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As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors:

a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, but those aren't visible to the people making the decision.

b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.

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> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.

The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, but there's unambiguously at least 8 origins and maybe a dozen. The unambiguous origins are Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization), as well as North America, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea (which don't clearly form independent origins of civilization, although note word order in that phrase). There's probably more origins as well.

In general, a lot of early civilization development is one of those things that was traditionally understood to be difficult and everyone cribbing off of the one guy who did it (kind of like how the Industrial Revolution is generally though to have happened), but the more people started digging into the research, the more endogenous its evolution appears: independent reinvention of the Neolithic Revolution seems to be the norm, not the exception.

Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.

In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best.

Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?

Wild cereals were one of many plant food sources in the paleo/meso- lithic world, and not even the most important. More careful analyses reveal families like Vetches and roots (known in the literature as underground storage organs/USOs) that simply don't preserve well in the material record.

Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing.

As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home.

Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!"

Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place.

Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.

It proves there was one, and quite possibly only one ‘city’ or settlement of some kind that was probably intermittently occupied, perhaps on a seasonal basis.

But yes, it is quite possible there are more to find, especially in now flooded former coastlines. I’m not expecting us to find anything spectacularly revolutionary or shocking though. Especially not widely distributed. There doesn’t seem any really good reason they would all be clustered along coastlines all over the place, but not along rivers or by lakes. Gobekli Tepe is nowhere near the coast.

> Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization)

I don't think it's settled that these are independent. Especially Mesopotamia and Indus Valley, and Meso and South America.

Both the Americas and Eur-Asia seem to have independently invented agriculture, and it didn't seem to lead to a technological explosion until looong afterwards.

Selective breeding was not required for early agriculture. That came later. I'm sure agriculture started with "hey we like strawberries, strawberries grow from seeds, let's plant the seeds and have more strawberries" for each of the plants they gathered.

> strawberries grow from seeds

You just jumped right over the bit that is deeply obvious to us, but not at all obvious to somebody who doesn't have any societally ingrained knowledge of how plants reproduce.

You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections.

You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?

Spontaneous generation was widely believed until the mid-1800s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

Anyone who lived on a farm knew better. And selective breeding of plants and animals had gone on for millennia before that.

It's worth noting that nobody lived on a farm before humans started doing agriculture.

I'd be shocked if hunter-gatherers didn't know that animal babies came from the male impregnating the female. They could hardly miss it living in the wild.

Sámi to this day manage herds of reindeer. I'd characterize it as farming after a manner. The reindeer for all practical purposes wild, yet they are cared for and benefit the Sámi. I expect they know how little reindeer come to be.

Off in eastern Siberia Tuvans were (until relatively recently) nomadic herders with at least one sub group being reindeer herders.

It seems like a logical step from managing wild herds to domesticating wild animals and I'm curious as to why domestication happens in some places and not in others. Then again, if it's working, why mess with it. :-)

There's a line in Antony & Cleopatra about this concerning the origins of some reptiles.

Didn’t they believe that only for stuff too small for them to easily see? I’m pretty sure they still knew that chickens came from eggs, for example.

It applied to vermin like mice, too.

From Wired[1]:

> In the 17th century, physician and chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont, apparently sick of there not being enough mice in this world, devised a home recipe for their manufacture. It was quite simple, really, far simpler than getting a girl mouse and boy mouse together with a tiny bottle of wine: “If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat,” he wrote, “the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.”

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/fantastically-wrong-how-to-gro...

Just because somebody wrote something doesn't mean that people in general believed it.

Read the whole article, these notions were widespread for millennia, it wasn't just van Helmont who thought that.

That ideation was the conceit of philosophy and academia. And possibly specific to Eurasians.

Quoting your link: "who compiled and expanded the work of earlier *natural philosophers* and the various ancient explanations for the appearance of organisms, and was taken as *scientific fact* for two millennia."

Ivory towers and echo chambers come to mind.

People who lived connected to the land and animal husbandry often had different ideas, often ironically closer to the truth. If they knew of the existence of rigor and scientific fact, its explanations weren't really relevant to their days.

To put it to a point: they knew damn well that if they only had a sow pig, they needed to mate it to a boar to get piglets, babies weren't going to appear magically. Through folk knowledge and wisdom, agrarians knew a pig gave birth 114 days after mating, and they would have arranged netflix and chill so that the piglets arrived in spring.

This idea that academics and the upper classes could be wrapped up in silly ideas and old ways can be demonstrated with the story of Edward Jenner, right around the era you were talking about.

>The record shows that it was there that Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox.

But physicians didn't treat peasants, and certainly (up until then) didn't listen to them.

Even animals know where babies come from. Like when the male guards his female(s) and prevents other males from mounting them. There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers.

> There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this! I have to say I’m quite skeptical.

Is there more information you can add? And why would it only affect human babies?

I saw it on one of those nature shows by David Attenborough.

Anyhow, the idea is that the father, in order to provide resources to the mother and child, needs reassurance that the child is indeed his. After all, what would you think if your kid looked like the plumber instead of you?

They did some double blind studies, and indeed babies do tend to look more like their fathers.

> why would it only affect human babies?

Because humans are very visual. Other species are more smell oriented. Who knows if their own babies smell like their fathers.

Writing things down meant not needing to reinvent the wheel.

There's a Mesopotamian joke in there somewhere.

In the transportation vein, kayak construction had a long history of not being written down :-)

That said, there's going to be some upper limit on how much technology can advance orally.

Planting the seeds of the plants you eat is selective breeding.

Not necessarily, you need to be optimizing for something,intentionally or otherwise.

It is, simply because you selected which ones to eat.

But even the Roman Empire--looked at on a long enough timescale--basically didn't move the needle on societal advancement relative to what happened once the industrial revolution got going.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.co...

The roman empire had steam powered contraceptions or prototypes too but lacked the machinery to produce them in large scale but more importantly their demographic were not very open to automation since they had human robots they could control aka slaves.

Why build an elaborate steam powered textile factory when it costs nothing to use slaves to do it for you?

Why do you need UFC on 4k television when you can watch gladiators duke it out live with no censorship?

Why do you need porn when...okay I will stop here but you get my point.

These mechanical constructions were always in the back of engineer's minds but nobody wanted it. If Romans invented the car, they would shun it for a horse.

I believe it is the development of commerce, colonialism and laws that really made it impossible to rely on human labor alone. Like the Dutch East Company and British one, the difference really came from increased need to manage the looting, I'm sorry, "legalized taking".

Wars also were increasingly more catastrophic and costly, an arms race if you will that really made them sit down and start engineering how to do real damage to one another.

Slave labor in the roman empire was not as cheap as one would think. Garrett Ryan goes into this in his latest videos, "Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HDQUuI6_E

haha i actually saw that video, very fascinating

The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.

yes it feels a bit like today, the society increasingly became complex due to ever-changing norms and social morality.

The videos upthread pretty much argue that a lot of pieces were in place but the cultural, economic, and societal pieces mostly weren't. Which, presumably, the right leadership could have shifted to some degree over time.

Wasn’t it Philip K Dick, in VALIS, who wrote “the Empire never ended”? Not in the sense that it didn’t end; it did in the 14th c. to the Ottoman Empire, but that the past is laminated onto the present.

They also had insufficiently developed metallurgy for anything steam-related.

Steam vessels need to withstand pressures that contemporary metal was incapable of tolerating.

Metallurgy is a huge player in technical progress. See current SpaceX efforts to prevent their Raptor 2 engines from ever so slightly melting when fired in overdrive.

The author and futurist Bruce Sterling (should need no introduction) has spoken about steam engine time before if I’m not mistaken but I might have mixed it up with someone else. Basically the steam engine could have been developed further in the past but the right set of social factors did not align with engineering and metallurgical factors

So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?

This question assumes a lot... and that isn't what happened.

I don't think it's assuming much, except that the first human civilizations were around 4000 BCE, which is consistent with the archeological record. This means for tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a pre-civilization environment.

What made them start civilization?

Beer. People stopped being nomadic when there were all of the ingredients and technology in the same place to brew beer. Then they didn’t leave because if they did there was no beer there. So they stayed near the beer.

Haha. Sort of like what drove the great expansion of the internet in the 90's? The dirty secret is it was online banking/trading, and porn. Porn drove the development of streaming technologies.

Nobody likes to talk about it, though.

To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor.

Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...

Not just that, but beer can make you braver and more willing to challenge the status quo.

Ah yes, the Beer Hall Putsch!

I've long wondered about the generational effects on human physiology and cognition from pregnant women drinking alcohol.

Excessive consumption causes Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but there is no sharp cut off.

They weren't. Its just an incredibly hard climb.

That primitive technology guy on youtube spent several years trying to climb out of his personal stone age. Even with actual knowledge and a path forward, the most he got was a few iron prills after hours of hard labour.

I could get that much iron out of dirt in a few minutes by running a magnet through it. We've come a long way, and its easy to forget how much our process relies on 6000 years of "ah-ha!" and hard labour.

We spent ~millions of years before that only occasionally changing the shape of our stone tools, and it seems like we had full power brains for much of that time. Sometimes you just don't have the spare calories.

I’m going with beer as a trigger for agricultural revolution.

You see occasional stories about a moose getting drunk and stuck in a tree on fermenting apples.

Now some ancient hillbilly figures out that they can get drunk on fermenting fruit. So eventually someone gets the bright idea to try and do it themselves.

> someone gets the bright idea

All my ideas are Bright ideas (tm).

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