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> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for

> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else. The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, but there's unambiguously at least 8 origins and maybe a dozen. The unambiguous origins are Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization), as well as North America, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea (which don't clearly form independent origins of civilization, although note word order in that phrase). There's probably more origins as well. In general, a lot of early civilization development is one of those things that was traditionally understood to be difficult and everyone cribbing off of the one guy who did it (kind of like how the Industrial Revolution is generally though to have happened), but the more people started digging into the research, the more endogenous its evolution appears: independent reinvention of the Neolithic Revolution seems to be the norm, not the exception.

zozbot234 5y ago
Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best. Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    Wild cereals were one of many plant food sources in the paleo/meso- lithic world, and not even the most important. More careful analyses reveal families like Vetches and roots (known in the literature as underground storage organs/USOs) that simply don't preserve well in the material record.
  - Alan_Dillman 5y ago
    Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing. As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home. Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!" Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place. Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.
- simonh 5y ago
  It proves there was one, and quite possibly only one ‘city’ or settlement of some kind that was probably intermittently occupied, perhaps on a seasonal basis. But yes, it is quite possible there are more to find, especially in now flooded former coastlines. I’m not expecting us to find anything spectacularly revolutionary or shocking though. Especially not widely distributed. There doesn’t seem any really good reason they would all be clustered along coastlines all over the place, but not along rivers or by lakes. Gobekli Tepe is nowhere near the coast.
danans 5y ago
> Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization) I don't think it's settled that these are independent. Especially Mesopotamia and Indus Valley, and Meso and South America.

zozbot234 5y ago

Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.

jcranmer 5y ago
In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best. Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Wild cereals were one of many plant food sources in the paleo/meso- lithic world, and not even the most important. More careful analyses reveal families like Vetches and roots (known in the literature as underground storage organs/USOs) that simply don't preserve well in the material record.
- Alan_Dillman 5y ago
  Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing. As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home. Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!" Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place. Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.
simonh 5y ago
It proves there was one, and quite possibly only one ‘city’ or settlement of some kind that was probably intermittently occupied, perhaps on a seasonal basis. But yes, it is quite possible there are more to find, especially in now flooded former coastlines. I’m not expecting us to find anything spectacularly revolutionary or shocking though. Especially not widely distributed. There doesn’t seem any really good reason they would all be clustered along coastlines all over the place, but not along rivers or by lakes. Gobekli Tepe is nowhere near the coast.

danans 5y ago

> Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization) I don't think it's settled that these are independent. Especially Mesopotamia and Indus Valley, and Meso and South America.