Remember, the globe also looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_...
PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.
Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues. Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the way to at least Chile. The issue with that idea is that all those coast lines and settlement areas are about 200m under water now and were likely destroyed by wave action, so it's hard to prove. Beringia is a really cool place to study, pardon the pun, and helps change some ideas about how humans came to be. It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.
And there is always a leading edge of the glacier where all that ground-up goodness ends up. Many dynamic biomes are found on the boundaries of extreme and hostile environments.
I've wondered about that a lot, actually. If homo sapiens have been around for ~200k years (according to wikipedia), what were we doing for the first 185k years? What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?
On a larger time frame, how many species have lived and died and had every trace of their existence crushed and melted down by plate tectonics?
It's fascinating to think about, and a little sad that we'll never know the answer.
Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution
Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it.
> Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE Göbekli Tepe ("Potbelly Hill") lost its importance. The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new realities to human life in the area, and the "Stone-age zoo" (Schmidt's phrase applied particularly to Layer III, Enclosure D) apparently lost whatever significance it had had for the region's older, foraging communities.
I haven't seen any sources citing evidence for Göbekli Tepe post-dating agriculture, but there are many lines of evidence that it pre-dates it -- such as an absence of cultivated grains, granary structures, or other evidence that one sees as agriculture actually gets going. All the plant remains that have been found are wild varieties. Thus the mainstream assumption is that Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers.
1. The site seems to be built with a plan. Maybe they did not use paper and pencil, maybe they were using some kind of sand table[2]. And there was a number of people involved, who were quite good at stone cutting, and on a large scale. Just have a look at central obelisk and pedestal [3] - those sharp edges, those smooth surfaces. Now, getting good at something requires daily practice, for a long period of time during which one would rather not go around for hunting. So not only there was a population of proto-carpenters but also societal structure to support them, at least for times of learning and construction work.
2. Even more unusual, the site seems to have been abandoned (evacuated?) in planned manner. Great effort has been made to cover it up with huge mass of soil mixed up with broken stones, as if to make it tougher against elements. This, for me, really stands out. AFAIK the norm is, when supporting culture "loses interest" in site maintainance (like, when all its members are dead), the site is being taken over and/or decaying and/or reused by next wave of humans. But not this time.
Quite fascinating.
[1] what I know is subject to change as time goes by and I get updates
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_table
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Göbekli_Tepe,_Urfa.jpg
https://evolution-institute.org/blog/complex-societies-befor...
Further, civilizations based on wood instead of stone may have vastly fewer remnants. Which creates bias as we assume civilizations started in areas without much wood.
Or, it's actually not food that's the limitation but rather something else like culture with farming going back much further.
That site isn't pre agriculture anyway.
*Citation needed. Every source I've seen says that it is.
> But without agriculture you can't have dense cities or anything like civilization. The population that can be supported by hunting and gathering alone is tiny.
Göbekli Tepe says otherwise. It was a truly large-scale undertaking, requiring the highly-organised planning, engineering, and construction efforts of many hundreds, possibly thousands of people. And all the evidence points to these people being hunter-gatherers, not agrarians.
Living permanently in the same place on a large scale is a completely different way of life compared to living a mainly nomadic life and gathering at special sites from time to time, even if you make a permanent mark on those sites.
[0]https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-near...
Yes, but we don't have civilization because of those religious sites.
If the best explanation is "it just took a long time to discover," then I can believe it, but it's very odd that not even once (that we've discovered) in 185k years did anybody get the idea to build any kind of permanent stone structures or buildings or even rock formations like Stonehenge.
As far as technology goes...one day there was spoken word the next voices/thoughts could be communicated without a person and through time - that is magic.
Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement.
For instance in Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing started out as a shorthand representation of little piles of clay tokens representing various stored goods (grain, beer, etc.)
I agree writing doesn't show up in a vacuum. The cuneiform clay tablets from Mesopotamia are the oldest record of "written language" but certainly not the oldest form of writing.
At least according to the current historical record argiculture dates to 12,000bc while written numbers (tallies made of wood and bone) date back 25,000-35,000 years. So unless there is some as of yet discovered agricultural civilization(s) - I think very likely - there is a problem with your feedback loop compared to the historical record: writing(numbers)came long before agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapulimancy
Edit: Found it, Oracle bones were used in the early 1200's BC, which does not predate cunieform usage from the 3500's BC : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Bones
Also, wow! -3500 is when writing started, damn that is a long time ago.
This would predate agriculture.
"Lake Toba is the site of a massive supervolcanic eruption estimated at VEI 8 that occurred 69,000 to 77,000 years ago, representing a climate-changing event. It is the largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory [2], it had global consequences for human populations; it killed most humans living at that time and is believed to have created a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make up of the human worldwide population to the present."
~15k years ago coincides about the with ice retreating at the end of the last glacial period. A large part of human history was too cold to farm.
The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period, which occurred from c. 110,000 – c. 11,700 years ago.
From the link :
> This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry, and weaving were brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Ekur, which was inhabited by Annuna deities, very ancient gods without individual names
We find the first evidence of cultivation around 11.5k years ago not so far away in the Levant. Aggrecuture appears to have been the major change which kickstarted civilisation as we know it off.
Herding and framing then began as soon as that ice-age receded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period#/media/File:Co2...
After that, human culture has been changing continuously as cities, states, writing and all the rest evolved and continue to evolve.
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/02/04/fishing-for-fossi...
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg...
In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great ordered navigator Vitus Bering to explore the North Pacific for potential colonization. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska's coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. Bering's first voyage was foiled by thick fog and ice, but in 1741 a second voyage by Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made sight of the North American mainland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_the_Am...
It's generally accepted that over 80,000 years ago people crossed the land bridge over the Torres Strait before it was submerged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait
Maybe, maybe not. Living for days on an open raft or equivalent is going to be a lot tougher when you're nearly in the Arctic Circle than it is in the sunny South Pacific.
> PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the about in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.
That's an interesting thought. If you use Reddit, might be a good one for /r/AskHistorians
A dude recently crossed the Atlantic on a stand-up paddle board. Which is insane, but it proves you be a prolific seafarer with very basic watercraft.
http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/articles/chris-bertish-...
"Since the 1976 voyage, Hokulea has completed nine additional voyages.... On May 18, 2014, Hokulea and her sister vessel, Hikianalia embarked from Oahu for 'Malama Honua', a three-year circumnavigation of the earth. The journey will cover 47,000 nautical miles with stops at 85 ports in 26 countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea
"Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators.... Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
http://www.hokulea.com/education-at-sea/polynesian-navigatio...
The novel "The Navigator" by Morris West talks about this, some. In fact, the whole theme of the book is about a voyage that a motley group of people take, from Hawaii, to find a lost Polynesian island, that is talked about by the old Polynesian navigators, and where they go to die. There are lots of other sub-plots in the story, like about human relationships, power, etc., so the whole book is not about the navigation stuff, but overall, the book was very good reading, IMO.
Also, IIRC, the National Geographic Society had done a study of these navigation techniques many years ago. They had sent a team - scientists, sailors, photographers, etc. - to various Polynesian islands, and interviewed some of the still-living navigators, took boat rides between islands during which the navigators used their ancient techniques, etc. It describes many of the kinds of things that you say they used - stars, currents, wave patterns, air and sea patterns, birds, winds, etc. They published an article or series about it in NatGeo magazine. I was lucky to read it as a kid. Very interesting article.
Remaining small but alive for thousands of years is not entirely unthinkable, but it's very unlikely.
Also typically a population grows depending on birth-death rates which reach quick limits in places of low resources. This is self-evident from different population sizes in different geographic habitats. Instead human populations mushroomed only in select places. See Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond for more.
Even if your colony is surrounded by impenetrable deserts, I'd think you could always propagate along the coast, living off the ocean.
That I'm just some internet guy speculating without any deep knowledge is probably obvious, but let me make it extra clear!
Living off the ocean is also incredibly dangerous.
Well, logistically limited by the carrying capacity of the local area with available technology, etc.
But logistic growth looks exponential...until it doesn't.
That is, if there don't arise artificial limiting factors, like a cult/religion rule or system that takes control over population's dynamics. When that happens, it may enter in a stable state until an occurring external disruptive change.