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Comment by timschmidt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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