Re: Civilizations

Joe Bernstein wrote:

Hi Joe,
I always enjoy your posts and often save them to
refer to later on (whenever that is).
Thanks.

In article <1139945085.016968.173830@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
rick++ <rick303@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A more preplexing question, beside getting answers for your homework,
is why civilization arose at all. Anthropologists place modern humans
as young as 40,000 years or as old as 125,000 years. By modern, they mean people that would not stand out in the street, could talk, learn tools, and create art.

All true, but then...

They probably lived like Native Americans for the first 75-90% of
this period before settling into villages and growing crops.

Um?

First of all, "settling into villages and growing crops" is how
the great majority of Native Americans lived at any time over
the past thousand years or so. Even if you restrict yourself to
USian ones, in which case the major population centres in the
Southeast tended to even have kings. (Powhatan was not some
sort of freak.)

So what do you mean by "lived like Native Americans" ? If you
mean hunting and gathering, um, well, that would be the Utes,
who were roundly mocked by all their neighbours for their
backwardness, or it would be the Canadian tribes (with some
exceptions), or some of the mountain groups. The Californian
and other coastal tribes don't qualify because they had something
different going on, comparable to the Jomon of Japan (the world's
first potters); in particular, they had villages. And further
south, you have people like the Olmecs and the Incas, until
you get (again) to small backward populations in places like
Brazil and Argentina.

Ah, be careful here.
1) Brazil is a big place.
2) There is mounting evidence that Amazonian Indians
in fact led settled lives, in villages, with
extensive/intensive farming. Trouble was, their
materialism was made up mostly of organic material
which doesn't last in a humid environment.
3) There is also evidence that the Argentinian natives
to a certain degree gave up farming in favor of
hunting, much like their relatives on the Great
Plains of North America.

If you mean the Plains Indians who followed the buffalo, um, pastoral nomadism is an advanced way of life complementary to agriculture; it isn't how people lived up to 10K BC, when they
didn't have pastoral *animals* domesticated. (It also isn't how
people lived *on the Plains* until the Spanish brought horses here...)

The Plains Indians didn't follow the lifestyle of Pastoral
Nomadism in the way that the Altaic peoples did or even the
way the Sami people do to this day. They didn't "own" the
herds. They simply followed along with little attempt to
control or "herd" the animals. Though some control was
certainly to be had with fire, though that's a limited
method for obvious reasons.

Apparently the Plains Indians, in many cases, gave up
agriculture altogether to go hunting. Some tribes kept
their sedentary ways, farmed, and traded with the nomads.
The Mandans come to mind with their very substantial
log and mud houses, not unlike houses built by the
Scandinavian people just before and during their great
migrations.

There's a recent book titled <1491> that's useful on this stuff,
although the author's a bit too keen to emphasise how Shocking
And New the information he's providing is.

Oh, come on, to VERY many people this information is
NEW and certainly shocking, because it upsets a lot of
widely held notions both about the NUMBER of people that
were in the Americas and their level of culture.

I thought the emphasis, while not something you would
write in a scholarly tome, was warranted in this piece
for popular consumption.

All of what is in this book, could be found elsewhere
in scholarly material, in a lot less readable form.

There are dozens of reasons proposed for the start of civilization.

Oh, yeah. They are strictly speaking off-topic here, since they
precede writing in most cases (I'd say, "in all cases", but some
folks would counter-argue with respect to India), but there sure
are dozens of reasons.

Personally, I prefer the end run advocated by Robert McCormick
Adams in <The Evolution of Urban Society> - that it's more
interesting to look at *how* it happened, than to try to answer
the often unanswerable, and often contingent, question *why*.
Indeed I so much prefer this approach that my own definition of
"civilisation" is "society past a certain point in that process",
rather than any specific criterion.

Well how did it happen? Did a population get to a point of
size where a certain level of organization is required? Did
that population then "allow" a big man to speak for them and
direct them in certain matters? After a while did this
population require someone with more authority? A Chief?
Then a King with hereditary backing for a *continuity* of
authority? How about some security issues from threats by
neighbors? This might require the creation of a state with
an army.

All the while this is happening, a class of people not
directly involved in primary production (agriculture) are
advancing ideas which gradually and almost inexorably becomes
a "civilization".

The how, are the steps noted above. Not always developing
at the same speed or in exactly the same way, but developing
nevertheless. The why is *clearly* population growth.

The population growth is brought on by human populations
obeying the Law of Nature, which is, "The number of
individuals in a given species will increase as the
food supply available to it increases."

There are about nine places on the earth where agriculture
developed independently. There are probably as many places
where civilization arose pretty much spontaneously with
little or no influence from the other "civilized" areas.

There are also places where agriculture developed and
civilization never did (New Guinea highlands for instance).
.