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Comment by timschmidt | Hacker News Reader

It's a big topic. I'm interested in the meltwater pulses following the last glacial maximum. I think something happened to cause those meltwater pulses. An impactor, or solar ejecta, or something similarly catastrophic. It's very interesting that those events seem to coincide with the earliest signs of human civilization. Global sealevels are still around 120m / 400ft higher than at the glacial maximum, and humans tend to build settlements at shorelines. Which suggests there is a lot of human history yet to be found on continental shelves worldwide. It seems an interesting avenue to potentially explain the gap between the appearance of biologically modern humans ~ 1m - 200,000 years ago and civilization ~10k years ago. I would not be surprised to find records somewhere of such a global catastrophe as seems to have happened.

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> It's very interesting that those events seem to coincide with the earliest signs of human civilization.

I think migration is a much easier argument to make than "civilization", especially when it gobekli tepi predates domesticated civilization by thousands of years, and cultivation of seeds began around twelve to fifteen thousand years before concrete evidence of settled civilization.

Still, if you're determined to link migrations to a single disaster, look no further than the link between the Toba eruption and the introduction of humans to Australia for the first time around ~70kya.

Indeed, migration was often how humans survived climate change.

Not such an option these days.

Please note that they're not the "earliest" sign of civilization. For once - as mentioned in the article, you have the Lascaux signs for example. But if you consider that these signs are not sufficiently complex to represent a civilisation, dont forget that Gobekli Tepe was only discovered in 1963 and that excavation only begun in 1995.

So there could easily be other sites of similar interest but more ancient history - not mentioning that David Graeber made a fair point of rememebering us that even important and powerful civilizations dont always leave big archeological traces.

But of course, that's in point with your argument about sea levels.

The paintings at Lascaux are beautiful and sophisticated, granted. I suppose by "civilization" which could have many definitions, I meant farming and city building (a city being some group of dwellings larger than dunbar's number). There is also some compelling genetic evidence that rice may have been domesticated and re-feralized several times throughout history, which could push the farming date back much further, which would be amazing. It seems to me that the nature of evidence-based archeology is to always be pushing these numbers further back in time, which is to be expected.

Well if you think that civilization equals cities and farming, then go grab "the dawn of everything", the last book of David Graeber :)

I was quite amazed to realize that the Golden Horde was way more sophisticated and powerful than most other empires of its time, and still it did not had cities, nor farming, and left really few traces. And that was around 1300, not in prehistoric times.

Also, if you're interested in the relation between farming and civilization but want an adverse position, go read "against the grain". It's also quite mind-opening.

Steppe nomads always had permanent settlements and agriculture. Often not by the nomads themselves, but the agricultural settlements were an integral part of their society. The Golden Horde had many cities in Europe and Central Asia, but those cities were usually on the peripheries of the empire rather than centers of power.

In some sense, this was similar to the Early Medieval Europe, where kings often had itinerant courts rather than permanent capitals.

You could also compare steppe empires to naval empires that were common in the Mediterranean. Both had vast expanses of low-value territory that enabled rapid travel. But the real value was in the surrounding agricultural land and cities.

I'm not really looking to debate or defend assertions. Just mark interesting points in human technological development in a way that's visible in the archeological or genetic record.

> I was quite amazed to realize that the Golden Horde was way more sophisticated and powerful than most other empires of its time, and still it did not had cities, nor farming, and left really few traces.

This is a pretty common theme for steppe horsemen, right? You can link this to the fall of probably dozens of empires.

> excavation only begun in 1995.

We are at 5%.

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