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I find it very interesting how long it took us to assemble the constituent ingredients of sedentary cities into what we recognize today. Almost as if the sedent

I find it very interesting how long it took us to assemble the constituent ingredients of sedentary cities into what we recognize today. Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time.

marssaxman 2y ago
A sedentary lifestyle is also inherently undesirable for some people living in our time, but most of us have little choice in the matter!
- danans 2y ago
  Fwiw, sedentary in the archaeological context doesn't mean "couch potato". It just means a society stays at a fixed location (vs constantly migrating). Sedentary hunter gatherer societies exist where the environment can support them.
burnte 2y ago
Agriculture took thousands of years of work in selectively breeding crop plants. For a long time it produced little food for a lot of effort, so until it became easier reliably grow good food plants, it was not widely practiced.
- Qem 2y ago
  Also while there was a lot of megafauna around, probably there was little incentive to settle and care for crops. It was better to chase the beasts.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  I'm not convinced. Cultivation began about 20kya, and we begin to see seed stores roughly contemporaneous with Gobekli. If anything, population was simply not dense enough (or could be maintained in the climate) for there to be incentive sufficient to focus on even staying sedentary with areas devoted to growth of crops. Why build a city to protect food stores when wetlands still produced enough in the natural economy to support you through the average year?
  - choilive 2y ago
    One theory is the climate shifted around that time (coincident with the last gracial period) so that the relative abundance of resources available to hunter-gatherers declined, basically necessitating agriculture.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      Yes, one very obvious example of this is the desertification of the Sahara.
bregma 2y ago
It required the invention of beer (which was predicated on a number of technologies, including large-scale agriculture, pottery, and zymurgy). Once they cracked open the first cold ones though, it got hard to get up off the stone-age couch and people began to specialize in such fields as philosophy and singing.
- xenospn 2y ago
  Wasn’t all beer warm until the invention of refrigeration?
  - technothrasher 2y ago
    There are writings from Mesopotamia around 4000 BC talking about cooling food and drink in ice houses.
  - adolph 2y ago
    A yakhchāl (Persian: یخچال "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chāl meaning "pit") is an ancient type of ice house, which also made ice. . . . Records indicate that these structures were built as far back as 400 BCE, and many that were built hundreds of years ago remain standing, where Persian engineers built yakhchāls in the desert to store ice, usually made nearby [0] Perhaps the earliest reference to icehouses comes from Shulgi, who held sway in the Sumerian city of Ur at the tail end of the third millennium bc. . . . Year 13, for Shulgi, was dubbed “Building of the royal icehouse/cold-house.” Jackson suggested such buildings might have been “timber-lined holes in the ground” designed to keep ice brought down from the mountains “cool and secure.” [1] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l 1. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-build-icehouse https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-buil...
    - kombookcha 2y ago
      That's so cool! Very interesting how similar it would be to the ice houses used right up until fridges come around. Ice blocks in basements lined with timber and packed in sawdust. Sumerian civilization is just endlessly fascinating.
danans 2y ago
> Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time. To the extent that nomadic hunters had a choice about whether to become sedentary (vs being enslaved by the larger sedentary populations), the reduction of autonomy (for both individuals and groups) for sedentary lifestyle behind fortifications has to be worth the benefits. That said, sedentarism vs nomadism is a spectrum, and it's not clear that the nomads would have seen themselves as fundamentally different than sedentarists. It was probably much later that terms related to being "civilized" vs "wild" came into existence - probably courtesy of agriculturalists' organized religion. Even as late as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, it wasn't necessarily inimical as king Gilgamesh's best friend was the wild man Enkidu. I would guess that nomads/hunters thought of sedentarists just as people who just had bigger and more permanent settlements than they did.

marssaxman 2y ago

A sedentary lifestyle is also inherently undesirable for some people living in our time, but most of us have little choice in the matter!

danans 2y ago
Fwiw, sedentary in the archaeological context doesn't mean "couch potato". It just means a society stays at a fixed location (vs constantly migrating). Sedentary hunter gatherer societies exist where the environment can support them.

burnte 2y ago

Agriculture took thousands of years of work in selectively breeding crop plants. For a long time it produced little food for a lot of effort, so until it became easier reliably grow good food plants, it was not widely practiced.

Qem 2y ago
Also while there was a lot of megafauna around, probably there was little incentive to settle and care for crops. It was better to chase the beasts.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
I'm not convinced. Cultivation began about 20kya, and we begin to see seed stores roughly contemporaneous with Gobekli. If anything, population was simply not dense enough (or could be maintained in the climate) for there to be incentive sufficient to focus on even staying sedentary with areas devoted to growth of crops. Why build a city to protect food stores when wetlands still produced enough in the natural economy to support you through the average year?
- choilive 2y ago
  One theory is the climate shifted around that time (coincident with the last gracial period) so that the relative abundance of resources available to hunter-gatherers declined, basically necessitating agriculture.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Yes, one very obvious example of this is the desertification of the Sahara.

bregma 2y ago

It required the invention of beer (which was predicated on a number of technologies, including large-scale agriculture, pottery, and zymurgy). Once they cracked open the first cold ones though, it got hard to get up off the stone-age couch and people began to specialize in such fields as philosophy and singing.

xenospn 2y ago
Wasn’t all beer warm until the invention of refrigeration?
- technothrasher 2y ago
  There are writings from Mesopotamia around 4000 BC talking about cooling food and drink in ice houses.
- adolph 2y ago
  A yakhchāl (Persian: یخچال "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chāl meaning "pit") is an ancient type of ice house, which also made ice. . . . Records indicate that these structures were built as far back as 400 BCE, and many that were built hundreds of years ago remain standing, where Persian engineers built yakhchāls in the desert to store ice, usually made nearby [0] Perhaps the earliest reference to icehouses comes from Shulgi, who held sway in the Sumerian city of Ur at the tail end of the third millennium bc. . . . Year 13, for Shulgi, was dubbed “Building of the royal icehouse/cold-house.” Jackson suggested such buildings might have been “timber-lined holes in the ground” designed to keep ice brought down from the mountains “cool and secure.” [1] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l 1. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-build-icehouse https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-buil...
  - kombookcha 2y ago
    That's so cool! Very interesting how similar it would be to the ice houses used right up until fridges come around. Ice blocks in basements lined with timber and packed in sawdust. Sumerian civilization is just endlessly fascinating.

danans 2y ago

> Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time. To the extent that nomadic hunters had a choice about whether to become sedentary (vs being enslaved by the larger sedentary populations), the reduction of autonomy (for both individuals and groups) for sedentary lifestyle behind fortifications has to be worth the benefits. That said, sedentarism vs nomadism is a spectrum, and it's not clear that the nomads would have seen themselves as fundamentally different than sedentarists. It was probably much later that terms related to being "civilized" vs "wild" came into existence - probably courtesy of agriculturalists' organized religion. Even as late as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, it wasn't necessarily inimical as king Gilgamesh's best friend was the wild man Enkidu. I would guess that nomads/hunters thought of sedentarists just as people who just had bigger and more permanent settlements than they did.