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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Also, Beringia went through many cycles of land and sea coverage[0]. Our climate has been pretty up and down since homo sapiens came onto the stage.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia

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> 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.

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.

>What changed ~15k years ago ... and why did it take 185k years to happen?

~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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period

It seems (though it is controversial) that some time during the last ice-age the brain (but not the visible anatomy) evolved to the point that there was a sudden explosion in culture (as visible to archaeology through art, burials etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Revolution_(human_or....

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.

Remember that many of the areas we know think of as ocean, were at that time dry land (Sundaland, Doggerland, etc) or covered in a mile of glacier. Even today fishermen will haul up old tools and bones from the Dogger banks off in the north sea. We may have had agriculture in many areas and times, but have not yet found the evidence for it, or the evidence is submerged and too hard to get to, or we built on top of it. Xenophon wrote of very ancient cities way back in ~400BC whose origins are attributed to legends and gods, possibly those cities were already thousands of years old.

https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/02/04/fishing-for-fossi...

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg...

"What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?"

Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

Does that answer the question, though, or just change it to "Why did it take 185k years to discover agriculture, cities, and tool making?" Not to mention all the millennia of close human ancestors like Neanderthals who could have potentially stumbled upon them.

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.

Also remember that a lot of the coastlines of yesteryears are now underwater, and coasts tend to be good for fishing and Homo habitation. So, there may be sites, just 200m down and buried in sediments. Also, humans tend to scavenge older sites and many places still may be the sites of current metropolises. Just as they were good places to settle way back when, they are good to settle now. Essentially, many theories are valid as there is not enough evidence to really support one side or the other. New techniques like geo-spatial mapping satellites may help, as will others that are not yet invented. Google Earth has been a (possible) asset to this and people may have found some new Egyptian sites using it : http://news.sky.com/story/two-new-pyramids-found-on-google-e...

That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre-dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture definitely had nothing to do with it.

Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

If it wasn't permanently inhabited, then it's not a city. There are the remains of massive camps in Russia built out of Mammoth bones and tusks that held many thousands of people, made possible by massive culls of migrating herds, but these are not permanent settlements either.

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.

Permanent populations are not a sign of civilization. Many religious sites today are sparsely populated except for once/twice a year, but we still have civilization. The Mongols were civilized even when they were raiding the entire old-world and establishing many dynasties. They had writing, religion, generals and well-organized armies, a bureaucracy, laws and customs, tariffs, etc, just not a single plot of land they went to sleep on every single night. Heck, even NYC doubles in population daily [0], those people may be daily commuter nomads, but they are 'civilized' people.

[0]https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-near...

>Many religious sites today are sparsely populated except for once/twice a year, but we still have civilization

Yes, but we don't have civilization because of those religious sites.

How do you know?

One area in the world where society may have evolved differently doesnt seem to be enough evidence to debunk the idea that the agricultural revolution gave rise to cities. Isn't this just an outlier... if it even does predate agriculture.

No time for a proper reply, but here's a series of blog posts addressing those issues (among others):

https://evolution-institute.org/blog/complex-societies-befor...

https://evolution-institute.org/blog/why-become-a-farmer/

It's an outlier. That's not deniable. It doesn't disprove the fact that agriculture lead to cities in so many other places... technically agriculture may not have been a prerequisite to cities, because of this one exception... cool. To say that this exception disproves the idea entirely, is to assume that all places evolved identically, which is just dumb.

Agriculture allows higher population density - a nice alternative to starvation, war, infanticide. But agriculture is less pleasant than hunter-gathering, so you avoid it til you have serious population problems.

Alternatively, fishing also allows for high population density's. But, those city's are now under a lot of water.

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.

So what? No one is claiming that prehistoric people couldn't build anything. 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.

That site isn't pre agriculture anyway.

> 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.

If true, it might not be agriculture that lead to all cities, but the abundance of food that did (which is more common in agriculture-backed societies). Maybe this was just a particularly good spot for hunting and gathering over a long period of time.

Seems to me that it could still be correct. It seems likely that humans were smart and well-equipped enough to build sites like Göbekli Tepe before the agricultural revolution, but the vast majority of them simply didn't have enough time to do so.

Your citation does not support the "decisively predates agriculture" claim, and in fact refers to early agriculture at the site as one of the competing interpretations.

Göbekli Tepe was built ~11,500 years ago, and it probably isn't a coincidence that early agriculture was developed in the same area -- about 1,000 years later. The early agriculture reference that you mention concerns the fact that the was abandoned as early agriculture started to take hold:

> 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.

Perhaps I am going too far with my speculation, but GT strikes me on two aspects as being highly unusual, with regard to what I "know"[1] about hunter-gatherer societies.

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

More specifically, what made societies around the world start building cities at roughly the same time? I suspect the answer will be that humans were a lot more mobile than we assume.

There is the "Nagging Auntie" hypothesis. :)

According to Jared Diamond, part of this was the development of complex, spoken language. He thinks it is responsible for a "great leap forward" about 60k years ago -- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/jul/03/research.h...

This would predate agriculture.

From [1]:

"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."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

~12k thousand years ago is when it appears we first started to form together into large communities, Göbekli Tepe is a good example. More here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

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.

Though people are suggesting the answer to your question is agriculture...I'd say it was likely writing (accounting/contracts) and in today's terms writing disrupted the existing systems of agriculture and city planning/building/management.

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.

Writing doesn’t show up in a vacuum. It’s a product of needing scribes to manage complicated supply chains, tax collection, property boundary recording, dispute adjudication, and most of all debt tracking.

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.)

>Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement.

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.

To add to this, pyromancy, specifically scapulimancy, may be some of the earliest forms of writing, and that was mostly used for divination and other 'religious' rituals, we think. I couldn't find the exact source, but some samples in ...China?... may be scapulimantic symbols used for fortune telling and the like that predate the cuneiform tablets. Again, conjecture and I can't find the source.

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.

Writing developed very late, about 5-6kya in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, and around 2-3kya in Mesoamerica. Even in the Americas, the large empires of the Aztecs and the Inca, as well as large complexes like the Mississippian culture, developed without writing (although the Incan quipu seems to have some sort of non-numeric data encoded that may strain our definition of writing system, and the Aztecs did have some form of proto-writing).

Record of written numbers (e.g. tallies, tallie sticks/bones) dates 25,000-35,000 years.

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is a great pop-anthropology book for anyone interested in this question.

Yeah! There are a lot of areas on Earth that Homo used to inhabit, but have disappeared under the oceans. Here are some more, for those that are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland

You'd think the land bridge would have pretty fertile soil too, with it having been seabed a few years prior and whatnot.

Does it glaciate? That process often grinds away everything down to the bedrock.

I don't believe the Bering Strait area was subject to any recent (within the timeframe we're discussing) glaciation.

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.

Take a look at the wiki page linked above. Beringia was never really covered in ice due to the wind and sea currents near it when it existed. The area was a 'refugium' of steppe grasses and light forests. It is thought that people may have moved there, stayed there, and then moved back into Asia as time went on, as well as into the Americas. As for using the area to farm, the very short summer growing season of higher latitudes is not well suited for agriculture.

Cultivating salt marshes isn't ideal.

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