archaeologists aren’t seeing all of the signs of a true civilization which they tend to care more about writing than farming per say. I do think writing as we know it stretches back just not as an alphabet but more as tally marks and cave painting. A lot of information can be exchanged that way and we do have records of cultures going back >20,000 years using these. I think if you went back a few tens of thousand years you would see culture that are a lot closer to civilization than we like to think. But again, they wouldn’t fit the current definition of civilization.

babesh 5y ago
The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral works in a prehistoric (pre-writing) culture. Transmission of culture was done orally and visually just as they are today. Culture wasn't just technology. It was also origin stories of the tribe, origin stories of the universe, and so on. A lot of information can be exchanged orally and visually without writing.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Definitely I guess my point is more that our definition of what constitutes writing seems to be arbitrary when we do have “writing” that goes back ~20k years it just isn’t letters representing sounds. I mentioned tally marks and we’ve found them all over the place. If our definition has to be that people use an alphabet to record sentences then civilization under the definition of writing + multiple city states may not be moved back. But I think that doesn’t capture a large (like 2-3 times as long) span of time in which there were “civilizations” and it’s really a shame.

ineedasername 5y ago

For the Göbekli Tepe site mentioned in the article you can use Google maps [0] and drop the little yellow man on some of the dots where pictures were taken. There's some panoramic pictures that show it much better than the article [1] [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2234784,38.9216386,306m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2234784,38.9216386,306m/data... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2233037,38.9225345,3a,75y,180.16h,66.92t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipN4RnWxCpXOeb-xDj3aVbSbbEaE7K1_ULXCCN61!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipN4RnWxCpXOeb-xDj3aVbSbbEaE7K1_ULXCCN61%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya286.4572-ro0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2233037,38.9225345,3a,75y,18...

rtx 5y ago

When you read about these early Iraqi and IVC cities. You see a complex society that can only come about thousands of year of staying in a community.

timepaas1977 5y ago

Look up Dwarka city that’s submerged under water! Age old civilizations that knew city planning, rock cutting and other advanced technologies who knows.

pjmlp 5y ago
For example Pavlopetri in Greece, about 5 000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlopetri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlopetri
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rand0mx1 5y ago
Dwarka city which was part of Indus Civilization or Mythological Dwarka city of Lord Krishna?
pratik661 5y ago
The oldest artefacts/ruins of Dwarka can be reliably dated to 1500 BC, which is well past the age of city building in that region. Most of the ruins are from the Vedic age (although it may have been a Harappan city before). The article refers to complex structures built before 10,000 BC, which is approximately established to be the age of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent/Anatolia (from which it is theorized to spread into Europe and S.Asia)

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I wonder if there's a general principle when you can assume any scientific finding that makes currently alive humans seem special, will underestimate how non-special we are. And if you can plot that against some metric does it asymptotically approach how special we really are?

clarge1120 5y ago

“... with [these assumptions] in mind we can conclude...” The exploration of what could have been is reminiscent of how an historian might piece together a narrative from available evidence. The historian, out of necessity, must fill in the blanks where there is no evidence, but also keep the narrative going. I am not convinced the author made the case, but it is an interesting story.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]