Highly recommend THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
Gobekli Tepi is used as one of many examples of how nowadays the evidence is stacked against the idea of agriculture being an inevitable and necessary step on the road to civilisation and all its concomitant ills. Rather the picture is far less linear, indeed it would seem that many societies both knew and had the ability to farm, but actively chose not to.
I haven't finished it yet, but personally it's bringing "modernity" down a peg or 10. It seems that all the possible forms of social organisation that we can imagine, and more, have already been experimented with, multiple times even. What's unique about our version, isn't so much its innovation, but merely its scale. And if we consider this current scale as, encompassing-all-the-lands-we-know-of, then that too has already been and, crucially, gone. What if there have already been societies that, not only witnessed that ultimate jeopardy of the complete collapse of their all-encompassing civilisation, but also went beyond and innovated a post-civilisation society? In some ways that would make them more "modern" than us.
And basically, if you have capitalism/individual property rights then the answer HAS to be cattle, plus a lot of fossil fuel inputs.
But at the systemic level is it better? It’s probably worse. So does that mean we’re just waiting on culture to invent the right social structures so we can return to hunting?
Homo sapiens is 300k-350k years old.
We'we known 3-4 interglacials... how can we be sure the previous ones didn't have civilizations ?
(Because we didn't get out of Africa before roughly the middle of the last glacial ?)
All of these different lines of evidence greatly constrain the types of 'civilizations' that were possible to highly localized ones with small populations, or that were completely and utterly wiped out with no surviving material culture, technology, or descendants.
That's to say it's not impossible, but highly unlikely. Any explanations all those lines would have to be parsimonious and no one's brought forth good evidence for such a narrative.
At one point in our history, humans developed language and could tell each other stories about major events in their lives. If developing an oral legacy is your definition of having "civilation", your question is unanswerable because there's no way we can prove conclusively which ancient humans had those capabilities and which didn't.
At some later point, we developed writing. Mural inscriptions and stone tablets are the first examples we have of humanity's communicative abilities. Is using the written word enough to have "civilization"?
Taking the other extreme, it's pretty much assumed that until the European exploration phase in the 15th-16th century, humans lived within their own local/continental society. Is being in contact with people on the other side of the globe a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
A layer of systems built by organisms atop their natural biology, where new members of an species are inducted into those systems by “choice” and not biological requirements.
Example: Bees and termites build nests, but that’s part of their natural biology: They can’t practically survive without it.
Humans “choose” to build houses, but a human infant could survive and grow to adulthood without one, albeit with less convenience.
We also find tons of tools and fossils such dating back to 200k years ago and there's no evidence of civilization there too. Rather the evidence is pretty clear on how primitive those people were.
We only think it does because we conflate civilisation with technologies of violence and bureaucracy, and those indeed leave clear archaeological traces.
All of us are very closely related as far as species go, so there must have been a serious population bottleneck at one point. We’re all more similar to each other than two chimpanzees.
Is this true of Africans as well? I would expect there to be much more variety in humanity's original homeland than in the rest of the world.
Africans esp the San have much more diversity than everyone else but IIRC it’s still remarkably low for our current population size.
Oldowan, also : ~first (non-sapiens) Homo, ~beginning of the current Ice Age (~50 interglacials so far),
and maybe even 3 300 000 years ago (Lomekwian) - also note that even going that far back, Australopithecus *still* doesn't have other remaining descendants than us.
That's kind of the point though with regard to early humans and proto-humans and civilization, isn't it? We've found plenty of evidence of basic stone tool manufacture and use of fire and intentional burials from much earlier eras.
But we haven't found evidence of what we call civilization - and traces of iron tools and irrigation works and cities and monuments ought to be easier to discern than small cut flint if early humans flourished with them over those periods - until the last 10-15k of human existence.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-di...
and the NYRB-standard exchange of letters
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-ine...
It feels like one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time.
I wish HBO would adapt it into a fictional series, as a way to ignite our imagination about our ancestors.
We have choices about how we organize civilization. Neither Rousseau nor Hobbes depicted destiny, just choices.