Humans

The Civilizational Myth: How New Discoveries are Rewriting the History of Humanity

Introduction

Throughout the ages, humanity has lived on the planet, existing in small groups, hunting and gathering food, moving to new areas when the climate was favorable, and retreating when it turned bad. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors used fire for cooking and heating. They made tools, shelters, clothing, and jewelry – although their possessions were limited to what they could carry. Sometimes they encountered other advanced humans like Neanderthals, and sometimes they interbred with them. Over long periods of time, history formed, unrecorded.

Radical Changes

Then, around 10,000 years ago, everything began to change. In some places, people began to cultivate crops. They spent more time in the same location. They built villages and cities. Many unknown geniuses invented writing, money, the wheel, and gunpowder. In just a few thousand years – a very short time in evolutionary terms – cities, empires, and factories spread across the world. Today, the Earth is surrounded by satellites and interconnected by internet cables. Nothing else like this has ever happened before.

Scientists’ Explanations

Archaeologists and anthropologists have sought to explain why these rapid and extraordinary transformations occurred. The most common narrative of this massive social shift describes it as a kind of trap: once people started farming, there was no way to return from an increasing sequence of social complexity that inevitably led to hierarchy, inequality, and environmental destruction. This dark view of the rise of civilization dominated for a long time. However, as we looked at more and more societies, this perspective began to dissipate. Confronting the uncomfortable evidence, we are forced to retell our origin story. In doing so, we rethink what society could be.

Humans

The origins of human civilization date back around 300,000 years – plus or minus a few tens of thousands of years. Throughout this time – including during ice ages – we were hunters and gatherers. So why did we abandon a lifestyle that had worked well for so long? This is the fundamental question in the roots of human civilization. “There is no clear reason for people to have started living in villages and domesticating crops and animals,” says Laura Dietrich at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna. “This is one of the greatest revolutions in human history.”

Complexity of Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Despite the difficulty of discussing this topic, anthropologists have arrived at a story to explain the massive social disruption in our recent evolutionary history. The thinking is that people in some fertile areas experimented with agriculture because it seemed like a good idea – only to discover there was no way to turn back. By producing more food, they created a population boom, which forced them to grow even more food. Individuals who could control the grain supplies did so, becoming the first rulers and emperors in what were once considered egalitarian societies. To maintain control, they created or exploited state apparatuses, such as writing, legislation, and armies. In this view, civilization has its advantages and disadvantages. It brings benefits like literature, medicine, and rock music, but it also comes with costs like inequality, taxes, and deadly pandemics that spread to us from livestock. Like Dr. Faust, our ancestors made a deal with the devil. The story of civilization is a tragicomedy with great narrative power.

New Evidence

Now, increasing evidence suggests that it is a myth. The first problem is that it distorts hunter-gatherer societies, which turn out to be more diverse and complex than we had thought. This error is exemplified at Göbekli Tepe, located atop a hill in southern Turkey. Starting in the mid-1990s, excavations there uncovered a series of circular enclosures containing several-meter-high stone pillars shaped like “T,” some engraved with animal symbols or other insignia. Rectangular buildings surround these enclosures. None of this would be surprising, except that Göbekli Tepe dates back as far as 11,500 to 10,000 years ago – before the advent of agriculture. “We have no cultivated plants or domesticated animals there,” says Dietrich. There is evidence that hunter-gatherers sometimes built monumental architecture, something previously thought to be unique to settled agricultural societies.

Experiences

Hunters and Gatherers

We cannot know why Göbekli Tepe was built. It seems it was not a living space: there is no water source and no evidence of permanent fire pits, so very few people may have lived here year-round, according to Dietrich. However, the stone pillars, or megaliths, are too large to have been moved by small groups. “The main evidence for construction can be linked to groups coming from other regions to gather there to create something shared, with a common idea,” she says. This common idea may have been religious, or a more mysterious ritual. The depictions have been interpreted as masculine: some of the carved animals have male genitalia, while there are no clear female representations. Some human skulls have been found, but it is difficult to determine their gender. There is also a stone basin that was used to process wild grains into soups and massive amounts of beer. Some suspect it was a place where groups of men gathered to perform initiation rituals.

Complex Hunter-Gatherer Societies

In recent decades, studies of modern hunter-gatherer groups have changed our ideas about their social structures as well. “People often think that hunter-gatherers live in small egalitarian groups that cooperate,” says Adrian Genau at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “But in reality, there are many examples of what are called ‘complex hunter-gatherers.’ These are people who can be somewhat sedentary and have a high degree of political stratification. There can be an inherited ruling class, for example, where you have a hereditary chieftainship. They have slavery and warfare.”

Agriculture and Hunting-Gathering Are Not Incompatible

Some hunter-gatherer groups may have operated in these ways for tens of thousands of years. “We don’t have a lot of direct evidence. But there are some burials of people with adornments and things that look like they could be rulers, dating back 20,000 to 30,000 years,” says Genau. Many pieces of evidence may have decayed or been hidden. Göbekli Tepe itself was deliberately buried for undetermined reasons.

Different Experiences of Agriculture

Although many questions remain, one thing is clear. The traditional story—that complex societies began with the advent of agriculture—does not always hold true, at least not all the time. Hunters and gatherers can form large groups, perform rituals, and construct elaborate monuments. Agriculture was not a prerequisite for that.

Reasons Behind Agriculture

It is helpful to imagine what early farms were like, says Amy Bogaard at the University of Oxford. Forget modern industrial-scale agriculture; it is more akin to gardening. “Think of a completely different spatial scale, greater focus, and enhancement of available growing conditions that can occur at this smaller scale.” She also notes that early farmers did not only farm. “There was still a lot of gathering, hunting, and foraging alongside it,” she says.

Agriculture Is Not a Trap

The obvious reason people might have started farming is that it produces more food, or at least a more predictable supply. However, there is limited evidence for this. In fact, it could be the opposite. Jared Diamond at UCLA points out that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race,” citing evidence that early farmers were shorter than hunters, more prone to malnutrition and diseases, and had shorter lifespans. But these are all generalizations. The evidence we have now suggests we need to assess what is happening at the regional level. Why start farming?

Experiences

Diverse Agriculture

Let’s take the example of the Çatalhöyük community in Turkey, which was a society of farmers living in a dense village between 7100 and 5600 BC. “It’s typical experimental data that lasts for 1500 years and works very well,” says Bougard. “There are some fluctuations in community size, but it has a very diverse farming system, with five or six grains, a similar number of legumes, and plenty of gathering.” In contrast, agriculture started off tough in Britain. By the time agriculture arrived there, many staple crops had been abandoned, leaving only a few grains. The result was an unstable boom-and-bust cycle where populations grew for a few centuries, then shrank and dispersed when crops failed.
Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25834450-800-the-civilisation-myth-how-new-discoveries-are-rewriting-human-history/