4 ms·

I think you need evidence of a system of government, agriculture, culture, laws to dispense justice predictably and a writing system to track and record aspects

by mc32 2mo ago

I think you need evidence of a system of government, agriculture, culture, laws to dispense justice predictably and a writing system to track and record aspects of the above. Hence we can have Egyptian, Indus, etc., but not prehistoric civilizations. The human organizations just didn’t have enough progress to be considered civilized. Thats not to say they were not advanced vis a vis their other contemporaries but rather didn’t meet certain milestones that mark a civilization.

MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
A distinctly Western European perspective. I would rate Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization, personally.
- mc32 2mo ago
  Most early civilizations arose in the East (today’s India, Egypt, China, etc., not Europe but that’s the normal take on what constitutes civilization) else we verge on saying any human organization is civilization (which I would disagree with).
  - MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
    Go far enough East at the right time of history and you arrive at Narwala Gabarnmang, Sahul and Sundaland. (Not too far from ancient China, incidentally... walking distance, even...) Anyway, until the work has been done, it is of course speculation - but I do personally believe that the civilization which occupied and cultivated the Australian continent for 80,000 years deserves at least a bit of interest from European guardians of civilization…
    - mc32 2mo ago
      Sorry to ask, but why shouldn’t the Chinese or Indians be interested in that question as well? This doesn’t have to rest on what Europeans think. Why not what the Chinese or Indians think? Anthropologically those human populations are generally considered “cultures” unless they have the milestones of civilizations.
      - MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
        If, as has been speculated, Narwala Gabarnmang is the original T-shaped pillar school of agriculture, which was then transmitted to the Tepe cultures and beyond, then of course it is of immense interest to everyone, not just Europeans and Chinese. If this transmission has occurred - then I think that is evidence of civilization, indeed. Just because we cannot properly read the Narwala Gabarnmang materials and the similarities with the Tepe cultural works, does not yield a final conclusion. But this line of research has been thwarted by the closure of Gobekli Tepe and a discontinuation of the work to make the link. I would hope the Chinese or Indians would pick up this line of research - however, I feel its pretty obvious that admitting to Narwala Gabarnmangs’ role in human development would require a humility even the Chinese are incapable of, let alone Europeans. Narwala Gabarnmang and the Tepe sites are both older than all of us. The link between the two is highly fascinating but postulating the connection does require a cultural hygiene which, in the modern zeitgeist, is distinctly difficult to maintain...
- hamper653 2mo ago
  > A distinctly Western European perspective. Well, "civilisation" is a Western European word for a Western European concept.
  - mc32 2mo ago
    The first European civilization was the Minoan. Millenia after the Egyptian or Indus or Chinese. Anyway, in Europe it was the Greeks who contrasted people in city-states vs people from the hinterlands; after that it was the Romans who came up with the concept of citizenship and public life --all of that in southern Europe. Sure, the word civilization was coined by a Frenchman, but the idea was there first in southern Europe --I'm almost certain ancient Chinese had similar contrasts between people from the ruling city vs people from the hinterlands and beyond.
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  > Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization It is is a rock shelter with a ceiling held up by pillars that appear to have been deliberately shaped and arranged by removing supporting columns to create usable space. It has one of the longest continuous occupation records anywhere (charcoal dates back over 45,000 years, with art possibly around 28,000 years old), and it produced the world’s oldest known ground-edge stone axe fragment, dated to roughly 35,000–65,000 years ago, predating similar technology elsewhere by tens of thousands of years. However: no writing, no cities, no centralized state, made by mobile hunter-gatherer groups rather than settled agriculturalists.
  - MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
    It’s also a place of education, a community center, a court for gathered people to hold council, a religious institution and a continuously occupied (except for a stint from 1950 - 2008) seat of power. For 10’s of thousands of years. The pillars were engineered to make the shelter more viable over time, and some of the pillars are constructed of stacks of layered rock which contain paintings. Like a stack of books in a library, if you will .. The paintings record animal husbandry traditions, mythology, and tribal history, also. > settled agriculturalists. Australias original caretakers were a level of advanced agriculturalist not seen much elsewhere around the world, and there is emerging evidence that what they learned to do on that continent was transmitted around the world, perhaps as the first widespread distribution of agricultural knowledge - see the link to Gobekli Tepe, also, which - alas - is being minimized, with some speculation that for socio-political reasons it is being suppressed as a line of research… The T-shaped pillars, it is speculated in some archeological and anthropological circles, refer to the pillars of the school of agriculture and animal husbandry that is, Narwala Gabarnmang and which was then manifest in the Tepe cultures. There are common symbols in both the Tepe site and at Narwala Gabarnmang - which we may not recognize as ‘words’, but which may well represent an encoded language not yet fully understood by those studying them. The research continues, this is speculation and it is of course controversial to consider that Narwala Gabarnmang is the original school of agriculture, from which knowledge was transmitted to the other Tepe cultures, but please don’t let the authoritative canonicalization of the birthplace of human civilization ceiling hit you in the head .. after all, a lot of things can happen in the span of 80,000 years of human history. I consider it one of the holiest places in all of human history, personally, but I do have a distinct desire to not propagate the other ‘holy land’ tropes that Europeans have propagated in the rush to eradicate cultures they’ve deemed inferior over the past few hundred years.
readthenotes1 2mo ago
Doesn't civilization just literally mean a system of living together in a city? There doesn't need to be any written record of how they did it does there, just evidence that they did?
- xhevahir 2mo ago
  What counts as a city? Anyway, we're talking about a concept involving family resemblances rather than an airtight set of sufficient-and-necessary conditions.
- mc32 2mo ago
  Urbanization is one qualifier but not the only one. Plus even today we could have such chaos in a town where laws are absent and justice is that dispensed by the strongman/woman warlord and that would hardly be considered civilization. Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes.
  - conartist6 2mo ago
    > Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes. Yet the presence of gathering places certainly does suggest civility! A warlord could command the cooperation necessary perhaps, but would have little reason to build that structure rather than walls and towers
  - DyslexicAtheist 2mo ago
    > strongman/woman warlord any examples of women warlords ? I'm interested because both gendering and not gendering that sentence would upset feminists and I can't tell if this is trolling or whether more thought went into why gendering felt like the safe bet here.
    - nephihaha 2mo ago
      Boudicca. Joan of Arc. Grace O' Malley. There are some others.
    - bryanlarsen 2mo ago

by mc32 2mo ago

MomsAVoxell 2mo ago

A distinctly Western European perspective. I would rate Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization, personally.

mc32 2mo ago
Most early civilizations arose in the East (today’s India, Egypt, China, etc., not Europe but that’s the normal take on what constitutes civilization) else we verge on saying any human organization is civilization (which I would disagree with).
- MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
  Go far enough East at the right time of history and you arrive at Narwala Gabarnmang, Sahul and Sundaland. (Not too far from ancient China, incidentally... walking distance, even...) Anyway, until the work has been done, it is of course speculation - but I do personally believe that the civilization which occupied and cultivated the Australian continent for 80,000 years deserves at least a bit of interest from European guardians of civilization…
  - mc32 2mo ago
    Sorry to ask, but why shouldn’t the Chinese or Indians be interested in that question as well? This doesn’t have to rest on what Europeans think. Why not what the Chinese or Indians think? Anthropologically those human populations are generally considered “cultures” unless they have the milestones of civilizations.
    - MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
      If, as has been speculated, Narwala Gabarnmang is the original T-shaped pillar school of agriculture, which was then transmitted to the Tepe cultures and beyond, then of course it is of immense interest to everyone, not just Europeans and Chinese. If this transmission has occurred - then I think that is evidence of civilization, indeed. Just because we cannot properly read the Narwala Gabarnmang materials and the similarities with the Tepe cultural works, does not yield a final conclusion. But this line of research has been thwarted by the closure of Gobekli Tepe and a discontinuation of the work to make the link. I would hope the Chinese or Indians would pick up this line of research - however, I feel its pretty obvious that admitting to Narwala Gabarnmangs’ role in human development would require a humility even the Chinese are incapable of, let alone Europeans. Narwala Gabarnmang and the Tepe sites are both older than all of us. The link between the two is highly fascinating but postulating the connection does require a cultural hygiene which, in the modern zeitgeist, is distinctly difficult to maintain...
hamper653 2mo ago
> A distinctly Western European perspective. Well, "civilisation" is a Western European word for a Western European concept.
- mc32 2mo ago
  The first European civilization was the Minoan. Millenia after the Egyptian or Indus or Chinese. Anyway, in Europe it was the Greeks who contrasted people in city-states vs people from the hinterlands; after that it was the Romans who came up with the concept of citizenship and public life --all of that in southern Europe. Sure, the word civilization was coined by a Frenchman, but the idea was there first in southern Europe --I'm almost certain ancient Chinese had similar contrasts between people from the ruling city vs people from the hinterlands and beyond.
andsoitis 2mo ago
> Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization It is is a rock shelter with a ceiling held up by pillars that appear to have been deliberately shaped and arranged by removing supporting columns to create usable space. It has one of the longest continuous occupation records anywhere (charcoal dates back over 45,000 years, with art possibly around 28,000 years old), and it produced the world’s oldest known ground-edge stone axe fragment, dated to roughly 35,000–65,000 years ago, predating similar technology elsewhere by tens of thousands of years. However: no writing, no cities, no centralized state, made by mobile hunter-gatherer groups rather than settled agriculturalists.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
  It’s also a place of education, a community center, a court for gathered people to hold council, a religious institution and a continuously occupied (except for a stint from 1950 - 2008) seat of power. For 10’s of thousands of years. The pillars were engineered to make the shelter more viable over time, and some of the pillars are constructed of stacks of layered rock which contain paintings. Like a stack of books in a library, if you will .. The paintings record animal husbandry traditions, mythology, and tribal history, also. > settled agriculturalists. Australias original caretakers were a level of advanced agriculturalist not seen much elsewhere around the world, and there is emerging evidence that what they learned to do on that continent was transmitted around the world, perhaps as the first widespread distribution of agricultural knowledge - see the link to Gobekli Tepe, also, which - alas - is being minimized, with some speculation that for socio-political reasons it is being suppressed as a line of research… The T-shaped pillars, it is speculated in some archeological and anthropological circles, refer to the pillars of the school of agriculture and animal husbandry that is, Narwala Gabarnmang and which was then manifest in the Tepe cultures. There are common symbols in both the Tepe site and at Narwala Gabarnmang - which we may not recognize as ‘words’, but which may well represent an encoded language not yet fully understood by those studying them. The research continues, this is speculation and it is of course controversial to consider that Narwala Gabarnmang is the original school of agriculture, from which knowledge was transmitted to the other Tepe cultures, but please don’t let the authoritative canonicalization of the birthplace of human civilization ceiling hit you in the head .. after all, a lot of things can happen in the span of 80,000 years of human history. I consider it one of the holiest places in all of human history, personally, but I do have a distinct desire to not propagate the other ‘holy land’ tropes that Europeans have propagated in the rush to eradicate cultures they’ve deemed inferior over the past few hundred years.

readthenotes1 2mo ago

Doesn't civilization just literally mean a system of living together in a city? There doesn't need to be any written record of how they did it does there, just evidence that they did?

xhevahir 2mo ago
What counts as a city? Anyway, we're talking about a concept involving family resemblances rather than an airtight set of sufficient-and-necessary conditions.
mc32 2mo ago
Urbanization is one qualifier but not the only one. Plus even today we could have such chaos in a town where laws are absent and justice is that dispensed by the strongman/woman warlord and that would hardly be considered civilization. Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes.
- conartist6 2mo ago
  > Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes. Yet the presence of gathering places certainly does suggest civility! A warlord could command the cooperation necessary perhaps, but would have little reason to build that structure rather than walls and towers
- DyslexicAtheist 2mo ago
  > strongman/woman warlord any examples of women warlords ? I'm interested because both gendering and not gendering that sentence would upset feminists and I can't tell if this is trolling or whether more thought went into why gendering felt like the safe bet here.
  - nephihaha 2mo ago
    Boudicca. Joan of Arc. Grace O' Malley. There are some others.
  - bryanlarsen 2mo ago