Possibly dumb question: Why no earlier civilizations?

Alkahest

Banned
Humans virtually indistinguishable from us have existed for about 200 000 years. Even the most conservative estimates (the Great Leap Forward theory) place the appearance of behaviorally modern humans about 50 000 years ago.

... so why did civilization as we understand it, with cities and writing and the whole shebang, only appear roughly 6000-5000 years ago? Was it really necessary for humans as smart as we are to take several tens of thousands or possibly over a hundred thousand years to develop all the necessary ingredients for an urban civilization? What prevented us from creating a city-dwelling civilization tens of thousands of years earlier than we did? Was it the climate? Or did it take such a long time to fill the suitable river valleys with enough people to make cities necessary?
 

eliphas8

The population density for cities wasn't there yet, the human population initially grew slowly and only could support cities after a long time, let alone the fact that the agricultural systems needed to develop a city dwelling civilization where a long time coming as we'll.
 

The Sandman

Banned
My personal theory is that there were earlier civilizations, towards the tail end of the last glacial period. Unfortunately, like most other early civilizations, they were in river valleys near a coastline. They didn't survive the 150ft rise in sea level at the start of the current interglacial. All that's left is the bit where stories of a flood annihilating a previous world are remarkably common among old myths worldwide.
 
Beedok

Beedok

Civilisation and farming started about 10 000 years ago, not 5000. I'm guessing there might have been some earlier trials, but as discussed they'd have been in lowlands that were flooded.
 

Alkahest

Banned
eliphas8 said:
The population density for cities wasn't there yet, the human population initially grew slowly and only could support cities after a long time, let alone the fact that the agricultural systems needed to develop a city dwelling civilization where a long time coming as we'll.
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That was my initial thought, as well. I wonder what would be necessary to make the human population boom earlier. Couldn't agriculture have been developed earlier? Or could some mutation in the human genome have made us a more prolific species? (Of course, we are already pretty optimized for baby-popping as far as I understand it, so that might be hard.)
The Sandman said:
My personal theory is that there were earlier civilizations, towards the tail end of the last glacial period. Unfortunately, like most other early civilizations, they were in river valleys near a coastline. They didn't survive the 150ft rise in sea level at the start of the current interglacial. All that's left is the bit where stories of a flood annihilating a previous world are remarkably common among old myths worldwide.
Click to expand...
That's a very interesting idea, although I think most mainstream theories about the origin of the flood myths place it at a much more recent date. And shouldn't some human artifacts have survived?
Beedok said:
Civilisation and farming started about 10 000 years ago, not 5000. I'm guessing there might have been some earlier trials, but as discussed they'd have been in lowlands that were flooded.
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I meant civilization in the sense of an urban civilization with trade, a complex social hierarchy and writing.
 

Mongo

It does seem that as soon as the Earth's climate moved to modern temperatures, people started along the road to civilization. See Gobleki Tepe for an example of a hill-top religious complex that was built right at the start of the current interglacial, and appears to be associated with the beginnings of agriculture and animal husbandry.

But even so, population levels were so low to start with, that it would still always take thousands of years before true cities can emerge. I once saw a chart of technological change on the y axis measured against the total number of adult lifetimes on the x axis (so that 1000 years with a world population of 1 million counts the same as one year with a world population of 1 billion), and the early neolithic actually rated as a period of very high levels of innovation, measured against cumulative lives lived, it was just that the total population was so low that the number of major innovators alive at any given time was also quite low, most likely zero, so that progress was slow when measured against the number of years (instead of total lifetimes lived) that have passed.

Given this fact, if civilization started to develop in an earlier warm period, the pace of development would be so slow that any proto-civilization would not have gone very far in the few centuries that would pass before the climate would plunge back into typical ice age conditions -- which involved severe fluctuations in year-to year temperatures and rainfall, much more severe than happens in the current interglacial, that render agriculture unfeasible. And in fact this is what is seen in the archaeological record -- during the most recent interstadials (brief warm periods during a glacial), there are indications of such advances as proto-agriculture (selective gathering of wild plants) and possible ceramic pottery, but they would always disappear when the climate worsened. So it was basically the ice age climate that held civilization back.
 
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Wolfpaw

Banned
The Sandman said:
My personal theory is that there were earlier civilizations, towards the tail end of the last glacial period. Unfortunately, like most other early civilizations, they were in river valleys near a coastline. They didn't survive the 150ft rise in sea level at the start of the current interglacial. All that's left is the bit where stories of a flood annihilating a previous world are remarkably common among old myths worldwide.
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This I like.
 

Willmatron

Banned
there's been plenty of evidence, but nothing comfirmed of civilizations older than 10 or even a hundred thousand years. take gobekli tepe.
 

Colin

1 - low pop density
2 - isolated communities
3 - large proportion of population involved in vital work to create food therefore elites capable of spending time/resources on thinking/adapting are very small
4 - fragility of any civiliizations to war/natural disaster/climate change
5 - need to develop civilizations to a certain critical mass, note how at certain times certain societies seem to 'take off'
6 - hindsight is a wonderful thing, looking back the path of human history is obvious but it wasn't then, nor is to us now, how do we really know what paths are worth following in the future?

I would suggest reading anything by Jared Diamond.
 

Crimea

Could I tack my own question on top of this, then: would it theoretically be possible for a civilisation to have risen before the Toba eruption?
 

Mikestone8

Alkahest said:
Humans virtually indistinguishable from us have existed for about 200 000 years. Even the most conservative estimates (the Great Leap Forward theory) place the appearance of behaviorally modern humans about 50 000 years ago.

... so why did civilization as we understand it, with cities and writing and the whole shebang, only appear roughly 6000-5000 years ago? Was it really necessary for humans as smart as we are to take several tens of thousands or possibly over a hundred thousand years to develop all the necessary ingredients for an urban civilization? What prevented us from creating a city-dwelling civilization tens of thousands of years earlier than we did? Was it the climate? Or did it take such a long time to fill the suitable river valleys with enough people to make cities necessary?
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I suppose what it boils down to is that you can't support an urban-type civilisation by hunting-gathering. There has to be a big enough agricultural surplus to fed the townies. So you need the population to get (and stay) dense enough to compel a changeover from hunting to farming - which only happened quite recently.
 

Codae

IIRC, ice cores etc. have shown the period since 8000 BC or so to have had a much more stable global temperature than before then, suggesting that it was only shortly before our agricultural epoch's initiation that the climate became stable enough to develop agriculture.
 

scholar

Banned
The Sandman said:
My personal theory is that there were earlier civilizations, towards the tail end of the last glacial period. Unfortunately, like most other early civilizations, they were in river valleys near a coastline. They didn't survive the 150ft rise in sea level at the start of the current interglacial. All that's left is the bit where stories of a flood annihilating a previous world are remarkably common among old myths worldwide.
Click to expand...
I know quite a few that have very similar ideas to this.

Another thing to muse is that the places we know where civilization has occurred in the past are centered around rivers, yes, but in arid climates as well that help preserve and protect things that would otherwise crumble and dissolve within a century in other areas of the world. Even hardened clay comes apart in humid climates that is open to the elements. The only other known 'civilization' comes from China which pops into existence as a fully formed and fully developed country with sophisticated enemies on similar levels in around 2000-1200 B.C. This doesn't make sense from a modern perspective, especially since we have next to nothing on the states that were contemporary to what would become China. In wet climates and areas like those even those things make in stone or iron would rot away into nothingness. There needs to be a key set of circumstances for something to survive in climates like that.

It is possible, even more than possible, that 'advanced' civilizations had existed around the world contemporary to, or far preceding, Mesopotamian cultures. Just that when they fell and societies collapsed into less complex social structures the remnants they leave behind simply rot away.

However just because there is the possibility doesn't mean we can assume it or believe it. There's an overall lack of evidence for it which simply cannot be ignored.
 

Dave Howery

it also took a loooooooooong time to domesticate the early plants used in the earliest agriculture; they had to be selected over and over for the right characteristics that made them suitable for growing in fields and gardens...
 
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