AHC: Earliest Homo Sapiens Civilization Possible?

What is the absolute earliest a civilization based around Homo Sapiens could come into being, with agriculture and a structure similar in complexity to those in the Fertile Crescent? My thought is have humans "discover" farming right out of the gate, to say, and then have little city states develop into a civilization at the mouth of the Shebelle and Juba rivers, which will then develop Writing and other things on their own.

Bonus points if you include basic cultural descriptions about the civilization you come up with (writing systems and etc.)
 
Well, Homo Sapiens seem to arise around 200K ago. If their behavior and intelligence developed simultaneously with modern anatomical features (which is one hypothesis) , the earliest possible civilization could develop during Eemian Interglacial which is between 130000 and 115000 ago.

Otherwise you can kill megafauna earlier during the current interglacial. :)

That's assuming there are generally unfavorable condition to develop and support agriculture during actual Ice Age.
 
I can remember reading somewhere that there was a civilisation that was developing C. 8000 BCE around Anatolia. I believe the question is not necessary when but where. So anywhere that has at minimum: a good/constant source of food and water, practical metals, strong wood and flint. If you can get those then you could say somehow a tribe discovers how to use all these etc. From there begins to become a developing culture. From there it just needs to survive uninterrupted. The earliest date would be the arrival if Homo Sapiens into that region.
 
Some theories hold that the earliest civilization in Egypt is anywhere from 40,000 to 32,000 years BCE. They are all based on multiplies of the Sothic cycle.
 
I can remember reading somewhere that there was a civilisation that was developing C. 8000 BCE around Anatolia. I believe the question is not necessary when but where. So anywhere that has at minimum: a good/constant source of food and water, practical metals, strong wood and flint. If you can get those then you could say somehow a tribe discovers how to use all these etc. From there begins to become a developing culture. From there it just needs to survive uninterrupted. The earliest date would be the arrival if Homo Sapiens into that region.

People make up a lot of bizarre speculation about Gobekli Tepe. It wasn't anything like Ancient Egypt or Norte Chico at all. Impressive, considering what we know about the Gobekli Tepeans, but not a civilization at all.
 
What is the absolute earliest a civilization based around Homo Sapiens could come into being, with agriculture and a structure similar in complexity to those in the Fertile Crescent? My thought is have humans "discover" farming right out of the gate, to say, and then have little city states develop into a civilization at the mouth of the Shebelle and Juba rivers, which will then develop Writing and other things on their own.

Bonus points if you include basic cultural descriptions about the civilization you come up with (writing systems and etc.)

It cannot be known for sure when the first civilization emerged, but in the Midddle east there are ruins of a walled city from 120000 years ago 9000 BC (I think around Jericho) , which means before the end of the glacial period and in the very end of Pleistocene. There had been also archeaological findings of an ancient settlement in Slovenia with weaving loons etc.
 
I guess to a certain extent it boils down to a question about how you define a civilization. Does it have permenent settlements that's lived in year-round? Are they Argiculturists, or can they merely be Gardeners (not actively planting stuff but harvesting and looking after natural plots of cereal/fruit)? Does it have to have a complex social basis where someone have administrative or religious duties and doesn't feed themselves? etc...
 
I guess to a certain extent it boils down to a question about how you define a civilization. Does it have permenent settlements that's lived in year-round? Are they Argiculturists, or can they merely be Gardeners (not actively planting stuff but harvesting and looking after natural plots of cereal/fruit)? Does it have to have a complex social basis where someone have administrative or religious duties and doesn't feed themselves? etc...

I guess I define Civilization as year-round settlements or with people with *strictly* governmental or religious position and some sort of farming.
 
so to be crude, in your mind a fishing village likely aren't civilization because they don't farm? :p
 
so to be crude, in your mind a fishing village likely aren't civilization because they don't farm? :p

Civilization: from 'civis', city. If it doesn't have cities, it's a culture or any one of a number of terms. It is not a value judgement, but a statement of centralization and tech development.
 
I've long held that there has been little evolution of human capabilities within our species on a very long time scale. But the timing of human expansion and the eventual development of agriculture, and then "civilization" in the broadest sense does seem to suggest that at prior opportunities, our species was not ready to take up certain challenges.

Then we have to consider the global context, which is that civilization has in fact only been seen to happen during the current interglacial period that started a bit over 10,000 years ago. I used to assume that, although the regions where civilization was founded and flourished in the current interglacial would not have been equally suitable during the last glaciation, there would instead be other regions that aren't prime territory for it today but would have been in the Ice Age, and wondered why in that very long period (of 100,000 years, ten times longer than civilization has been known to exist OTL) none were founded. One possible reason would be that the foundation of civilization required a certain critical mass of human population, regionally, whereas our species is now believed to have only begun its migration out of Africa just 80,000 years ago--in the early phase of the last glaciation in fact. So perhaps it was a coincidence that that critical mass was reached just about the time the ice started to retreat?

Other discussions here of the possibility of civilization during the glacial period though brought up another factor--it would seem that climate during the glaciation was more variable and unstable than it has been during the interglacial. That would mean that insofar as civilization is dependent on the development of crops (or conceivably other stable and large-scale exploitable resources, such as fisheries) there would not be enough time for a particular agricultural suite to be developed before large changes in regional climate would render that package locally useless; if there isn't a new region opened up by the same changes soon after, in fact overlapping the old proto-civilization's vitality period, near enough to be colonized, the experiment in agricultural dependency would end, with survivors necessarily reverting to gathering and hunting and forgetting most if not all of what they may have learned. In turn that also suggests that if any abortive experiments in civilization happened they would be unlikely to have anyone in contact range who did the same thing in parallel to interact with and learn from; each experiment would be isolated as well as short-lived.

This might help explain why it was that when the ice finally did retreat and the new, warmer climate zones stabilized, agriculture and civilization at least in its most primitive forms exploded pretty much all over the world; perhaps the gatherer-hunter societies preserved more lore of their prior failures than one might guess, and techniques that jump-started early agriculture lay ready to hand in many human populations. As it is, we know of separate eruptions of agriculture, based on entirely different and local crop suites, in several parts of Asia, Africa, New Guinea, and separately, North and South America too. In the early material Jared dug up for Lands of Red and Gold, he showed that even in Australia there were ancient practices that definitely pointed toward precursors of agriculture, as well as waterworks to improve fishing! As for Europe--others may know of instances of independent agriculture developing there too, but I don't know of any. I presume the potentials were pre-empted by early contact with the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, from whence the standard grain crops of Europe were derived.

On this view, one couldn't get civilization much earlier than we did OTL. The only way to do so would be if by good fortune, some region that stayed climatically stable enough for long enough in the Glacial period had happened to foster one, and its people managed to always find refuges where their evolving crop suite would work as climates shifted, then shifted again, much faster than they have in the Interglacial period.

I would think that if such a development were to occur, the precocious civilizational complex would become ubiquitous, hopping from one refuge to another and multiplying in number, thus scattering to cover a big part of the world (in little patches at any given moment), diversifying enough to become functionally equivalent to OTLs multipolar, diverse origin spectrum, and even if a final cascade of climactic shifts combined with bad luck took them down completely before the glaciation ended, they'd leave traces--new interglacial era civilizations would arise early with shared heritages although distantly separated--most of all they'd leave traces of material culture behind. Many of these might be submerged by the rising seas, but some of them must be found in highlands they happened to intrude into as well. If there was such a period of scrappy but marginal civs in the Glacial period, I think we'd have found conclusive and clear evidence of it by now.

So I'd say clearly it didn't happen. This doesn't rule out the possibility it might, in some ATL, or that the Glacial era civs would do even better, learning to stay put in particular regions despite large climate shifts, achieving a global footprint comparable to our Interglacial development, and perhaps even high-tech civilization before the glaciation ends.

However we have to go back to the question of critical mass again. If the H Sapiens Sapiens population of the world outside Africa was zero before 80,000 BCE, obviously we have to allow some time for humans to colonize regions and then saturate them before we could expect any civilizations to form, even if the climate were stable enough to favor them. If our species was essentially as it is 200,000 years ago, why did we not leave Africa during the prior glaciation? Or, considering that from Egypt to the Levant is a dry land bridge even with the ice in deep retreat, during the last interglacial?

Perhaps we existed, much as we are today, but in very tiny numbers, occupying a small suite of environments in East Africa, and had not expanded to fill Northern Africa with its various portals to Eurasia until the last interglacial came and went? 80,000 years ago--some 20,000 years after the prior glaciation would have started--might be about when the sea levels in the Red Sea declined enough to allow primitive people passage from Somalia to Yemen, which a book that attempted to reconstruct the pattern of human migration from genetic evidence I've read in the past decade suggested was in fact the route out of Africa our species took. (Why not from Egypt to Sinai and Caanan? Maybe some did but the genetic evidence of their route was washed out; maybe the Nile valley was too attractive and few groups were moved to push on east from it?)

If all this is the case, then the clock on possible civilizations cannot be started until our ancestors had a chance to spread far into Eurasia and approach near-saturation population levels as gatherer-hunters in many regions, where a few of them might have proven suitable ground to develop civilization faster than climatic change ruined them. This would push the earliest times up to say 50,000 BCE or even later.

Depending then on how formidable the odds were against a civilization forming and prospering during the Glaciation, it may be that there was simply no chance of it happening on a sustainable basis until the ice finally retreated, which is to say, pretty much the exact moment that the precursors of many different civilization heritages did start to form OTL on most of the continents.

In that case--we have maximum range for civilization already in OTL!

And it's pretty ominous that we are coming up on the predictable end of this current interglacial right about---now!

Maybe with massive carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas releases, we have broken the ancient cycle of the glaciations that have prevailed the past 30 million years or so, and instead of entering a new glaciation we are going to see the ancient polar ice caps melt at last.

Still, the reason the Glacial era climates were unstable is not clear to me; perhaps in the warm, ice-free periods local climates will still fluctuate quite a lot, disrupting our ability to sustain civilization. Of course if all this happens without causing a crisis that provokes humans into inflicting military self-destruction on each other, or at any rate the damage such a cycle of wars does leaves a high-tech civilization of sorts intact, we may be able to engineer our way around many of the challenges--or perhaps be able to do so because our population is decimated?:eek: We might even be able to take charge, by means of massive applications of technology suitable to terraform a planet, to arrest or reverse changes in Terran climate we don't like.

But if the challenge of a drastic climatic shift, on top of current high stresses due to high population and strain on resource bases combined with high ideological tensions, breaks the chain of technological civilization, and busts the few survivors down to primitive levels, I would guess that perhaps the glacial era Fimbulwinter might be delayed 500 or a thousand years by global warming, but after the poisoning and probable nuclear devastation of the immediate future settle out to less immediately toxic levels, the elimination of technological civilization, if that happens, will lead to a re-stabilization of Earth's chemical balance, which will sequester away the excess CO2 and other gases, and combined with the astronomical factors that cause glaciations in the first place, the northern plains will again cool, the Fimbulwinter--the snows that fall one winter and never quite melt away in the summer--will come, if many centuries late, and the glaciers will start to form, or rather reform, on Greenland then Canada, and in Antarctica if they melted there. The the cold and ice will advance from the poles, and we will be in another Glacial period within a thousand years or so anyway. It will then take many thousands of years for the ice caps to thicken thus lowering sea levels. But if the theory that climatic instability put the kibosh on civilization developing from scratch in the last interglacial is correct, presumably that same instability will block it from recovering for the next 100,000 years.

In that case, we could expect, some 110,000 years from now, the new foundations of new civilizations, essentially a completely new deal with no continuity with ours. And some 120,000 years on, these new societies will have been attempting to replicate the rise of our technological era--but would be frustrated to find many key resources we exploited in our rise to be depleted. Perhaps the challenge of our having consumed their easy steps away will lead to a response of a more sustainable path being taken.

Certainly, although they would have no cultural continuity with us whatsoever, they will find traces of our work, besides the clue of many depleted mines--remnants of dams with sediments backed up behind them around the channel that formed when the dam finally broke, for instance, or the cuts of highways and railways through mountain walls. If they dig in the right places they will find artifacts, and probably the inference that we existed will explain many things to their scientists--such as the drop in diversity of animal and plant species with the last Interglacial, or the presence of toxic substances in the ecosystem that might still in their day cause diseases; shoals of microscopic bits of styrofoam. And the high radiation levels found in the strata just under prime sites for cities and farmland.

Maybe they will learn lessons from our fate, and maybe not.

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As I've said though, I do think civilization is tenacious. If we do shoot ourselves into a mess, fighting over the last of the easy resources while the planet teeters on the brink of another Ice Age, I would expect that somewhere, by luck if not planning, some populations would survive and retain the knowledge and motivations to keep civilization going. It may well be that between small beginnings and a world severely poisoned by global civilization's last suicidal spasms, they remain marginal for a long time--long enough to see the ice caps melt and be forced to relocate to higher ground. Would they then, centuries hence, recover enough to again have a globe-spanning economic system that extracts resources from everywhere and concentrates wealth enough to allow for spacecraft and grandiose proposals to control the climate in the future? Do they perhaps let the high sea levels ride, take advantage of the greater warmth and moisture, colonize highlands in high latitudes that were largely spared the wrath of the great wars, and manipulate the climate through controlled gas emissions and perhaps orbital mirrors and sunshades, and ease our few descendants into an era of gradual expansion into space while maintaining Earth (other than we know it) as a nature preserve and residence?

Or do they find it very difficult to throw off Earth's deep cycles, and find the Fimbulwinter closing in, and abandon Earth completely for space settlements, leaving behind only a few diehard survivalists who do relapse, in their small numbers, to Ice Age gather-hunting again? Does a new wave of civs arise 110,000 years hence, only to find the Solar System filled with human societies living with technologies inconceivable to us today, who have moved on to settle colonies in thousands of star systems surrounding Sol?
 
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