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Nomadic tribes are sapient, intelligent and have rich cultures, but they aren’t strictly civilisations. Some pastoral societies have taken serious issue with t

• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Some pastoral societies have taken serious issue with this view Where is the evidence the Mongols took issue with this view? They certainly seemed to recognise the value of cities. To my knowledge, the practice of falsely conflating intelligence and civilisation to be offended that not every society formed a civilisation is a modern occupation.
  • pvg 2y ago
    Where is the evidence the Mongols took issue with this view? I think if you eat all neighbouring civilizations in a few decades, you're definitely a civilization.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > if you eat all neighbouring civilizations in a few decades, you're definitely a civilization If you run the cities, yes. If you only raid them, no. (The Mongols built roads and founded a Chinese dynasty. They were a civilisation.)
      • pvg 2y ago
        This is a slightly silly discussion because the 'civilization' the Silurian hypothesis is concerned with is something like human civilization as a whole. Whether pastoralists are a 'civilization' (or even more fraught, 'civilized') seems like a completely arbitrary distinction to try to make, especially on the basis of something like 'cities'. The ability to organize, direct, coordinate, supply and project military power over great distances is a hallmark of plenty of things we think of as 'civilizations' and the Mongols were easily the world heavyweight champion of that, in their day. A great number of people found out the fact a stone wall is much harder to move than a yurt is not the tremendous civilizational advantage they thought it was.
        • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
          > is a slightly silly discussion because the 'civilization' the Silurian hypothesis is concerned with is something like human civilization as a whole Going back to the top comment: “Within the Silurian context, the urban distinction is almost demanding: if humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is a good chance all evidence of our tool use would have disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of years.”
          • AlotOfReading 2y ago
            I've done archaeological work in Mongolia. The oldest things I've found predate the last glacial maximum. Those rocks might not have survived a few million more years, but I can certainly think of lithics that would.
    • digging 2y ago
      Is bubonic plague a civilization? How about a stray gamma ray burst?
      • pvg 2y ago
        I don't think this is the rhetorical killshot you seem to believe it is.
        • deleted 2y ago
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