Possibly dumb question: Why no earlier civilizations?

BlondieBC

Banned
Sounds strange. It implies that early humans were exclusive coast-huggers for a very long time. That sounds recipe for very quick speciation, limited population, and high vulnerability to sea level variation in times where sea levels were probably variating significantly in short times (short in evolutionary times of course).
Also, little in human body seems to be particularly adapted to gather seafood. It's not an argument in itself, but I suppose it helps shedding doubt.

It does not strike me as strange, but I remember the old aquatic ape theory. It tired to explain some characteristics of humans - hairless, no pheromones, we can float unlike chimps, etc. While largely discredited last time i check, we have lots of indication (fossil) that the humans were most dense near water in drier climates (South African Coast, East African Plains by rivers.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Farming was superior to hunting and gathering, though, because it allowed so many more people. If you have ten times the population, it doesn't matter if you're shorter and sicker than the other guy. Still, it's little wonder that it seems, at least in the Middle East (where we have the best record) drought and exhaustion of traditional food sources effectively forced people into being farmers. It's not something many contemporary hunting and gathering peoples willingly gave up frequently after all.

I think it closer to 100 to 1 between farming and hunter gather densities.

Why can't hunter-gatherers preserve food? It's harder to carry food if you're nomadic, but that doesn't mean that hunter-gatherers don't have any way to preserve surplus food supplies. And don't say that hunter-gatherers are unlikely to have surplus food to preserve because that is usually not the case.

Low food density. While there are areas with intense food densities, much of any environment is low on food. So you are often moving around many times per year, maybe many times per month. You can do some food storage, but when you have to move to follow the plants or animals, you can't take most of it with you.
 
Minus demosticatable crops and animals in that region was it not stable enough to have allowed agriculture-civilization?

IIRC Sub-Saharan even during the ice age was relatively unaffacted climatically. My information may be outdated. Does anyone have info on temperature, rainfall, of old stone age East Africa? In other words what is the enviroment Homo Sapiens was designed for? Are we all savanna hunter-gathers built on an older forest dweller design?
 
There is some evidence that certain Hindu texts are a lot older than expected -- not Ice Age old, but still earlier in the Neolithic than commonly assumed. There are a number of descriptions in certain Hindu texts of the positions of the visible planets at various key events, that are quite precise -- enough so that exact dates for the last time these positions would have occurred can be calculated. One important fact is that the chance of these positions being made up, and just happening to match actual planetary positions, is very low, since randomly chosen planetary positions to the level of precision given in the texts typically happen only once in many tens of thousands of years, so they very probably represent actual observations at the time that the planets were in that visible position.

It seems that according to these observations, Krishna would have been born on July 21, 3228 BC, and Rama would have been born on January 10, 5114 BC. I cannot vouch for the historical existence of these people, but somebody must have observed these planetary positions so that they were (possibly much later) linked with these events.

edit -- I should add that these dates are corroborated by hydrological evidence. The Rigveda is full of references to the bountiful Sarasvati River, which appears to be the central river of their religious poetry, but which went dry starting about 3300 BC, becoming completely dry by 1900 BC. So the early texts must have been composed sometime before that, which would also mean that the cities of the proto-Harappan civilization must actually be where the early Vedic texts were compiled.

The Zoroastrian Yima, who I believe is Yama in the RigVeda, supposedly led his people from q crippling snow. This has been described as a historical mention of Ice Age migrations.
 
The Zoroastrian Yima, who I believe is Yama in the RigVeda, supposedly led his people from q crippling snow. This has been described as a historical mention of Ice Age migrations.

I would want to see additional unrelated evidence before I would be willing to accept such a remarkably early date. Sorry!

The oldest astronomy-derived dates in the Rigveda that I know of are scattered references to the sun being in particular constellations at certain equinoxes/solstices (don't recall which ones in particular) which in the earliest cases, imply a date of c. 6500 BC. It may be a coincidence (or not) that this coincides with the start of proto-urban civilization in the Indus and Sarasvati basins.
 
Top