Could a Civilization exist before the neolithic era
- Thread starter Mosshadow
- Start date
Archaeology is pretty good at finding tools and cities from the distant past. However I'm sure that many "cities" (of a couple hundred people) of the early periods of agriculture have not been discovered as of 2018. That said a entire civilization would leave behind enough tools and garbage for archaeologists to find. Perhaps a city or a groups of villages located on the ice age coastline could have been swallowed into the sea when the glaciers retracted and sea levels rose.
Well it´s depends when exactly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe was erected, the oldest stone pilar are dated from 9.600 to the 8.800 B.C. and this is awful close to the paleolithic,and was in use for some 1.000 years before was backfilled, but in the other hand, a civilizations as we understand it could easily be build in those same 400 years
Kaze
Banned
Do you consider the Cave paintings in Southern France evidence of civilization?
Do you consider that the Neanderthal was the first humanoid-like species that buried their dead -instead of the cannibalism of the previous existing species. (The Homo Erectus bones often show evidences of being de-fleshed, cooked, or in the case of one skull boiled until it burst where on it is likely the Homo Erectus ate the contents of the burst skull). The Neanderthal was usually burred with grave goods such as tools, food, red ochre, and fresh flowers. Some have theorized that the Neanderthal might have had the primitive inklings of religion (or the concept of an afterlife). The problem is the idea of Neanderthal religion is still controversial among most scholars in the field of ancient human study. So if Neanderthal religion theory is true - that is a case for "civilization".
Do you consider that the Neanderthal was the first humanoid-like species that buried their dead -instead of the cannibalism of the previous existing species. (The Homo Erectus bones often show evidences of being de-fleshed, cooked, or in the case of one skull boiled until it burst where on it is likely the Homo Erectus ate the contents of the burst skull). The Neanderthal was usually burred with grave goods such as tools, food, red ochre, and fresh flowers. Some have theorized that the Neanderthal might have had the primitive inklings of religion (or the concept of an afterlife). The problem is the idea of Neanderthal religion is still controversial among most scholars in the field of ancient human study. So if Neanderthal religion theory is true - that is a case for "civilization".
Zachary VIII
Banned
Depends on what you define as "civilization". Cultures an societies certainly existed.
The probability that a society develops agriculture and domesticates crops without said crops leaving evidence behind, whether as physical remnants in middens and latrines, pollen in lake sediments, changes in soil and vegetation due to cultivation, depictions in art, or genetic evidence in related plants or the crop itself, is extremely small.
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If you're talking a few thousand years before the "start" of agriculture (whenever that would be), then yes, it's possible that agriculture has been going on for a bit longer than we think. Genetic analysis of a number of crop plants indicates a long period (potentially 10,000 years but the time period is fuzzy) of "semi-domestication" prior to what most people would call farming (and most of this period would have been mild unconscious selection by humans). But earlier than that? There's really no evidence for it, and as I said above, the lack of evidence is telling.
EDIT:
If you're talking a few thousand years before the "start" of agriculture (whenever that would be), then yes, it's possible that agriculture has been going on for a bit longer than we think. Genetic analysis of a number of crop plants indicates a long period (potentially 10,000 years but the time period is fuzzy) of "semi-domestication" prior to what most people would call farming (and most of this period would have been mild unconscious selection by humans). But earlier than that? There's really no evidence for it, and as I said above, the lack of evidence is telling.
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Possible but difficult.
Agriculture requires stable climates and farmable crops, and long-term cities (whether for the dead or the living) require durable material for us today to detect.
Depends on what you mean by a "city". How big does it have to be? Generally, you need a food surplus generated by something to get a city-number of people to survive in one area. And once you have that, you can get specialists and spare time and resources. Agriculture was normally the food booster.
I've had some thoughts about an end-of-the Ice Age proto-civilization based on fishing, which falls and is inundated with the end of the Ice Age.
Interestingly, they have done genetic analysis of wheat comparing various strains to find the wild common ancestor. Turns out it converges on an area less than a days walk from Göbekli Tepe, and a convergence time of 12 000 years.
I've had some thoughts about an end-of-the Ice Age proto-civilization based on fishing, which falls and is inundated with the end of the Ice Age.
Interestingly, they have done genetic analysis of wheat comparing various strains to find the wild common ancestor. Turns out it converges on an area less than a days walk from Göbekli Tepe, and a convergence time of 12 000 years.
Yes
If look at the climate at the time such civilisation would be much limited where it could exist. The climate was drier and the sea level lower. So much of the prime real eastate in the early neolithic age was likely pretty worthless. But instead we had fertile low land valleys and coastland in flooded areas today.
So prime real estate.
The Persian Gulf Valley: We could very well have had a early neolithic civilisation there. If that's the case we could easily imagine that the refugees from this flooded valley created the first post-Ice Age agricultural civilisations.
The Oman coastal lowland: even today southern Oman are hit by monsoon and are one of the most fertile areas on the Arab peninsula, in the Ice Age the coastal lowland likely receive much and we could easily imagine a densely populated (by the standards of the time) civilisation thrive there.
These cultures would be limted in any potential expansion by the dry highland of Arabia and the Alpine forests of Anatolia and Persia. Any traces of their existence would be hidden by the flooding of these regions. Other limits would be if Ice Age civilisation had greater use of wood and bambus (in case of a African or Asian Ice Age civiliastion) than of stone. These while useful keep far less well. Also when we look at the claim of when the early domesticated agricultural animals (goat, sheep and pig) was domesticated, we see a a wide rtange of guesses. So I would be surprised if I found out that a agricultural culture with sheep, goats and pigs existed for several milleniums at the end of the Ice Age. I would be surprised if we found out it was older than 20-18.000 BC. When we see how long agriculture took to move from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt, we could easily have had such a culture not expanding for milleniums. But at the same time the idea of our domesticated animal being older than this seem unlikely.
But it's also not impossible that early than that human have experimented with agriculture only to give it up again. While some claim that the Toba Eruption wasn't as disasterous as earlier believed, even a mild one could have resulted in a population decrease, which resulted in a experiments in agriculture being given up or variation in climate making another early adopters give up on agriculture.
If look at the climate at the time such civilisation would be much limited where it could exist. The climate was drier and the sea level lower. So much of the prime real eastate in the early neolithic age was likely pretty worthless. But instead we had fertile low land valleys and coastland in flooded areas today.
So prime real estate.
The Persian Gulf Valley: We could very well have had a early neolithic civilisation there. If that's the case we could easily imagine that the refugees from this flooded valley created the first post-Ice Age agricultural civilisations.
The Oman coastal lowland: even today southern Oman are hit by monsoon and are one of the most fertile areas on the Arab peninsula, in the Ice Age the coastal lowland likely receive much and we could easily imagine a densely populated (by the standards of the time) civilisation thrive there.
These cultures would be limted in any potential expansion by the dry highland of Arabia and the Alpine forests of Anatolia and Persia. Any traces of their existence would be hidden by the flooding of these regions. Other limits would be if Ice Age civilisation had greater use of wood and bambus (in case of a African or Asian Ice Age civiliastion) than of stone. These while useful keep far less well. Also when we look at the claim of when the early domesticated agricultural animals (goat, sheep and pig) was domesticated, we see a a wide rtange of guesses. So I would be surprised if I found out that a agricultural culture with sheep, goats and pigs existed for several milleniums at the end of the Ice Age. I would be surprised if we found out it was older than 20-18.000 BC. When we see how long agriculture took to move from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt, we could easily have had such a culture not expanding for milleniums. But at the same time the idea of our domesticated animal being older than this seem unlikely.
But it's also not impossible that early than that human have experimented with agriculture only to give it up again. While some claim that the Toba Eruption wasn't as disasterous as earlier believed, even a mild one could have resulted in a population decrease, which resulted in a experiments in agriculture being given up or variation in climate making another early adopters give up on agriculture.
Problem: The climate was also much more unstable. It makes developing food producing strategies more difficult because they may not pay off reliably and leave you short of food. I think you'd need a less weather sensitive main food source than agriculture.
You know, genetic analysis of ancient human remains from around the Persian gulf has given some very interesting results. It is beginning to seem quite probable that it was the homeland of a basal population that split off the out of Africa group almost immediately, long before the other non-African groups split, and remained isolated until the end of the Ice Age.
Current thinking is coming round to no Toba bottleneck effect. The current (march) issue of Journal of Human Evolution has a good piece on it.
The benefit of Gulf Valley are the fact that it didn't depend on rain, but would have gotten its water from the spring and summer melt in Anatolian and Iranian mountains. This would create a much more stable source of water. But would also have made it next to impossible to move out of the valley.
Yes it's also why I doesn't find it unlikely that a Ice Age agricultural culture could have dwelled there.
Maybe, but even without a bottleneck, we would likely have seen some population decrease, which would make a move back to hunter-gartnering a viable strategy.
Doesn't meltwater also require a stable climate to reduce flash flooding and landslides?
Stable climate is about regular and predictive weather not just clement weather.
Bavarian Raven
Banned
Or the "civilization" is based upon fishing and gathering, rather than agriculture. As were a small smaller civilizations along the pacific coastline of south america. Any traces of it would of course be hidden by the rising of the sea levels...
That's a very good point!
Especially as coastal archaeology is rather difficult to do.
It needs plants (trees mostly) which can work against erosion. Also when talk about stable climate, it means you expect there won't be a year without rain, but floods remove the need for rain, a example of this kind of area would be Egypt, where annual flood flooded the fields, and ensure nutrients arrived to the fields. Another example are southern Iraq one of the most fertile region in the Middle East and it get very little rain, but instead get the water through annual flood from the Iranian and Anatolian mountains.
But those were all regular, in a stable climate such things are regular and bad seasons rare. In an unstable climate you don't know what the seasons will be, the wet and dry years are unpredictable so you don't know when the floods are or how big.
Even in a unstable climate mountains get rain and in the winter snow, the snow melts in the spring and flow down the mountain bringing nutrients with it. There's years where the mountain get less rain, but unless the sun stop shining and the wind stop blowing, mountain ranges like the Anatolian and Iranian will get water, and unless winter and summer becomes random they will melt at the same time of the year. The problem with agriculture the Ice Age was that a lot more of the potential agricultural land was marginal, which made it a easy victim of climatic variation. At the same time a early agricultural packet was much less developed than a modern one, making it far less able to cope. But these things doesn't mean that there didn't exist zones of stability, even today we have zones of stability like the Nile and southern Iraq, whose fertility doesn't depend on annual rain.
To paraphrase Sir Pterry, history defines a civilised culture as one which can support historians.