What caused civilization?
Bob Keeter
For those that regularly read the newsgroups, this is obviously a
retread! Sort of like the "Are we related to Neanderthals?", "Where
did the Neanderthals go?", or "Who killed the megafauna?" threads!
But its one of my personal favorites and with the investigations of
Caral (in a coastal valley of Peru), it might deserve to be pitched
around again!
Background: We have widely scattered "seed points" for human
civilization all leaning towards a 3k BC start up. Egypt, Mesopotamia,
India, China and now Peru! We could always mumble about nomads
transferring concepts between the Old World sites, but now we have a
New World site with very nearly the same level of sophistication at the
same point in time! If we leave out flying saucer abductions,
"monolythic seeding" ala "2001: A Space Oddessy", some witchdoctor
throwing the bones wrong, and pure dumb luck (5 times in a row with the
SAME answer at the SAME time ain't luck, someone is cheating!) what
caused all of these civilizations to spin up at the same time!!!!????
HSS had apparently been meandering around the world for nearly 100,000
years with a toolkit only marginally superior to his predecessors. Yet
within a measly few hundred years, urbanized, pyramid/temple-building,
socially-structured civilizations start sprouting up like weeds in a
flower bed, quite literally all around the world! WHY!!! What pulled
the trigger of the starting pistol?
Regards
bk
James Michael Howard
the stage of the most basic hypothesis formation: "What will happen if I do
this?" I suggest this occurring with increases in testosterone and DHEA.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
First Jois
> Background: We have widely scattered "seed points" for human
> civilization all leaning towards a 3k BC start up. Egypt, Mesopotamia,
> India, China and now Peru! We could always mumble about nomads
> transferring concepts between the Old World sites, but now we have a
> New World site with very nearly the same level of sophistication at the
> same point in time!
[snip]
> what caused all of these civilizations to spin up at the same time!!!!????
>
> HSS had apparently been meandering around the world for nearly 100,000
> years with a toolkit only marginally superior to his predecessors. Yet
> within a measly few hundred years, urbanized, pyramid/temple-building,
> socially-structured civilizations start sprouting up like weeds in a
> flower bed, quite literally all around the world! WHY!!! What pulled
> the trigger of the starting pistol?
>
> Regards
> bk
Hi BK!
Was it something in the water?
The probably is some kind of formula (Maybe Philip has one.) that says when
the number of farming families produce "x" amount of food and need "y"
amount of cooperation to get water or to get rid of water and a strong
family can begin a kingly or priestly line, you can consider the trigger
pulled.
Or could it have even been earlier? When food producers were preyed upon by
non-food producers?
Jois
J.E.F. Godesky
Agriculture, of course! Real, hard-core, plow-based agriculture. It's a
terribly inefficient way to get your food, and to make it work, you need a
massively complicated society--hence, the state. And not only does
agriculture make it possible for one farmer to--if he breaks his back
enough in the process--feed many times more people than just his own
family, it almost requires it. Or else, why go to all that labor when you
can do a little hunting & gathering on the side, and come up with enough
food for the family with a lot less effort? So, cities, or in Latin,
civitas. Hence, civilization.
So, I guess the real question isn't so much why civilization, as why
agriculture? It's certainly not the easier way, or the smarter way. It
makes a society that's much more rigid, draconian, and really downright
nightmarish considering the alternatives, but don't worry, you get to work
harder to keep it going! :^) And as far as that goes ..... well ......
it's an excellent question. Personally, I think the excavators at
Catalhuyuk were on to something: religious sites leading to longer and
longer pilgrimages, creating some sedentism, which required agriculture.
Ideology is often poo-poo'ed as a means of state-formation, but I think
there's something to it. The Moche in Peru were more an ideology than a
state. Teotihuacan, the first real, major Mesoamerican civilization, may
well have begun as a site of religious pilgrimage (Pasztory, Millon). Of
course, there is Catalhuyuk in the Old World, and the Egyptian pharaohs. I
don't know much of the remaining two centers, in Shang China and the Indus
Valley, but I believe the Indus Valley civilization also was centered on an
ascetic religious community.
J.E.F. Godesky
Andrew Melka
If this thread has been strung many times before, I am sure the
following subject has come up before, but anyway. The onset of the
Holocene (i.e. the present interglacial) had the net effect of putting
alot more energy into the system. The result was smaller population
ranges, greater population densities, and a richer mosaic of diversity
(i.e. a movement in the direction of rain forest on a tundra--rainforest
continuum). These factors led to agriculture, and in time agriculture
led to civilization. The exact date, 3000BC, might correlate with the
end of the climatic maximum (i.e. the warmest, wetest stretch of the
Holocene, when there were large fresh water lakes in the Sahara, dates
9ka to 6ka.). A very good book is _The Great Ice Age: Climate Change
and Life_ by R.C.L. Wilson, S.A. Drury, and J.L. Chapman.
More philosophically, maybe the paradox of humans evolving as
part of nature, but now being in opposition to nature, can be explained
by the Holocene windfall. If I hunt Red Deer, when Red Deer are
becoming scarcer, it will be harder for the deer population to recover,
and fewer people can be supported. It seems to be just impossible for
people to get out of ballance with nature. But it is usually just such
an imballance that is invoked as triggering agriculture. Maybe, though,
the Upper Paleolithic Revolution was one of those rare, but totally
normal, events in the evolution of life, but because of the accident of
100k year glacial cycles, the momentus change occured in tune with the
cold periods not the warm periods.
Peter Melka
Joe Hoffman
long standing interest in the early history of our species I would like see
it examined thoroughly.
Given the amount of knowledge that writes or lurks around this group I
would like to see if the group can put together a matrix that addresses
what is know about the state of the world, at or immediately preceding the
seeming explosion in "urbanization.
While I know that the knee jerk response to the question Bob raises is,
"Agriculture of course.", I think his question was intended to address a
larger and probably earlier set of enablers. Catal provides an opportunity
to really expand the sample size because it is so remote from previously
know events while occurring at roughly the same time.
Some of the data that would be meaningful could be:
Latitude, altitude, nearest fresh water resource.
Prior "known" cultures in the general area.
Climate in the preceding 1k years
Protein resources
Tool kit prior
Animal resources
Others should be able to identify additional data types that may help even
though they may seem irrelevant. Astronomers may have information
regarding visible super nova events roughly correlating in time for
example.
Rather than a lot of hypothesizing, the collection of hard facts may point
to a more solid scenario and may in fact predict where similar new finds
may show up.
Your thoughts?
Joe
Bob Keeter
<jef.g...@verizon.net> wrote:
Snippage. . . . .
> >
> > HSS had apparently been meandering around the world for nearly 100,000
> > years with a toolkit only marginally superior to his predecessors. Yet
> > within a measly few hundred years, urbanized, pyramid/temple-building,
> > socially-structured civilizations start sprouting up like weeds in a
> > flower bed, quite literally all around the world! WHY!!! What pulled
> > the trigger of the starting pistol?
>
> Agriculture, of course! Real, hard-core, plow-based agriculture. . . . . .
More Snippage. . . .
OK..Agriculture is DEFINITELY a possible "intermediate step" towards
organized civilization, but is it a direct, one-for-one occurence? I
seem to remember a map that showed the "centers" for early agriculture.
Each of the old world civilization centers was in one of the farming
lands, but MANY of the farming areas never progressed! They were still
farming areas in the Iron Age!
Going back to the original question (with a bit of rephrasing!) HSS
had been wandering around the world for the better part of 100,000
years, and even longer, according to current theory, in Africa. He
apparently had moved into just about every climatic environment,
exploited a wide variety of food sources, yet in four or five different
places around the world, ALL OF A SUDDEN you see cities!
If Im a forest ranger and I see a forest fire every month or so, well.
. . .thats the breaks! If I see five in scattered areas around my
domain all at once. . . .well, something happened to trigger them!
Furthermore, if these "seedspots" were in fact just random occurences,
similar "beginings" must have happened MANY times over the 100,000
years? Where did these "failed civilizations" go? Why was the first
"successful one", be it Egypt, Mesopotamia or Peru, so rapidly followed
by all of the others? Again, Im not going to hide behind such
poppycock as UFO abductions, ET "seedings" and such. There has to be a
real REASON in there somewhere why after so much time (with either
failed attempts or simply no attempts at "civilization") that five
should kick off at once!
Regards
bk
CurtAdams
>Going back to the original question (with a bit of rephrasing!) HSS
>had been wandering around the world for the better part of 100,000
>years, and even longer, according to current theory, in Africa. He
>apparently had moved into just about every climatic environment,
>exploited a wide variety of food sources, yet in four or five different
>places around the world, ALL OF A SUDDEN you see cities!
It's not "all of a sudden". Mesopotamia antedates other Eurasian
civilizations by thousands of years. The other Old World cities
all appear to descend from Mesopotamia. So all you have is that
the New World got a presumably independent origin of civilization
during the spread of civilization in the Old World. Really, this
doesn't blow my mind. Temperate Old World first, New World later,
Australia/Tropical Africa/Southen Africa didn't get it before
contact with Old World civs. I see a distinct correlation with land
mass.
The beginning of the interglacial that others on this group have
suggested is a great candidate. Domestication of the Fertile
Crescent flora and fauna definitely took place about then. It
takes a long time to get domesticates up to snuff, and you do
indeed see a gradual increase in Fertile Crescent city size
over this period. I'll bet similar processes took place in the
New World but things were slower as they had a smaller pool
of domesticates. See Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
Curt Adams (curt...@aol.com)
"It is better to be wrong than to be vague" - Freeman Dyson
pete
`In article <3AECBA75...@verizon.net>, J.E.F. Godesky
`<jef.g...@verizon.net> wrote:
`Snippage. . . . .
`> >
`> > HSS had apparently been meandering around the world for nearly 100,000
`> > years with a toolkit only marginally superior to his predecessors. Yet
`> > within a measly few hundred years, urbanized, pyramid/temple-building,
`> > socially-structured civilizations start sprouting up like weeds in a
`> > flower bed, quite literally all around the world! WHY!!! What pulled
`> > the trigger of the starting pistol?
`>
`> Agriculture, of course! Real, hard-core, plow-based agriculture. . . . . .
`More Snippage. . . .
`OK..Agriculture is DEFINITELY a possible "intermediate step" towards
`organized civilization, but is it a direct, one-for-one occurence? I
`seem to remember a map that showed the "centers" for early agriculture.
`Each of the old world civilization centers was in one of the farming
`lands, but MANY of the farming areas never progressed! They were still
`farming areas in the Iron Age!
`Going back to the original question (with a bit of rephrasing!) HSS
`had been wandering around the world for the better part of 100,000
`years, and even longer, according to current theory, in Africa. He
`apparently had moved into just about every climatic environment,
`exploited a wide variety of food sources, yet in four or five different
`places around the world, ALL OF A SUDDEN you see cities!
My suggestion, which I've offered before with no particular fervour, is
that it might well tie in with sea level rise. 10k years ago, we had
the continental shelves exposed, and rich bottom land near the ocean
all over the world. Hs may well have thrived in that environment,
and a maritime settlement culture spread round much of the world,
resulting in a significant population developing in the lowlands.
Then the ocean starts to rise. It takes quite a while, but in a
few kyears, the lowlands are all gone, and the populations are all
concentrated at the edge of the continental highlands. The Black Sea
flood at 5500BC means the water was still rising even that late.
I don't have a mechanism to offer in detail about why this should
precipitate cities, but it's the only thing that every area of
the world has in common, except for some possible climatic events.
Perhaps small family settlements with rudimentary agriculture were the
common culture of the lowland peoples. We know that huts near the
water were built in europe and the middle east in that time period -
~9-10kya. So when the change in geography concentrates the population,
the culture is continued with minor alterations, resulting in villages,
and after a millennium or two getting the kinks out, the success
of the new lifestyle results in larger populations, and mud huts
get replaced with brick and stone...
The problem I have with this idea of course is that I'm looking at
a period of 6 or 7 k years, and still at the end of that period
it seems to result in cities at the same time everywhere. I would
expect a distribution around a couple of kyears, but it seems to
cluster much more closely around 2500bc. Thus I'm not strongly
attached to this idea, it's just that it gives a common timed event
to start from.
--
==========================================================================
vin...@triumf.ca Pete Vincent
Disclaimer: all I know I learned from reading Usenet.
Neurocop
"Joe Hoffman" <jo...@warwick.net> wrote in message
news:3AEE1B84...@warwick.net...
> While I know that the knee jerk response to the question Bob raises is,
> "Agriculture of course.", I think his question was intended to address a
> larger and probably earlier set of enablers. Catal provides an
opportunity
> to really expand the sample size because it is so remote from previously
> know events while occurring at roughly the same time.
One possible explanation is that by the time HSS began migrations to the New
World they had already developed the technology and social behavior of
building towns. The earliest of these are still in the Middle East. Don't
forget that we are talking about a time-frame of less than 10K ybp. There is
no reason to believe, for example, that urban construction suddenly and
simultaneously appeared de novo in 5 different sites far apart on the globe.
Urban technology certainly took a long time to develop. HE populated Europe
and Asia over 100K ybp, but there are no cities ascribed to them.
Urbanization may certainly have required agriculture, but it is hard to
believe that widely scattered HSS populations should have simultaneously
come up with this new lifestyle. A more parsimonious solution is that this
"invention" occurred in some specific region, probably the Middle East, and
spread by migration and/or communication with neighboring populations,
leading to the dissemination over a period of at most a few millenia to the
continents of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North and South America.
Antarctica was spared, because there were no prehistoric humans there, and
it is certainly no place for agriculture. North America was populated by
humans for many thousands of years with few "cities," the exceptions being
some sites in the American southwest. Why agriculture did not take root in
North America is hard to explain. One possibility is that it allowed
hunter-gatherers an ample opportunity to survive without having to resort to
agriculture and urban life. Australia has been populated for a long time,
but no prehistoric cities have been found there, perhaps because of the
severe environmental limitations on agriculture of that continent.
Leif Ekblad
One thing that's interesting me, is why most civilizations appeared in the
area where the Neanderthals had previously existed. Is this purely an
incident, or does this suggest inter-breeding was so successful that this
made the civilizations prosper here and not somewhere else?
-Leif
Leif Ekblad
I think all the basic features of modern man was already present long before
this happened, but what triggered this was the co-habitation between homo
sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens neandertalensis. The two races does
complement each other quite good, and this might have made those societies
more efficient. With higher efficiency, some people can start doing other
things than just getting food. Someone probably came up with the idea of
agriculture, and this made it possible to get even more food. Also, many of
the old world societies are found in the area where Neanderthals had
previously lived.
-Leif
James Michael Howard
allowed humans to form the simple hypothesis: "What will happen if I do
this?"
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
Harry Erwin
> Continued development of the advanced prefrontal lobes. HSS finally reached
> the stage of the most basic hypothesis formation: "What will happen if I do
> this?" I suggest this occurring with increases in testosterone and DHEA.
>
> James Michael Howard
> Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
>
Possible problem: a cultural trait diffusion/synchronization time in
excess of the interval over which the initial civilizations got started.
If that's the case, then there has to be a common non-cultural cause.
Climate?
--
Dr. Harry Erwin, ha...@dherwin.org, http://world.std.com/~herwin
First Jois
"Leif Ekblad" <le...@rdos.net> wrote in message
news:9clsnv$eftar$1...@ID-78319.news.dfncis.de...
> > The beginning of the interglacial that others on this group have
> > suggested is a great candidate. Domestication of the Fertile
> > Crescent flora and fauna definitely took place about then. It
> > takes a long time to get domesticates up to snuff, and you do
> > indeed see a gradual increase in Fertile Crescent city size
> > over this period. I'll bet similar processes took place in the
> > New World but things were slower as they had a smaller pool
> > of domesticates. See Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
>
> One thing that's interesting me, is why most civilizations appeared in the
> area where the Neanderthals had previously existed. Is this purely an
> incident, or does this suggest inter-breeding was so successful that this
> made the civilizations prosper here and not somewhere else?
>
> -Leif
Hi Leif!
There is just too great a space in time to drag the Neanderthals across the
gap (20,000-30,000 or so years) from their last appearance to the beginning
of civilization. The fossil record so far indicates that their identifying
body markers disappeared and that suite of features did not continue down
through time. Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" makes perfect sense and is
a great read for setting up the conditions that allow/make civilization.
Jois
James Michael Howard
Erwin) wrote:
>James Michael Howard <jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>
>> Continued development of the advanced prefrontal lobes. HSS finally reached
>> the stage of the most basic hypothesis formation: "What will happen if I do
>> this?" I suggest this occurring with increases in testosterone and DHEA.
>>
>> James Michael Howard
>> Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
>>
>
>Possible problem: a cultural trait diffusion/synchronization time in
>excess of the interval over which the initial civilizations got started.
>If that's the case, then there has to be a common non-cultural cause.
>Climate?
>
The "common non-cultural cause" is the development of the prefrontal lobes
to the level of hypothesis formation.
CurtAdams
>One thing that's interesting me, is why most civilizations appeared in the
>area where the Neanderthals had previously existed. Is this purely an
>incident, or does this suggest inter-breeding was so successful that this
>made the civilizations prosper here and not somewhere else?
Actually, HN probably only lived in the Fertile Crescent, of all the
relatively early civilization sites. They definitely weren't in China,
Egypt, or Peru, and I don't think they were in the Indus valley.
Granted, that is the place civilization appears to have started, but
the timing is way off.
In regards to your earlier idea the HN genes contribute to Asperger,
I find it unlikely. Asperger genes are deleterious in the sense that
people with Asperger tend to have fewer children (not necessarily
in the sense that the *people* with it are "inferior"). Socialization is
very important for breeding in humans. Deleterious genes just couldn't
hang out against selection for so long. HN might have had very
different socialization than HS, and an HN in modern society might
be diagnosed as "Asperger" (along with many other possibilities).
But a direct genetic connection is unlikely.
Harry Erwin
That goes back quite a while, I'm afraid, and requires a time interval
for the underlying genes to go to fixation throughout large areas of the
world that would spread the emergence of civilization over a much longer
interval than we actually see. <Another hot idea assassinated by cold,
cruel data...>
Leif Ekblad
the
> >area where the Neanderthals had previously existed. Is this purely an
> >incident, or does this suggest inter-breeding was so successful that this
> >made the civilizations prosper here and not somewhere else?
>
> Actually, HN probably only lived in the Fertile Crescent, of all the
> relatively early civilization sites. They definitely weren't in China,
> Egypt, or Peru, and I don't think they were in the Indus valley.
> Granted, that is the place civilization appears to have started, but
> the timing is way off.
They definitely where in Iraq and Israel. From those sites, Eqypt is
close. It's not likely they where in China or Peru though, but those
two countries wasn't really the craddle of modern civilization.
> In regards to your earlier idea the HN genes contribute to Asperger,
> I find it unlikely. Asperger genes are deleterious in the sense that
> people with Asperger tend to have fewer children (not necessarily
> in the sense that the *people* with it are "inferior").
This is true nowadays, but only in the last few centuries. Before that, I'm
pretty sure the socializing didn't matter that much. The strong traits did
make them successful in spite of their weak socializing. People didn't
travel as much, and the possible selections for mating where much smaller.
> Socialization is
> very important for breeding in humans. Deleterious genes just couldn't
> hang out against selection for so long. HN might have had very
> different socialization than HS, and an HN in modern society might
> be diagnosed as "Asperger" (along with many other possibilities).
> But a direct genetic connection is unlikely.
Another factor is that ADHD is much more common, and their strong
hunter-traits certainly didn't make them inferior. This of course also
would help Asperger genes that are related to ADHD, to survive.
-Leif
Johnny Abreu
But exactly what is considered a civilization? A group of people? A culture,
A religion, writing, shelters or buildings?
If it was agriculture that started civilization and as some people suggest,
agriculture led to the complicated allocation of land, recording of the
productions which lead to writing etc, then why did the African population
which was also agricultural based not develop writing?
Cheers - Johnny
***************************************
So much to learn, so little time,
Please, keep it short and simple
http://home.global.co.za/~abreu/
***************************************
CurtAdams
>They [HN] definitely where in Iraq and Israel. From those sites, Eqypt is
>close. It's not likely they where in China or Peru though, but those
>two countries wasn't really the craddle of modern civilization.
Egypt is close, but we still haven't found them there. You do see
overlap between HN/HS contact areas and 1st civilization; but the
overlap was rather large so it's not overwhelming. I find Jared
Diamond's demonstration that the Fertile Crescent had *overwhelmingly*
the best set of potential domesticates a much more convincing
hypothesis.
Essential support for any hypothesized HN origin for a trait would
be that it's absent in Africans. I'm not aware of that holding for
Asperger's or ADHD.
>> Asperger genes are deleterious in the sense that
>> people with Asperger tend to have fewer children (not necessarily
>> in the sense that the *people* with it are "inferior").
>This is true nowadays, but only in the last few centuries. Before that, I'm
>pretty sure the socializing didn't matter that much. The strong traits did
>make them successful in spite of their weak socializing. People didn't
>travel as much, and the possible selections for mating where much smaller.
All human societies have extensive socialization - even the presumably
more basal hunter-gatherers. See Sarah Hrdy's recent book on motherhood
(can't remember the title) for some examples
>Actually, from another discussion I got some more insight into this. ADHD,
which is
>another "disorder" that often coexists with Asperger, was chacterized by
Thom Hartmann
>as a hunter in a farmer society. This was because ADHD traits are what makes
a good hunter.
>Someone else proposed that Asperger would be great for trackers. This would
also explain
>why ADHD is much more frequent than Asperger, since a hunter society would
need lot
>of hunters but only a few trackers. So, one theory might be that ADHD
represents the
>Neanderthal hunters and Asperger represents the Neanderthal trackers.
The theory that Asperger or ADHD traits could be beneficial to some
individuals is more plausible a priori than the idea that it's conserved
from very ancient x-breeding. Deleterious traits at high frequencies
are usually connected to: 1) some compensating advantage (many
anemias) 2) high mutation rates (muscular dystrophy) or 3) founder
effect (but then it's generally in specific populations). That's a model
for something we often see. Also, it's relatively testable, although the
rapid disappearance of genuinely a-civilized people may impose a time
limit.
*BUT* if Asperger exists due to a frequency-dependent polymorphism,
there's no need to invoke x-breeding with HN. The HS genome could
likely have coughed it up on its own.
James Michael Howard
prefrontal lobe development necessary to form civilization's
characteristics, because civilization depends on the simple hypothesis:
"What happens if I do this?" Therefore, as the various groups of Homo
sapiens settled, civilization's characteristics appeared rapidly.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
On Tue, 1 May 2001 17:08:12 +0100, harry...@sunderland.ac.uk (Harry
Leif Ekblad
> >close. It's not likely they where in China or Peru though, but those
> >two countries wasn't really the craddle of modern civilization.
>
> Egypt is close, but we still haven't found them there. You do see
> overlap between HN/HS contact areas and 1st civilization; but the
> overlap was rather large so it's not overwhelming. I find Jared
> Diamond's demonstration that the Fertile Crescent had *overwhelmingly*
> the best set of potential domesticates a much more convincing
> hypothesis.
>
> Essential support for any hypothesized HN origin for a trait would
> be that it's absent in Africans. I'm not aware of that holding for
> Asperger's or ADHD.
That is rather interesting of course. I've seen no evidence that ADHD or
Asperger is present in eastern Asia or Africa. There are no active pages
on Internet in Japan on ADHD or Asperger, and the only site on chinese
is an US site that translated texts to chinese. Consequently, it's not at
all proved
that ADHD or AS is present everywhere.
> The theory that Asperger or ADHD traits could be beneficial to some
> individuals is more plausible a priori than the idea that it's conserved
> from very ancient x-breeding. Deleterious traits at high frequencies
> are usually connected to: 1) some compensating advantage (many
> anemias) 2) high mutation rates (muscular dystrophy) or 3) founder
> effect (but then it's generally in specific populations). That's a model
> for something we often see. Also, it's relatively testable, although the
> rapid disappearance of genuinely a-civilized people may impose a time
> limit.
>
> *BUT* if Asperger exists due to a frequency-dependent polymorphism,
> there's no need to invoke x-breeding with HN. The HS genome could
> likely have coughed it up on its own.
There are some points I've made that is inconsistent with this theory.
First, most
consider ADHD and AS more related than ADHD and NT (normals), even though
ADHD people behave more like NT. Secondly, the different body language seen
with AS isn't explained with this theory, nor is the special walking-style
or different
way of functioning. More importantly, researchers believe 100s of different
genes
are involved with ADHD, but the individual traits are seldom seen alone, but
very
often together. ADHD and AS is also often seen together.
If AS where specific traits beneficial for HS, why are all these traits
often seen together,
and rarely alone?
-Leif
J.E.F. Godesky
> to the level of hypothesis formation.
So, am I to presume, then, that the !Kung and Hazda do not have prefrontal lobes?
Jason Godesky
J.E.F. Godesky
> A religion, writing, shelters or buildings?
Civilization comes from the Latin civitas, for city. So, a civilization is a
society with cities. It's synonymous with a state-level society. Civilization
would be the culture, not the group of people, their religion, writing, or
structures.
> If it was agriculture that started civilization and as some people suggest,
> agriculture led to the complicated allocation of land, recording of the
> productions which lead to writing etc, then why did the African population
> which was also agricultural based not develop writing?
The Peruvian civilizations pretty much prove that, contrary to many Eurocentric
theories of state formation, writing is NOT a pivotal ingredient for a
civilization.
Jason Godesky
Bob Keeter
> The problem I have with this idea of course is that I'm looking at
> a period of 6 or 7 k years, and still at the end of that period
> it seems to result in cities at the same time everywhere. I would
> expect a distribution around a couple of kyears, but it seems to
> cluster much more closely around 2500bc. Thus I'm not strongly
> attached to this idea, it's just that it gives a common timed event
> to start from.
>
>
Personally, I think that I like your idea of the rise of sea level.
While there are "difficulties" with fitting that together with
everything else, its the ONLY hypothesis that Ive heard so far that
actually gets through the first "wicket", i.e. it had to be something
that occurred fairly consistently in all of the different places.
A warming climate itself would seem to show "promise". However, all
that a few degrees rise in temperature really does is move the "seed
spot" from the Nile delta to the first cataract (i.e. cooler temps
would have favored more tropical locations). In the case of the
Peruvian site, not sure that it would have changed the "favorable zone"
much at all, given the nearly equatorial location of the site!
Sealevel on the other hand was very nearly a GLOBAL issue. ANY
"trigger" would have to meet that test I think!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
> Agriculture could not exist until development of the prefrontal lobes which
> allowed humans to form the simple hypothesis: "What will happen if I do
> this?"
>
Unless Im sadly mistaken all indications are that the "prefrontal
lobes" were as fully developed in the first HS as in the most modern HS
and IIRC the classic Cro Magnons actually had a higher volume and
certainly the Neanderthals did!
Dont think that there were any Neanderthals stacking brick to build
"Neand-Urok" or digging irrigation ditches for fields of barley! ;-)
Sorry, while developed agriculture MIGHT have been one of the
precursors for civilization, dont think that "prefrontal development"
was the kick off!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
Snippage. . . . .
> The "common non-cultural cause" is the development of the prefrontal lobes
> to the level of hypothesis formation.
>
>
I believe that to one degree or another that capability is shared by
humans (HS, HN, and possibly back as far as the first "tool makers"),
chimps, bonobos, some birds, dolphins (if todays reports of "self
awareness" are true!), and even octopusses!
Nope. Dont think it fits my friend!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
Snippage. . . . . . .
>
> One thing that's interesting me, is why most civilizations appeared in the
> area where the Neanderthals had previously existed. Is this purely an
> incident, or does this suggest inter-breeding was so successful that this
> made the civilizations prosper here and not somewhere else?
>
>
Im not so sure of this proposition! Dont think that there were any
significant number of Neanderthal remains found in Egypt, the Indus
Valley, the Chinese "seed spots" (although there you could POSSIBLY
argue for H. erectus supplying the "robust" genes to match with the HSS
brains!), and certainly not in Peru! To me at least that would seem to
indicate that four of the five primary "seed sites" fail the test!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<ab...@global.co.za> wrote:
> Thanks Bob for the Interesting thread.
>
You are MOST welcome! Its one of those topics that just MIGHT have
some resolution if we happen to stumble across the right insight, and
get some professional researcher to carry it forward, yet its certainly
not going to be solved by digging up ONE little fragment of bone
anywhere! ;-)
Might as well chew it up with discussion then! ;-)))
> But exactly what is considered a civilization? A group of people? A culture,
> A religion, writing, shelters or buildings?
>
I'll go with the definition offered elsewhere, i.e. when human
"society" rises to the point of constructing permanent "cities". now
what is a city? What abuot a cluster of manufactured dwelling for more
than a single "family group" or small tribe.
> If it was agriculture that started civilization and as some people suggest,
> agriculture led to the complicated allocation of land, recording of the
> productions which lead to writing etc, then why did the African population
> which was also agricultural based not develop writing?
>
>
As well as the Peruvians, the later Incas, and a host of later
"civilizations". Id vote for writing as a "byproduct" of civilization,
cities, and the need to communicate and record transations and ideas
that were "outside" of the venue of a family group or tribe.
Agriculture is probably a necessary precondition for cities, although
the jury is apparently still out on the latest Peruvian finds. Writing
I dont think evolved ANYWHERE until after the cities and civilization
were fairly well established.
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<thal...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
Snippage. . . . .
>
> One possible explanation is that by the time HSS began migrations to the New
> World they had already developed the technology and social behavior of
> building towns. The earliest of these are still in the Middle East. Don't
> forget that we are talking about a time-frame of less than 10K ybp. There is
> no reason to believe, for example, that urban construction suddenly and
> simultaneously appeared de novo in 5 different sites far apart on the globe.
>
I think that Im with you in a general sense. If the "new world" was
first populated by the boat people that is the current rage, "village
life" and some form of communal living was also probable. (If for no
other reason than building boats and extracting food from the sea is a
lot easier with plenty of help!). I also happen to think that if this
WAS the method of populating the new world, it happened a considerable
period prior to 10k ybp. Too many "sites" in S. America these days to
really be able to support the "Clovis First" dates you offer.
> Urban technology certainly took a long time to develop. HE populated Europe
> and Asia over 100K ybp, but there are no cities ascribed to them.
> Urbanization may certainly have required agriculture, but it is hard to
> believe that widely scattered HSS populations should have simultaneously
> come up with this new lifestyle. A more parsimonious solution is that this
> "invention" occurred in some specific region, probably the Middle East, and
> spread by migration and/or communication with neighboring populations,
> leading to the dissemination over a period of at most a few millenia to the
> continents of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North and South America.
>
From some aspects this is the more parsimonious, the problem is that it
requires a degree of "connectivity" that is just not there!
Furthermore, in spite of what some of the more sensational writers
might contend, I really dont think that there is enough similarities
between the different sites to suggest that there was any "trickle
around" going on at all! Even if there were, knowledge of
city-building would have had to spread all over the world in a scant
few hundred years and would have had to bypass many promising but never
developed sites in its way between the "seed cultures"!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
Erwin <harry...@sunderland.ac.uk> wrote:
Snippage
> <Another hot idea assassinated by cold, cruel data...>
Its a tough house tonight! ;-)
Regards
bk
Philip Deitiker
<jef.g...@verizon.net> wrote:
>Agriculture, of course! Real, hard-core, plow-based agriculture. It's a
>terribly inefficient way to get your food, and to make it work, you need a
>massively complicated society--hence, the state. And not only does
>agriculture make it possible for one farmer to--if he breaks his back
>enough in the process--feed many times more people than just his own
>family, it almost requires it. Or else, why go to all that labor when you
>can do a little hunting & gathering on the side, and come up with enough
>food for the family with a lot less effort? So, cities, or in Latin,
>civitas. Hence, civilization.
>
>So, I guess the real question isn't so much why civilization, as why
>agriculture? It's certainly not the easier way, or the smarter way. It
>makes a society that's much more rigid, draconian, and really downright
>nightmarish considering the alternatives, but don't worry, you get to work
>harder to keep it going! :^) And as far as that goes ..... well ......
>it's an excellent question. Personally, I think the excavators at
>Catalhuyuk were on to something: religious sites leading to longer and
>longer pilgrimages, creating some sedentism, which required agriculture.
>Ideology is often poo-poo'ed as a means of state-formation, but I think
>there's something to it. The Moche in Peru were more an ideology than a
>state. Teotihuacan, the first real, major Mesoamerican civilization, may
>well have begun as a site of religious pilgrimage (Pasztory, Millon). Of
>course, there is Catalhuyuk in the Old World, and the Egyptian pharaohs. I
>don't know much of the remaining two centers, in Shang China and the Indus
>Valley, but I believe the Indus Valley civilization also was centered on an
>ascetic religious community.
I actually have a very different perspective. One
of the critical dividers between hunter gatherers
and cities is the notion of possession and accrual
of wealth. Hunter gatherers generally possess
little more than what they can carry on their
backs, however "agriculture" based civilizations
require the acquisition of wealth, at the most
basic level tools for plowing, seed stock piles,
etc. In addition to this preparing land for
plowing requires an investment in labor which,
when it initially happens may piss off hunter
gatherers or pastoral herders at the least. Thus
when one gets to the point of settling (and as
suggested I think the basic principles were in
place before the end of the last ice age) once
settled one needs a means of protecting the
various investments (land, tools, graineries,
etc).
Pastoral tribes and H/G societies all have
hierarchal structures that extend beyond the
nuclear family level, we can argue about degrees
of relatedness and kin selection in these
structures none the less, the heirarchy of a
simple civilization, the pastoral/agrarian
settlement, if successful, would result in
addition of levels as a result of population
increase. But is agriculture prerequisite?
There are H/G tribes in south america that burn
away a section of the forest for 'gardens', which
are protected by the density of jungle and by
their unpredictable placement, and native
americans were said to place corn crops in areas
that were difficult to find so that they could be
left untended, but these are rather an exception
and not the rule. None the less agriculture does
not demand such organization.
Once a planter has invested in a plant, his
vested interest is to defend his household and
locale until the crop is harvested, he is thus
fixed for the season. OTOH, the ability for the
planter to defend his crops during his lifetime
may vary. The more he plants, the more he has to
defend. Thus his potential interest and the
interest of freinds, close relatives or parties
with vested interest (for example cooperative
trade between pastorals and agrarian elements in a
region) could be to collaborate during the
planting season for protection and
possibly spike in labor needs during harvest, for
the betterment of a community. Thus it is no
wonder that we see the formation of settlments
surrounded by feilds, as places of stronghold and
storage of grains, and heirarchal organization.
And we have to remember that truely cooperative
and representative societies were generally
failures.
So we have on the one hand the advancement of
the need for larger scale cooperation, and on the
other hand inability to maintain a diffuse
cooperative scheme. It is of little wonder that a
system of kings, lords, emperors, etc developed.
The point being the someone should have the last
say in solving disputes or cooperation would
always break down.
We can always give the biblical example and of
course many here are poisoned by the bible;
however, we can look elsewhere for equivilantly
good examples and similar solutions.
One example I could give is the transition from
the late jomon, yayoi period, to classic emperial
period in Japan. We enter the yayoi period about
2400 years ago with the settlement of agrarian
groups in kyushu (SW japan) in which land is
abundant and technology for displacement of
primative jomon is easy. Life in this period is
hard, as judged by the number of skeleta uncoverd
in the hakata region which have spearpoint
injuries (most inflicted by the settlers on
themselves). The pressures on the mainland
accelerated settlement and increased the strife by
2200 years ago, and by 2000 years ago trade and
expansion from the SW island had created an early
civilization in SW Japan capitaled in what is now
fukuoka. There were many 'uji' or primative
religious beliefs at the time, associated with
many coalitions of peoples. The Uji associated
with the miyazaki region, the hiuga clan prospered
as they expanded northward across shikoku and
southern honshu. One of the benefits of being the
distal clan was access to new lands and distance
from manipulation by mainland forces in china and
korea. By the 4th century they reach the
Nara/Osaka region only to be confronted with a new
wave on continentalism and continental interest
guised in a new religion. However because the Uji
were often self-interested and squabbling over
regional issues they were ill-equiped to control
the potentially dangerous forces filtering in from
the continent. As it became apparent to the lessor
uji that these forces were strong enough to
eventually 'overthrow' the virutally non-existent
political structure, they reorganized themselves
behind the hiuga-derived (shinto) clan, and
establish an emperial society that persist to
today. The continental religion was not shut-out,
but was transformed by its own isolation into
another region specific religion that coexisted
with the transformed uji and the old
'disorganized' uji are all gone.
Why groups do this is for their self
preservation, the enemies they know are probably
better than the enemies lurking out of site,
particularly when technologies generally spread
from the most frequented and complex trade centers
(not everyone can live at the center and land may
be more abundant from the center), so coalitions
of culturally similar groups unite behind the
simplist decision making body, the individual, in
order to survive and defend themselves. A hunter
gatherer society might just move onto to other
grounds, and eventually be displaced. But agrarian
societies have to find a mechanism of maintaining
order with uncertain threat. The individual leader
then creates or screens subordinate ruling bodies
which can be used to handle the complexities of
civilizations such as defense, police and law
enforcement, taxation, infrastructure building for
trade routes (essential for technological
advancment), trading bodies, regulations and
treaties.
Thus when we think of civilizations we need to
think of the functions they perform rather than
the heirarchy, we can argue that heirarchies are
corrupt or corruptable intities, but in a low tech
world such entities are prerequisite for providing
higher order function of human societies.
Agriculture is a function of the heirarchy, seed
for planting, land for plowing, labor for
planting, plowing and harvesting, food and seed
storage. Secondarily agrarian based socities are
more than that, agrarain based societies are the
cap of other food acquisition techniques including
pastoral, and hunter gathers.
For example in many early agrarian societies
people still hunted for meat, unplanted trees need
to be felled for building and cooking, wool or
leather for clothing, bone instruments for tools.
Thus while agriculture may demand a more
structured societies, pastoral societies might
also organize along similar lines. Since they also
have goods of value. We can see evidence of this
organization by noting a number of H/G and
pastoral groups invaded and defeated agrarian
based societies. Other pastoral groups repeatedly
raided agrarian societies and stole the grain
stocks. Thus agriculture itself does not demand
development of civility. However interaction of
several 'immovable' resource acquisition schemes
would suffice to organize a settlement behind
capable groups. Depending on the region and the
'pressures' on H/G or pastoral they might need to
organize in order to compete for the best hunting
lands (if game is static in a region) or for the
best herding lands, and treaties and regulations
may also be needed.
Thus it is my opinion that a geographic fixation
of resource gathering coupled with a need to
cooperate to defend, accumulate stores and wealth,
and trading and learning organizations that allow
the cultural evolution prerequisite for long term
competition and defense will be the major reason
for static civilization, and specifics such as
agriculture are important considerations, but part
of the overall equation.
I can sort of anecdote now with the bible
without getting to terse of a response. IMHO the
bible as we know it really begins with Abraham.
This abraham is a very interesting fellow, if
story is anywhere near true he must have been a
major 'civil' cynic of his time. His family was
from Ur (sumeria) travel to akkadia and lived his
young adult life in damascas region. Yet rather
than settle in any of the civilizations he bought
a parcel of land west of the dead sea, overlooking
the grain feilds where he should have settled, and
essentially devoting his family to pastoral
lifestyle. Obvious that he distrusted the religion
of sumeria, and the religion of the people around
him in 'canaan', he distrusted the intentions of
every person he came in contact, every settlement
he entered, no doubt the tilt of sodom and
gommorah was part of his greater veiw of agrarian
centered settlements. But even a cynic of
civilization has the ability to protect himself
from the unstable nature of civilizations of that
period (and even our period) and his descendants
end up in egypt and after many generations they
get out with an extreme dislike for emperial rule
and a longing by objective or law-driven rule,
rule by judges. This rule did not work, and people
became insecure about the ability of a
representative society to organize so they
appointed a king, according to the prophet samuel
king will take a 10th of what you own, your best
land for his vinyard, your daughters for
concubines, your sons for soldier, and in the end
you will detest him . . . .Ole saul did not take
to long to corrupt himself, poor David got all
tightpanted over another man's wife, and sent ole
hubby out on a suicide mission, and everyone ended
up in babylon to greet the persions, then back to
isreal to greet the greeks, then the romans . . .
. . . . . . . .
Come to think about, given 1500 years of
relatively stable emperial rule Japan hasn't done
to bad for itself has it. Helps to live on an
island I guess.
Civilization is a dream, its an effigy of hopes
and desires, its structures convince us we are
powerful, its technologies convince us we are
strong and war-worthy. It is the result of
sacrifice from what we inherantly want to what we
might concede with our arms behind our backs and
our heads in the trough, because we fear the curse
of Adam, that we cannot go back. It is the place
between the rock and the hardplace. It is the
outrageous labor of childbrith or the blowing
sands and thistles in plowworn feilds or of dried
up rivers, of fouled water. It is about senseless
battles, of irreconcilable beliefs, of bloodwars,
racism, ethnocentricism, weapons of mass
distruction. When abraham sat under the tree in
hebron he was praying to the god of better
civilization, and a millenium and a half later
look what became of his prayers (you will be a
sojourner and a wanderer), and the rest of the
world has picked up cloth to follow him. So i have
to say that civility may come about with cities
but we increasingly detached ourselves from
staying in one place. And the cities also unseat
themselves don't they. Where is Ur now? how many
people live in IVC settlements, where is Memphis
egypt.
The bottom line is the gods of the modern man
are gods of civilization, they are gods of
organization and heirarchy, whether they are
Japans emperors with the finger on the pulse of
culture and cultural evolution, or the hebraic
gods with a religion of law and cynical prophets,
to the bhuddist and christian gods who would give
out the motto get along to get along, or the
communist who propel the rule of the masses (via
totalitarianism?) All are rooted in the needs of
the heirachy require for complexification in
competitive survival schemes. Do not these schemes
protect the megapolistic states from the ebbs and
flows of single 'settlements'? Thus even as we
look at the needs of the settlement we must
realize that settlement based civility is a
tentative survival scheme, agrarian or not, and
that mobility of peoples ideas and technologies
are important underpinnings prior to, during early
civilization (alas abraham as isolationist civil
cynic who would profoundly affect so many
civilizations that followed). Thus I go back to
what I said in the beggining, the trends
underlying the hallmark we call civilization had
been evolving long before civilizations dotted its
first "i" or crossed its first "t", these trends
were encorperated into civilizations and spread
when civilizations fell apart only to appear in
new civilizations that are, now, long gone. The
'cause' is not so important as the pressure to
successfully compete, to gather wealth, to
increase genetic fitness by promoting survival of
ones kin and offspring by accruing defensive and
offensive technologies, by increasing output with
new tools, new planting techniques, new pastoral
techniques. By trading for scarce resources, when
developing them was difficult. By exploiting and
diverting nature via irrigation and domestication
practices. The true cause of civilization is to
increase the ante in the 'zero sum game' of
survival.
It was the destiny of homo erectus to expand
beyond the range of other hominids and establish a
range far greater than that of any living primate,
doing so within a few 100,000 years. It is the
destiny of homo sapiens to break the niche
constraints applicable to all other animals, at
some point limitations in exploitation via crude
H/G practices had equilibrated and many forms of
new technology might penetrate these constraints
resulting settlements controlled by larger
political heirarchies, there were analogous
cultures in Egypt, Sumeria, IVC, and meso america
with a clear affiliation with agriculture. There
are not so analogous cultures that flowed out of
scandinavia from the 2400 to 900 years ago, or
that flowed out of outer mongolia 1000 years ago,
without such a clear affiliation to a settlement
or agriculture, but whose impact of evolution of
'civilization' was equally important. In modern
times the role of agriculture is more than clear,
we can gain 10 times the number of calories from
cultivated land than from the pastoral derivative,
but now we are pushing agricultural production to
its theoretical limit (without direct intervention
in the genetic makeup of domesticated plants and
animals). Through advanced technology (pesticides,
herbicides, harvesting and planting machinery) it
seems obvious to connect agriculture to
civilization. But how easy is civilization without
a metal plow, a domesticated opr mechanical beast
of burden, a silo (grainery) for dry seed storage.
OTOH how easy is it to watch over a herd of
animals as they forage over natural abundance.
Even in modern world there are areas where
pastoral exploitation is still more efficient than
agrarian exploitation of the land. In addition
being agrarian is no guarantee of civilization. I
saw a report (forget where) showing the seeds
native to NE asia ended up in american NW and some
may be the ancestor of certain native american
cultivars. These seeds may have come over 16,000
to 10,000 years ago and yet the simplist signs of
civilization did not develope more than 4600 years
ago in the americas (that we know of). Obviously
they were cultivated, but was cultivation an
immediate driving force or were other 'things'
required? Maybe they had all the things but
preferred the largely H/G modality. Maybe H/G was
a more plesant way of living at the entry
technology level, and fortuitous events spiral
H/Gs into civility (analogous to getting kicked
out of a nice garden variety jungle)
Thus the gedanken question I leave everyone here
with is think about the resources, technology,
infrastructure, and politic required to transit a
very simple settlement into a 'civilization'.
Going to grow grain, how are you going to make
your plow, were are you going to keep your seed.
Going to grow sheep, cows or goats. How are you
going to house them, herd them, feed and water
them in drought. Where are you going to get
resources that noone has figured out how yet to
grow, what technologies are required. How are you
going to build your house, tent. Who is going to
process your grain. do you commit one person(s) or
do you share the process with everyone. Skin or
milk your goats? Do you keep your sons, slaves,
servants, how long? How is land valued, traded or
passed to the next generation. Alot of culture to
'begin' the simplist 'civilization' has to be in
place before you can yell eureka.
How about defense, justice. Do you create an
army or draft anyone as needed. How about treaties
with neighbors, they have the goods you need, but
also their swords are pointed your direction. How
about unknown threats, unknown trading groups, do
you have a set of rules to determine what is
acceptable or unacceptable in your settlement. How
do you go about repatriating people and lands lost
to outside attack . . . . . . . . Are you going to
create a meeting place, maybe the wife doesn't
want every hairy wooly-bugger romping through her
hut, they carry mites, drink too much and make
really disgusting noises after they eat. Whos
going to maintain it (keep records . . . .)
How are you going to keep the populus happy now
that they cannot go romping about the countryside
bludgeoning anything they see fit, f__king
anything that catches their fancy, or killing
anyone whom that scares or threatens them. There
is no 'survivor' on TV for them to watch, life
gets pretty monotonous. No TV => overpopulation,
what to do with the surplus? Let them go to the
next group over for a head hunt? Maybe catch a few
mates to widen the gene pool of the group. Maybe
head out every spring on a robbing/pillaging
expedition to expand the resource base, or will
these things result in unpredictable reprisals or
outcomes. How about encouraging population growth
during times of plenty and then expansively
encorperating adjacent groups as slaves condensing
the grain stores and replacing these groups during
times of scarcity. Hunting competitors like
animals? How about forming offensive coalitions
with adjacent groups and taking out proximal
groups. Creating broad political regions and
creating an empire . . . . .
What are you little civilites allowed to
beleive, anything, really distructive self serving
gods, pantheistic gods (whatever makes them happy
as long as they are not too rompous), one god
(your god), just let'em create a few myths so
they have some betime stories for the kids, their
old gods, something you pull out of your hat while
pssing yourself off on top of a mountain. Is
belief a threat, how do you deal with it?
Choices, Choices, Choices. Maybe you say "to
hell with it all" pick up your tent and throw it
next to the biggest tree you can find on a hill
that noone wants with no great feilds, screw your
aged step sister and let the chips fall where they
may. But the joke is, when we say destiny, then we
know that the chips will none the less fall close
to where they are thrown, and the fate of every
human is somewhat inevitable. There is no
'reverse' in human cultural evolution, no yellow
brick road, the fate of disequilibrated evolution
is to 'change' until equilibration is achieved or
new fundemental mutations occur creating a new
equilibrium target. Since we have not yet reach
our target, we can surmise that occurrance of
civilization is simply a landmark intermediate in
a much longer term process that is not yet
complete, thus the cause of civilization is the
predisposed behavioral patterns unique to humans,
and that humankind (homo) went from a prespecific
unpredisposed state to the current
specific/predisposed state creating the
disequilibria in which the first occurrances of
civilizations are intermediate cultural states.
We see evidence of an expansion, which created
further disequilibria in many areas of the world,
followed by some quasispecific displacements,
followed or contemporary with rapid technological
exchange and further expansion, followed by
complexification of settlements and of resource
gathering techniques, addition of metalurgic
techniques, followed by the multilateral increase
in political state size and longer range trading
groups, more sophisiticated encription methods,
expansion of sophisticaion of language, expansion
of intercontinental travel, resource base, rapid
expansion in weapons of war and mass distruction,
accounting, maritime transport, land exploitation,
mineral gathering, etc, etc .(read tommorows
newspaper) . . . . .
From that initial expansion of kung!-like people
in subsaharan africa 100 to 200 kya to the
present, which waypoint is more important than the
next? Which waypoint is clearly significant? Did
the first human to cross out of africa pass on his
genes? Did the first civilization survive long
enough to leave a lasting record? Did the first
writing script persist? When did the last
neadertal breath his last breath? was this the
last non-Hs hominid to breath, was their deaths
important or just passing events in expansion of
humans? Though we cannot see the specifics we know
that things changed, humans grew culturally,
sometimes slowly sometimes rapidly, they
interacted more over longer distances, they shared
more technologies, the population grew, the
expanded population improvised, copied, emulated
amd manipulated nature. They capitalized on the
strength of other animals, domesticating the
canids 100 kya, other animals later, they
domesticated and cultivated, independently, many
varieties of grains, legume, tuber, herb, gourd in
many places in the world.
Maybe the most important waypoint was the
mutation of that gene which facilitated the
ceasation of the bottleneck permissive of
competitive expansion and resulting in a
unsatiated disequilibriation. Maybe civilization
and its favored attachement to agrarian lifestyles
is but just part of the slope of the
disequilibriated state.
OK so who asked for the equation?
Bet your sorry, now?
C Now-->*
u *
l *
t *
u *
r *
a **
l **
***
c ***
o ***
m ****
p *****
l ********
e *stasis*******
x
i
t
y
---------------------------------------------------
^ ^
radiation TIME> civilization
So pick a point in time, tell me which is more
important, the part of the curve in which
civilization takes place (where complexity is
already in longer term expansion) or the part of
the curve in which complexity begins a marked
increase over an apparent static state?
Now that everyones happy, go away and leave me
alone. And for the chump who wanted to know what
caused civilization go read the bible, some folks
weren't as pleased as you think that civilization
was "caused", some were downright resentful. If
you think I am ethoncentric, go read the
nihonshokai make a visit to Asuka.
Philip
[pdeitik @ bcm.tmc.edu]
http://home.att.net/~pdeitik/
pete
*--ka-SNIP!--*
` Maybe the most important waypoint was the
The problem with this idea, which is otherwise somewhat appealing, is
that your horizontal axis is about 300Kyears, and if we split the
curve among different radiating groups, each of which face different
vagueries of environment, climate, adversity etc, in their journey,
they thus experience different degrees of wellbeing, reproductive
success, population density, leisure time, "wealth" (ie richness of
land) and thus I would suggest their curves diverge in correspondence
with the resources they have to contribute to their cultural complexity.
And with a curve of this extent, the divergence should be in the order
of 5-7k years for the same height on your curve. And for many different
aspects of diverging cultures, I would suggest that we see something
like that kind of time difference - smelting technology is just one
example that might have taken that long for all cultures to reach had
not contact ended the experiment. Yet the appearance of cities occurs
in less than a tenth of that time spread.
And geez, Phil, were the preceding pages really necessary?
Harry Erwin
> Homo sapiens arose from a relatively small group. These individuals had the
> prefrontal lobe development necessary to form civilization's
> characteristics, because civilization depends on the simple hypothesis:
> "What happens if I do this?" Therefore, as the various groups of Homo
> sapiens settled, civilization's characteristics appeared rapidly.
>
Sorry about arguing, but I'm a neuroscientist and have quite a bit of
interest in the functions of the prefrontal. Homo sapiens in the strict
sense has had what you refer to as "prefrontal lobe development" for >30
KYr. This shows up in culture and in endocasts. Farming communities go
back about 10KYr, and urban communities about 5-6KYr. The timing is
wrong for your hypothesis to be true.
Bob Keeter
Erwin <harry...@sunderland.ac.uk> wrote:
No point in being "sorry", this thread was intended to provoke some
discussion and there are BOUND to be some disagreements! As for your
statement, at least at the biological and physiological level, you dont
see any "tripwire" or minimum level of complexity in the brain that
lead to the sudden boom in city-building? Didnt think so! ;-)
OT: Based PURELY on the neuroscientist's viewpoint, how would you
assess the relative "intelligence potential" of HSS, archaic HS,
classic "Cro Magnon", Neanderthals and H. erectus? Even if you dont
have a "quick and dirty" answer, if attacking that question, what would
be your approach? Just curious! 8-)
Regards
bk
James Michael Howard
size and funtionality, over time. Please read this that I used to respond
to another post in this thread.
Well, I suggest the characteristics of civilization are the result of
evolution of the prefrontal lobes in hominids. It follows that this primary
characteristic evolved to its most effective size and function through the
various hominids to Homo sapiens. Now the following quotation supports
this, indirectly, as does the second quotation. I cannot find citations
which say that the prefrontal lobes of hominids prior to H. sapiens were as
large as those of H. sapiens; perhaps someone who reads this can supply
these citations so they can bring their data to bear on this issue.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas
J Hum Evol 1999 Aug;37(2):191-223
The primate neocortex in comparative perspective using magnetic resonance
imaging.
Rilling JK, Insel TR.
"In this study we use neuroanatomic data from living anthropoid primate
subjects to test the following three hypotheses: (1) that the human
neocortex is significantly larger than expected for a primate of our brain
size, (2) that the human prefrontal cortex is significantly more convoluted
than expected for our brain size, and (3) that increases in cerebral white
matter volume outpace increases in neocortical gray matter volume among
anthropoid primates. Whole brain MRI scans were obtained from 44 living
primate subjects from 11 different species. Image analysis software was used
to calculate total brain volume, neocortical gray matter volume, cerebral
white matter volume, and the cross sectional area of the spinal cord in each
scan. Allometric regression analyses were used to compare the relative size
of these brain structures across species, with an emphasis on determining
whether human brain proportions correspond with predictions based on
nonhuman primate allometric trajectories. All three hypotheses were
supported by our analysis. The results of this study provide additional
insights into human brain evolution beyond the important observation that
brain volume approximately tripled in the hominid lineage by demonstrating
that the neocortex was uniquely modified throughout hominid evolution. These
modifications may constitute part of the neurobiological substrate that
supports some of our species most distinctive cognitive abilities."
Am J Phys Anthropol 2001 Mar;114(3):224-41
Prefrontal cortex in humans and apes: A comparative study of area 10.
Semendeferi K, Armstrong E, Schleicher A, Zilles K, Van Hoesen GW.
"Area 10 is one of the cortical areas of the frontal lobe involved in
higher cognitive functions such as the undertaking of initiatives and the
planning of future actions. It is known to form the frontal pole of the
macaque and human brain, but its presence and organization in the great and
lesser apes remain unclear. It is here documented that area 10 also forms
the frontal pole of chimpanzee, bonobo, orangutan, and gibbon brains.
Imaging techniques and stereological tools are used to characterize this
area across species and provide preliminary estimates of its absolute and
relative size. Area 10 has similar cytoarchitectonic features in the
hominoid brain, but aspects of its organization vary slightly across
species, including the relative width of its cortical layers and the space
available for connections. The cortex forming the frontal pole of the
gorilla appears highly specialized, while area 10 in the gibbon occupies
only the orbital sector of the frontal pole. Area 10 in the human brain is
larger relative to the rest of the brain than it is in the apes, and its
supragranular layers have more space available for connections with other
higher-order association areas. This suggests that the neural substrates
supporting cognitive functions associated with this part of the cortex
enlarged and became specialized during hominid evolution."
Thomas Gentles
<thal...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>............................................ Why agriculture did not take root in
>North America is hard to explain. One possibility is that it allowed
>hunter-gatherers an ample opportunity to survive without having to resort to
>agriculture and urban life.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that there was extensive use
of agriculture prior to European occupation.
Ronald Wright in Stolen Continents writing about the Cherokee says
on page 97 ".... Cherokee took up farming around the time that the
Roman Empire fell.....Over more than 1000 years, stone axes had
patienly cleared the bottom land,,,"
Heather Pringle in In Search of Ancient North America writes about
Cahokia along the Mississippi "Cahokia boasted an estimated 10,000
to 15,000 inhabitants - a population only slightly smaller than
London at the time..............All belonged to the Mississippian
culture. Masters of the bow and arrow and maize agriculture"
David Meyer in Three Hundred Prairie Years writes "..On a more
speculative note, I point out that recent archaeological
studies... have shown that just before the arrival of Europeans
villages of gardeners were present in the Red River Valley of
Manitoba and also in South Western Manitoba". He also refers to an
early explorer record of a tobacco garden in west central
Saskatchewan 300 feet long and 15 feet wide.
Tom Gentles
Harry Erwin
>
> OT: Based PURELY on the neuroscientist's viewpoint, how would you
> assess the relative "intelligence potential" of HSS, archaic HS,
> classic "Cro Magnon", Neanderthals and H. erectus? Even if you dont
> have a "quick and dirty" answer, if attacking that question, what would
> be your approach? Just curious! 8-)
>
The problem is that behavior (which you're concerned with) doesn't
fossilize well. You can study correlated things (artifacts and
endocasts, mostly), but the correlations are not perfect. According to
anthropologists, there seems to be evidence for a slow increase in
social and technical complexity during the period from 250 to 50 KYr BP,
with Africa leading. What caused the genetic bottleneck and where it
occurred is unknown. Languages also seem to go back into this period,
although it is almost certain that H. erectus used vocalizations for
communication. Then in the period 60-30 KYr BP, we see more and more
evidence for fully modern behavior, including art and long-range
planning.
The nasty question is why all the hominids--even early modern H. sapiens
in the Near East ca. 100 KYr BP--were so culturally conservative.
Harry Erwin
> Dr. Erwin, did you think that the prefrontal lobes evolved, increased in
> size and funtionality, over time.
Yes, however there are anatomically fully modern specimens of H. sapiens
at about 100 KYr BP in the Near East. They were culturally conservative,
having the same Mousterian culture as H. neanderthalensis at about the
same date in nearby caves. That suggests the prefrontal _may_ have been
fully evolved by that point, although modern levels of artistry appeared
much later. In any case, we have evidence for fully modern planning and
artistic skills no later than 30 KYr BP. That predates the evidence for
farming villages by 20 KYr and for urbanization by 25 KYr.
Gerrit Hanenburg
>Sorry about arguing, but I'm a neuroscientist and have quite a bit of
>interest in the functions of the prefrontal. Homo sapiens in the strict
>sense has had what you refer to as "prefrontal lobe development" for >30
>KYr. This shows up in culture and in endocasts. Farming communities go
>back about 10KYr, and urban communities about 5-6KYr. The timing is
>wrong for your hypothesis to be true.
Regarding frontal lobe morphology see:
Bookstein, F. et al. (1999). Comparing Frontal Cranial Profiles in
Archaic and Modern Homo by Morphometric Analysis. The Anatomical
Record 257:217-224.
"Archaic and modern human frontal bones are known to be quite distinct
externally, by both conventional visual and metric evaluation.
Internally this area of the skull has been considerably less
well-studied. Here we present results from a comparison of interior,
as well as exterior, frontal bone profiles from CT scans of five
mid-Pleistocene and Neanderthal crania and 16 modern humans. Analysis
was by a new morphometric method, Procrustes analysis of
semi-landmarks, that permits the statistical comparison of curves
between landmarks. As expected, we found substantial external
differences between archaic and modern samples, differences that are
mainly confined to the region around the brow ridge. However, in the
inner median-sagittal profile, the shape remained remarkably stable
over all 21 specimens. This implies that no significant alteration in
this region has taken place over a period of a half-million
years or more of evolution, even as considerable external change
occurred within the hominid clade spanning several species. This
confirms that the forms of the inner and outer aspects of the human
frontal bone are determined by entirely independent factors, and
further indicates unexpected stability in anterior brain morphology
over the period during which modern human cognitive capacities
emerged."
Gerrit
Andrew Melka
I don't understand the rationale of sea level change. I'm
thinking something like; the fertile plains of the continental shelves
are submerged, the gatherer/hunters are forced to make do with less
sediment rich hill country, this forces the more intensive use of such
resources as there are. In favor of this, I think agriculture in the
fertile crescent began in Syria-Lebanon-Palestine and only gradually
moved down to the Tigris-Euphrates, but this might be an outdated
account.
The scaling argument of temperature clines shifting north is (I
think) a large distortion. (I think) that in general it's true to say
that temperate latitudes experienced less extreme seasonal changes
during cold periods. That is, the summers were much cooler but the
winters not a lot colder. I can't justify this statement with my
present knowledge of the factors, but at least it's possible to
recognize that climates existed then that exist no where today, because
sunlight and daylength had less annual variation at lower annual average
temperatures clines.
Besides temperature there was also an increase in water (hence
precipitation), as well as an increase in CO2 because colder water can
hold more CO2 in solution. This combination: greater seasonalty,
warmer, wetter, (and even more CO2 encouraging plant growth), might have
made a particularly large contribution in the creation of mediterranean
climates. I think I read about mediterranean climates in Jared
Diamond's _Guns,Germs, and Steel_, but maybe it was somewhere else.
These climates are characterized by warm to cool winters with lots of
rain and hot summers with little rain (southern California for example).
I think it might be possible to put all the early sites of agriculture
in a mediterranean or a monsoon category. This would apply to Egypt,
for example, because the Nile originates in Monsoon east Africa.
The beginings of mediterranean or monsoon seasonality could
have led to at least a temporary dominance of annual growing plants.
Annual growing plants have to produce fruit and/or seeds every year,
thus providing a more abundant and easily predictable resource. I can't
think of any grain or vegetable that isn't annual.
Peter Melka
J.E.F. Godesky
> in the Near East ca. 100 KYr BP--were so culturally conservative.
That one would seem simple: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." That they
changed so little shows that what they had worked just fine for them.
J.E.F. Godesky
James Michael Howard
crania support equivalence in prefrontal lobe size and architecture between
early H. sapiens and modern H. sapiens. If you can, cite the work so I can
review it. I provided two quotations which, indirectly, support my
contentions and these investigations relied on MRI to detect the differences
between our, and the great apes,' prefrontal lobes.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
James Michael Howard
mention the subordinate structure, the prefrontal cortex. Can the book you
mentioned provide evidence that the prefrontal lobes have not changed and
that the changes may actually be in density of neuronal layers within the
prefrontal lobes which would not be visible to the technology used?
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
pete
(jmho...@sprynet.com) sez:
`Mr. Hanenburg, good input. However, the material you provided does not
`mention the subordinate structure, the prefrontal cortex. Can the book you
`mentioned provide evidence that the prefrontal lobes have not changed and
`that the changes may actually be in density of neuronal layers within the
`prefrontal lobes which would not be visible to the technology used?
You seem to be promoting a model of steady, gradual development in
the forebrain. However, changes in morphology result directly from
changes in genetics, and those changes are necessarily quantized.
In order to justify your gradualism, what mechanism can you invoke
which can provide uniform, gradual change, whether directly or
via hormone mediation, in forebrain morphology? You can't posit
a gradual increase in testosterone production without a gradually
changing genetic basis, and I can't see how our genome can provide
you with this. Furthermore, it's not at all clear that any such
postulation is necessary, as we have a perfectly good mechanism for
gradual development in human behaviour that is independent of
genetics: culture. It can explain gradual developments over long
periods of time perfectly without any need to refer to biochemistry
at all. In fact, gradual change is the very nature of cultural
activity. It can respond to a sudden quantum genetic change (say
150kya) with a gradual ramping up of behavioural complexity, without
any need for further change in physiology.
James Michael Howard
suggest changes in the prefrontal lobes may be induced by exposure to
testosterone in utero. The receptors for testosterone prouduced in utero
are affected by testosterone at puberty. This mechanism would be controlled
by selective reproduction, i.e., these individuals would be more aggressive
and sexual and increase in number at the expense of those of low
testosterone. This would produce a change in the percentage of the
population; it would not depend upon a genetic change. Since you open the
door to "culture," I suggest culture results from changes within the brain,
not vice versa. People of higher testosterone behave differently from those
of low testosterone.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
Philip Deitiker
(pete) wrote:
>The problem with this idea, which is otherwise somewhat appealing, is
>that your horizontal axis is about 300Kyears, and if we split the
>curve among different radiating groups, each of which face different
>vagueries of environment, climate, adversity etc, in their journey,
>they thus experience different degrees of wellbeing, reproductive
>success, population density, leisure time, "wealth" (ie richness of
>land) and thus I would suggest their curves diverge in correspondence
>with the resources they have to contribute to their cultural complexity.
>And with a curve of this extent, the divergence should be in the order
>of 5-7k years for the same height on your curve. And for many different
>aspects of diverging cultures, I would suggest that we see something
>like that kind of time difference - smelting technology is just one
>example that might have taken that long for all cultures to reach had
>not contact ended the experiment. Yet the appearance of cities occurs
>in less than a tenth of that time spread.
>
>And geez, Phil, were the preceding pages really necessary?
Hell no, got tired of reading bout why neadertals
died out, megafuana extinctions, all the crap as
significa when in fact it really isn't.
The way I look at the big picture is this. If gene
by itself was all required, civilization would
have appeared in africa 40 kya. It obviously is
not, or culture was really lagging. However where
we find the 'conversion' of civilization from
diorganized units into integrated societies are
within crossroads between diverse regions. We
could argue that IVC is too far away from those
crossroads, but then again there was evidence of
trade with sumeria. In addition there are very
clear signs of prehistoric trade between minoin,
egyptian and mesopotamian cultures. Thus the
'gene' needed to get to a part of the world were
influences were coming in from many directions.
Obviously if you are australoaboriginal or some
inuit living around the straits of labrador, you
are not going to be prevy to access the more
sophisticated aspects of culture, your society
will be minimalistic. However, the fringes
contribute over longer periods of time and the
crossroads are the benefactor of long term/long
range trade. Thus in mesoamerica/andes,
sino/mongolian region (which extends over a huge
range and may have included coastal regions far to
the south) or eastern mesopotamia/NE
african/mesopotamian region have the ingredients
which would support large population. The places
where civilization developed were often not the
best/most productive agricultural places in the
world.
Think about this, when trade becomes an issue,
and settlements exist for the sole or primary
effort to trade, then massing of peoples and
culture to a locale becomes independent of what
one grows in ones back yard. Those settlement need
to organize a collection of 'facilities' around
them which can produce consumables and become
secondary benefactor of trade and wealth. Rome
created an empire, but how did the empire fair as
ports of rome became centers of trade.
It may be true that resource base ebbed and
flow, obviously climate had an affect on the silk
road. But on the other hand, if we look at the
middle east it becomes clear that as resources and
technology base shifted controlling populations
simply moved their center. There was never a time
from recorded history to the present that
'civilization' in a contiguous regions ceased, It
simply moved a few hundred miles at a time. In
fact we can almost trace the changes northward
from the ancient nubian civilizations in africa,
to memphis, to mesopotamia and minoin, to persia,
asia minor, greece and then italy, upward to
france, england and russia. And I'de be willing to
bet that they find even more ancient examples in
ethiopia. It is probably no coincidence that the
eurasia founder population transited through
ethiopia, and this and favorable climate at the
time gave the ethiopian/nubian/egyptian corridor
along the nile a head start. But the true draw of
power would quickly show itself to center more in
the eurasian theater for obvious reason, size (and
with deglaciation), size of tillable/herding land,
simultaneous, with the decline of north african
climate. Thus I think that deglaciation cycles
play a role in the timing, if that had not
occurred NE africa probably would have developed
'civilization' and I would still look for signs of
cultural continuity between the junction of the
three major continents.
The situation in mesoamerica is a little more
complicated, because gene flow from asia on two or
more occasions within the last 16000 years has
potential for boosting the process with asia
technologies already associated with eearly asia
civlizations. Not that it had to, but mesoamerican
civilization may have been seeded by seafaring
asian cultures that made it all the way to andes,
with genetic signs of this activity. Nonetheless
the south and northern branches of paleoamerican
civilizations appear closest to the junction in
the lands closest to central america first and
then spread away from this, suggesting that trade
was an important stimulus for the process. As the
northern branch expanded it becomes clear that
there are benefactors from these development as
far north as eastern north america. In this
process that took more than 3000 years the steady
advance in the complexity of culture is apparents,
the central valley of mexico bearing the largest
population and most extensive trade routes,
associated copper smelting, glass knive
production.
In the andes a series of roads that linked far
reaching regions, observatorys and fortifications
far from the production centers is indicative of
the increase in cultural sophistication from the
first signs several thousands of years earlier. It
is true that we can find tribes in south american
jungles that were less impacted by the changes;
however, they may have provided wealth and
benefitted from trade with the 'empire' even if
they failed to progress significantly during the
period. All indicators were that if europeans had
stayed out the influence of the precolumbian
civilizations would have continued to have grown,
and I would have predicted that north america
proper would have been the next target of
civilization in the region (it is anyway, but ..).
Secondarily I don't think the time frame is
300,000 years. I say this because while mtDNA
tracts neutral shifts/fixation/expansion, it does
not trace the fate of selective genes. If for
axample a gene appeared that was favorable in both
large and small groups, it might have a selective
coefficient that expanded several fold more
rapidly than the mt fixation process, resulting in
coalescence of that gene a few thousand years
prior to radiation, and with some radiation
occuring simulateous with that genes expansion
occurring in the population. Thus the 'late'
scenario would be that the gene appeared 110 kya
and expanded and an early scenario would be it
appeared 180 kya and expanded. That is not that
long ago frankly, because there is a lag created
as a result of interregional expansion, 35 ky in
africa, 35 ky in asia. It took at least 20 ky to
displace neadertals is we use a late date for AMH.
Thus one could stipulate the following.
"civilization" is the result of several
preconditions.
1) genetic predisposition
2) resource cooperation over long ranges
3) long ranges
4) population basis to support trade over long
ranges.
During the process starting from africa we start
with 1, as population in africa expands the
population pressure to form the basis of 2 is
limited by diffusion of rapidly growing groups.
Secondarily as those groups expand and enter new
reagions their relative selection goes down until
they adjust to new habitats, this tempers the
process.
During the second phase africa is occupied
however africa as a continent lack many selective
forces that push more extreme cultural evolution
(such as cold adaptation, cold climate
technologies, beast of burden that appear off
continent). Thus even as african population begins
to equilibrate the seconds phase is expansion in
asia, whereas african culture would be refining
many technologies, asian culture might be
borrowing or improvising technologies in diffuse
survival schemes; however once that population
expands asian and then eurasian cultures begin the
refinement process and then trade between african
and euarasia become meaningful. As populations
increase (pastoral and agrarian refinements aiding
this process) there are shifts in trading and
maritime activities which begin accelerating the
refinement process so that it no longer expected
to reach equilibia, at this point civilization is
an inevitable consequence of more deeply rooted
process.
We could argue that if homo sapiens was
restricted to only africa that civilization might
never occurred, more likely it would occur later,
or alternatively asian hominids produced a similar
mutation and developed civilization on their own
resulting in a multispecific human population. One
could argue that geez, what if africa was one
fifth its current size, civilization may never
occur. Yep and homo sapiens might also never occur
thus the argument is moot. From the point of
erectoids on we have to deal with the framework of
multicontinental hominids and multicontinental
culture. And to answer your question, we can parse
all the worlds culture and point to this guy or
that guy and say look, not evolving; however the
big picture is that evolution is/was constantly
taking place and genetic predisposition is
definitely a controller of where equilibria could
go, its not a smooth gradient, more like a bumpy
mountain road, but the path is nonetheless uphill.
Civilization IMHO is more the product of broad
range cultural exchange as a pretext to
agriculture, thus the graph is an accurate
depiction of collective cultural evolution from
the time of radiation. It is cultural expansion
which permitted expansion in africa, out of
africa, finalizing displacements, expanding human
populations in several continents at a single
time, and appearance of "historic" societies world
wide which are staggered by only a few thousand
years. Thus we need to look to these major
crossroads of cultural exchange for timing of
civilization and look to human behavior for the
reason, agriculture IMHO is just another
technology, like fido, chariots, bow and arrow,
etc.
I look to the anceint text as examples of how
people felt about and coped with civilization. It
does appear there was a bit of disenfranchisement,
and I think this is self-inflicted. After all they
all placed themselves as decendants of gods or
gods themselves, so how do they explain when the
feilds salted over or some barbarian H/G gang
mowed down their forces and ran off with their
best looking women (or in the case of the aztec
bring nasty epidemic diseases which debilitate the
guys who are supposed to defend everything).
Christ put cards on the table when he said all
that sophsitry, plowing, wealth amounts to not if
the participants are not mentally prepared to deal
with the fact the civilizations are founded in a
changing world. Traditions and beleif will not
relieve the pain of evolution required to maintain
a civilization once it is initiated. And this is
the point, many 'things'/behaviors might have
triggered or better said compatible with the
triggering of civilization, but what 'things' are
required to maintain it (i.e. bring about a state
of competitive stasis or growth indefinitely), and
who is fit to answer the question.
Quite honestly, the commencement of civilization
in the fullest sense is not complete until the
process can be judged as always or perpetually
nurturing of its inhabitants. THIS process is not
complete until the civil"ites" realize what the
social/technologic construct "is" and not what
they dreamed ('deified') it might be. It is not
until Darwin that this is clearly enunciated (we
can throw in a few famous behavior psycologist).
We know this is true, european culture was thrown
backwards because people believed cats were
signatures of the devil. Montezuma was convinced
the earth was coming to an end cause his calender
told him so, he sacrificed 10,000 willing
individuals sealing his destiny. All the disease
in mexico could not defeat the aztecs, but one
mindf--ked ruler with a bunch of mistreated
subjects and the spanish were turning aztec
temples into RC chruches.
Now we know that our little 'worlds' are not
the center of the universe, and civil"ites" are
not godborne but firebrands of the earth with the
initiative to commence higher order colonial
constructs, like industrious fire ants, that move
around after a bit of poison, and dubiously
maintain them on an ever expanding cultural base.
Eventually the cultural base is extensive enough
to maintain civilizations of higher order
construction, permissive of the ebb and flow of
'settlements' and civilization sticks. Part of
this process is the interoggative between failure
and cause, between permissible and impermissible
roles of technology, of social orders that can
harnass the power of civil"ites" without having
the construct collapse like a house of cards. Then
we can talk about the 'process' that brings about
something we can attest to is complete. Simply
saying 'some dudes planted some wheat and
civilizations sprung up' instead is a simplistic
answer typical of simple minded anthropologist
who can't even follow a simple mol-bio argument
past the first complex equation.
What caused civilization? duh WHAT IS
CIVILIZATION? beyond a forth grade answer.
Agriculture? why?
Heirachies? Why?
Metalurgy? Why?
Encryptation? Why?
Trading? Why?
City states and political cooperatives? why?
. . . . . . . .
The age old answer to the question is that human
self-interest is the origin of civilization and it
is also its doom. How selfinterest primes the
process is an interesting question how to modulate
it to keep it from collapsing is even more
germane. Key to both processes is the
conceptualization of human as both animal and
superanimal. Animals compete, try to gain
territory, help their kin, trying to increase
relative reproductive fitness, right. Isn't this
what fire ants do? Survive and reproduce.
Somewhere along the line the idea that there is
strength in numbers and zero-game strategies will
never produce progeny in numbers to defend and
offend, thus the enemy of my enemy is my friend,
and cooperation takes over. But even in a
cooperative scenarios the civil"ites" are
irrepressible cheats (hey just a little cheat
whose gonna know) then when many cheat we call it
corruption, then when corruption is widespread,
the civil"ites" are digging around looking for
grains of wheat in their thornbushes. Humans often
conceptualize their 'superanima' as the resolve to
overcome the anima, and at times the human resolve
show amazing accomplishment, but as soon as people
realize they've got some wealth the
cheat/glutton/corruption bug takes over. People
don't see this when they look at civilization,
they don't see that while the cause of
civilization combination of luck, timing, resolve,
the cause of failure is no different than the fate
critters that kicked off the land that was plowed,
and move back once it is abandoned.
We can distill out of this cycle _that evolution
of technology and social study are somewhat
irreversible products of this cyclical process_,
thus in addition to our 'superanimistic' resolve
to creat the plow and plant some wheat, _some sort
of higher order reflection on civil technologies
and orders deserves some applause here_. Yes? Not
just cause all anthropologist are poisoned
anti-religious so agriculture is a real sweet
answer for them, but that as scientist we know
that such things are complicated and required
several additional inputs to result in a
stable/definable situation that fits needing some
sort of cause.
Also from a PA perspective, the change in
technology associated with AMH expansion in europe
and expansion into asia and americans prior to the
end of the last ice age could also be consider a
step in the graph, expansion of populations after
the last ice age a step in the graph, the
deforestation of lands that resulted from the end
of the last ice age can be seen as a step. The
flood of the black sea in 7.54 kypb can be seen as
a step. With so many steps which is the most
important or is it that steps (generally) were
being made and s#!t simply happens. Why is it that
all these steps we talk about have an outcome that
is favorable to humankind, or conversely, humans
are primed to exploit any change that takes place,
in any direction that the change takes place is
favorable. The answer is that because it is more
favorable to us relative to everything else that
lives. Thus we break intra and interspecific
zero-sum games exploiting change, _and that causes
civilizations_. But the ability to continue change
for a successer wanes and civilization collapses
or shifts. Thus we reflect on the change and _thus
that also causes civilization_. And since more
stable outcomes are the product of repeated trail
and error processes then the part of the curve in
complexity from 'gods only knows' thousands years
ago to present as part of the larger change, which
also causes civilization. It may be true that
since civilization that curve has inflected
upward, but it might also be true there are other
occasions in the past where the curve 'inflected'
upward, and we don't see them cause we are so
dumbfounded by our civilization accomplishment.
Then we get back to that 'gene' in that small
population that lived in Botswana not "too" long
ago. The graph is a fair representation (patting
my-egotistical, selfcenter, selfinterested,
gluttonous [burp]-self on the back while ground
shakes and books clobber me on my gnostic boney
head).
Bob Keeter
VERY good citation! Thanks!
If Im reading all of the big words right 8-), this analysis of actual
crania indicate that the "braincase" of even a pre-Neanderthal is for
all practical purposes the same as for HSS? If so, unless intelligence
and "cognitive ability" is somehow degraded by brow ridges and a
slanting face, it would seem that they had the same physiological
brain?
Right?
Regards
bk
In article <3af041f...@news.nl.uu.net>, Gerrit Hanenburg
Bob Keeter
Erwin <harry...@sunderland.ac.uk> wrote:
SNippage. . . . .
>
> The nasty question is why all the hominids--even early modern H. sapiens
> in the Near East ca. 100 KYr BP--were so culturally conservative.
AND, dont forget that at what ammounts to the exact same time they came
busting out of that long standing conservatism in various spots all
around the world and started building cities! THEREIN lies the most
interesting part of that nasty question! 8-0
Thanks for the info!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<jef.g...@verizon.net> wrote:
The obvious answer! Unfortunately, the origial question was more along
the lines of "what broke"?
After at least 100ky of blissful stability with fairly marginal
improvements in technology, why did cities blossom? If it had started
out in one point with a gradual and obvious "diffusion" to new sites,
the explaination would be trivial. What you have is a virtually
simultaneous evolution in four or five different, essentially isolated
areas, to full fledged "civilizations"!
What upset the late paleolythic oxcart?
Regards
bk
CurtAdams
>After at least 100ky of blissful stability with fairly marginal
>improvements in technology, why did cities blossom? If it had started
>out in one point with a gradual and obvious "diffusion" to new sites,
>the explaination would be trivial. What you have is a virtually
>simultaneous evolution in four or five different, essentially isolated
>areas, to full fledged "civilizations"!
I thought I'd already said this; it wasn't simultaneous; Mesopotamia
came first. We know there was diffusion to Egypt and the Indus
Valley, because they grew Fertile Crescent crops, and to China,
because they used horses. So that leaves only the New World,
which by all current evidence was somewhat later.
Curt Adams (curt...@aol.com)
"It is better to be wrong than to be vague" - Freeman Dyson
Leif
> suggest changes in the prefrontal lobes may be induced by exposure to
> testosterone in utero. The receptors for testosterone prouduced in utero
> are affected by testosterone at puberty. This mechanism would be
controlled
> by selective reproduction, i.e., these individuals would be more
aggressive
> and sexual and increase in number at the expense of those of low
> testosterone. This would produce a change in the percentage of the
> population; it would not depend upon a genetic change. Since you open the
> door to "culture," I suggest culture results from changes within the
brain,
> not vice versa. People of higher testosterone behave differently from
those
> of low testosterone.
Sorry, but I also find this theory totally wrong. Put your self back into
the stone age, and
without knowning anything about current civilization, and you'd definitely
behave like an inferior stone-age human. Many things in the culture depend
on each other, most importantly you must first provide efficient ways of
providing food. Then SOME people can try to improve technology. The scheme
is the same as modern industrialization, only going a lot slower since the
stone-age technology requires so much work of the citizens.
-Leif
Leif
>
> If Im reading all of the big words right 8-), this analysis of actual
> crania indicate that the "braincase" of even a pre-Neanderthal is for
> all practical purposes the same as for HSS? If so, unless intelligence
> and "cognitive ability" is somehow degraded by brow ridges and a
> slanting face, it would seem that they had the same physiological
> brain?
>
> Right?
Absolutely. There is no reason whatsoever to involve gradual development of
the
brain to explain culture. My view is that the growth in technology seems to
be somewhat
exponential. In the stone-age advances in technology was very slow, since
most people had to think about food for the day. Today all the current
technology our ancesters developped makes it possible for us to advance at a
very fast pace. This wouldn't be possible if we didn't have our ancesters
technology.
-Leif
-Leif
Leif
> thinking something like; the fertile plains of the continental shelves
> are submerged, the gatherer/hunters are forced to make do with less
> sediment rich hill country, this forces the more intensive use of such
> resources as there are. In favor of this, I think agriculture in the
> fertile crescent began in Syria-Lebanon-Palestine and only gradually
> moved down to the Tigris-Euphrates, but this might be an outdated
> account.
I think you're absolutely right about that. It's most likely that
agriculture arose
at one place and spread to nearby locations.
I also think that part of the reason why this happened in the Middle-East,
and not at some other location, is because of Neanderthals. If you envision
a cooperation between CroMagnon and Neanderthals, you should be able to
conclude that this would make hunting more efficient, and more people would
be able to come up with new ways of surviving. If those inventions where
made by CroMagnon or Neanderthals will probably never be known to us.
-Leif
Harry Erwin
> Dr. Erwin, I do not think you can make statements to the effect that fossil
> crania support equivalence in prefrontal lobe size and architecture between
> early H. sapiens and modern H. sapiens. If you can, cite the work so I can
> review it. I provided two quotations which, indirectly, support my
> contentions and these investigations relied on MRI to detect the differences
> between our, and the great apes,' prefrontal lobes.
>
> James Michael Howard
> Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
>
The hypothesis of equivalence has not been falsified. Gerrit provides a
nice citation.
Science is not about having interesting ideas. Science is about having
testable ideas and then going out and _carefully_ testing them. FMRI is
a very nice technique, but it has limitations that practitioners usually
pass over in silence and typically only provides suggestive results.
Johnny Abreu
"J.E.F. Godesky" <jef.g...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:3AEF3EFD...@verizon.net...
JA:
> > But exactly what is considered a civilization? A group of people? A
culture,
> > A religion, writing, shelters or buildings?
JG:
> Civilization comes from the Latin civitas, for city. So, a civilization
is a
> society with cities. It's synonymous with a state-level society.
Civilization
> would be the culture, not the group of people, their religion, writing, or
> structures.
JA:
Surely you could not have a civilization without religion (a form of belief)
and buildings or structures? It is not the common belief that keep a group
of people together?
JA:
> > If it was agriculture that started civilization and as some people
suggest,
> > agriculture led to the complicated allocation of land, recording of the
> > productions which lead to writing etc, then why did the African
population
> > which was also agricultural based not develop writing?
JG:
> The Peruvian civilizations pretty much prove that, contrary to many
Eurocentric
> theories of state formation, writing is NOT a pivotal ingredient for a
> civilization.
JA:
Writing may perhaps not be the main ingredient in a civilization, but will a
civilization that has no writing be able to progress in technology?
Johnny Abreu
"Bob Keeter" <rke...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:010520012059112661%rke...@earthlink.net...
> In article <9cmtk6$jkc$1...@ctb-nnrp1.saix.net>, Johnny Abreu
> <ab...@global.co.za> wrote:
>
> > Thanks Bob for the Interesting thread.
> You are MOST welcome! Its one of those topics that just MIGHT have
> some resolution if we happen to stumble across the right insight, and
> get some professional researcher to carry it forward, yet its certainly
> not going to be solved by digging up ONE little fragment of bone
> anywhere! ;-)
> Might as well chew it up with discussion then! ;-)))
You're right about that! I wouldn't like to chew too much on it, but I sure
want to see the faces that do. :-)
> > But exactly what is considered a civilization? A group of people? A
culture,
> > A religion, writing, shelters or buildings?
> I'll go with the definition offered elsewhere, i.e. when human
> "society" rises to the point of constructing permanent "cities". now
> what is a city? What abuot a cluster of manufactured dwelling for more
> than a single "family group" or small tribe.
Could we settle for a multitude of people staying in the same area, building
community shelters, having the same goals (beliefs?) and working toward a
common good? Of course that would not be possible without agriculture!
> > If it was agriculture that started civilization and as some people
suggest,
> > agriculture led to the complicated allocation of land, recording of the
> > productions which lead to writing etc, then why did the African
population
> > which was also agricultural based not develop writing?
> As well as the Peruvians, the later Incas, and a host of later
> "civilizations". Id vote for writing as a "byproduct" of civilization,
> cities, and the need to communicate and record transations and ideas
> that were "outside" of the venue of a family group or tribe.
> Agriculture is probably a necessary precondition for cities, although
> the jury is apparently still out on the latest Peruvian finds. Writing
> I dont think evolved ANYWHERE until after the cities and civilization
> were fairly well established.
I just a crazy idea of a few little tribes trying to "keep up with the
Jones". Do you think this idea could have motivated a family to do better
then the next, a bigger plot of land, more production, better seed, bigger
houses. And when one tribe couldn't keep up and tried to find out the secret
of the other's success a religeon was started which eventually lead a new
class of people. (There must alway be a motivation behind an action, isn't
there?)
Regard - Johnny
James Michael Howard
affect others are controlled; primarily sexual and aggressive.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
On Thu, 3 May 2001 20:53:50 +0200, "Johnny Abreu" <ab...@global.co.za>
wrote:
Philip Deitiker
(CurtAdams) wrote:
>I thought I'd already said this; it wasn't simultaneous; Mesopotamia
>came first. We know there was diffusion to Egypt and the Indus
>Valley, because they grew Fertile Crescent crops, and to China,
>because they used horses. So that leaves only the New World,
>which by all current evidence was somewhat later.
I don't think so, horsemanship were probably IE
invention, probably introduced to china via the
mongols via a ural/turko/mongolian route. Egypt
was probably as influenced by events in NE africa
as it was by early akkadian and mesopotamian
culture. Chinas oldest 'civilizations' now appear
to be on the order of at least 4800 years of age
and rice agriculture in asia appears to be older
than anywhere else in the world. Other cultures
domesticated other animals and plants
independently of each other with the probably
exception of the dog, which was domesticated when
the human population was small or possibly by
neandertals and borrowed from them. Mesopotamian
culture gets high marks for being in the right
place, contiguous with NE african, mediterranean,
black sea, IVC cultures which were appearing at
about roughly the same time and produced some
feedback.
J.E.F. Godesky
> affect others are controlled; primarily sexual and aggressive.
In that case, I'd have to say the !Kung are INFINITELY more civilized than we!
Jason Godesky
James Michael Howard
Steve Short
"Philip Deitiker" <pde...@bcm.tmc.edu> wrote in message
news:tbk3ftseid4vtit2k...@4ax.com...
It is very often forgotten that from 2500 y BP (500 y BC) back to about 7500
y BP (5500 y BC), i.e. through the early Holocene, the world was
significantly warmer than it is now with sea levels worldwide (depending on
eustatic and other effects etc) 0.5 - 1.5 m higher than now. At a crude
level this meant that at any European or North American latitude climate
was, on average, about equivalent to what it is today 1000 - 2000 km further
south. There are, for example, corals still in their original growth
positions that show clearly where the warmer coastal water penetrated (every
keen skin diver has seen them). I have a gut feeling that for this reason,
this is when agriculture/civilization began to 'take off' i.e. about 5500 -
5000 BC.
Steve
--
Dr Steve Short
Ecoengineers Pty Ltd
P O Box 161
Helensburgh
New South Wales
Australia 2508
Tel: 61242944652
Fax: 61242941948
J.E.F. Godesky
> Surely you could not have a civilization without religion (a form of belief)
> and buildings or structures? It is not the common belief that keep a group
> of people together?
Religion is a cultural universal, found in all human cultures; civilizations and
otherwise. Buildings and structures are found in all civilizations. However,
these are parts of a culture; a civilization is the culture. If we have a set
A, with elements X, Y and Z, then we can't call X "A." X is not "A," it is one
part of "A." All civilizations have religions, buildings, etc., that's true.
But a religion is not a civilization, nor is a building a civilization. These
are both parts of culture, and it is a culture that can be a civilization.
SYNOPSIS OF FOLLOWING LONG, DRAWN-OUT ARGUMENT: Religious sites, with
pilgrimages made to them, led to sedentism, which necessitated agriculture. The
agricultural surplus dictated the need for a redistributive economy, giving rise
to an aristocracy who created the state.
I still stand by my idea that agriculture is the root of civilization. James
Michael Howard suggests that cognitive ability is the cause of civilization; in
which case, we must draw two false conclusions. 1.) The civilization was
present up to 100,000 years ago in Africa, with the dawn of the first modern
humans, and 2.) "uncivilized" groups, such as the !Kung or Hazda, do not possess
the same cognitive or neurological apparatus as the rest of us; in other words,
hunter-gatherers differ physiologically and cognitively from we agriculturists.
Since neither of these are true, then obviously cognitive functioning has
nothing to do with it.
But then, I disagree with the basic premise that civilization is a good thing.
What are the earmarks of a civilization? V.G. Childe's characteristics of
states, refined by C. Redman, are the usual earmarks of civilization cited in
most anthropology books and lectures:
PRIMARY CHARACTERISTICS:
1.) Cities
2.) Specialization (in crafts, military, and trade)
3.) The Monopoly of Force
4.) True Law
5.) Territorial Residence
6.) Class Stratification
7.) Concentration of Surplus Production
8.) Means of collecting tribute and taxes
SECONDARY CHARACTERISTICS:
1.) Monumental public works
2.) Long-distance exchange
3.) Writing
4.) Sciences
5.) Highly-developed, standardized art
I take issue with all of the secondary characteristics: many chiefdoms built
monumental public works, as with the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures in
North America; long-distance trade, art, and sciences can be found from the
Upper Paleolithic onward; and writing, as shown by the Inka and other Peruvian
civilizations, is not necessary for civilization.
On the other hand, I quite agree with the primary characteristics. As I stated
before, the very word "civilization" comes from the Latin for "city." We do see
increasing population density through the Mesolithic, this is true. But the
jump even from the Ubaid period to the Eridu period in Mesopotamia is a radical
departure from any previous pattern. We're not talking about a gradual
progression, but a radical break from tradition. The Agricultural Revolution
was indeed a revolution, not just a gradual change. Hunter-gatherers, using
greater complexity, ingenuity, and resourcefulness, were able to increase their
yields, and thus, their population density. Able to harvest more from a smaller
area, they were able to support greater density. However, even the most
resourceful hunter-gatherers cannot support anything even like a small town. In
an acre of woodland, there may be as much as 50% of the biomass there available
to humans as food; remember, that same acre of woodland has an amazing amount of
biodiversity, and is not supporting just humans, but every other species in the
habitat, as well. In an acre of plowed farmland, however, the percentage usable
by humans as food jumps to something much closer to 100%. You've now completely
destroyed the biodiversity of that acre--there's now only one species generally
growing there, whatever the farmer planted (ignoring the occasional weed,
etc.)--and that acre can now feed only a small handful of species (humans, and
the animals we've spent so many centuries chasing off farmland--rabbits,
insects, etc.) But, the mediocre farmer can support the same number of people
as the best hunter-gatherer, with half or less of the area. This increased
density of food production, of course, means you can support a more dense
population. Cities, in short, are not possible without agriculture.
It may be, in fact, that agriculture NEEDS cities. Agriculture is hard
work--I've seen estimates that put the caloric input per calorie gained of
agriculture at something like 20 times that of foraging. Moreover, it's not
nearly as healthy. Looking at the skeletons of people from the agricultural
revolution, archaeologists have noted a very sizable DROP in nutrition. Hobbes'
ideology aside, the hunter-gatherer is not "nasty, brutish and short." It is,
in fact, "the original affluent society." They're called "egalitarian" with
good reason! Even today, malnutrition is higher in the United States than among
the few surviving foraging groups (a few !Kung bands in the Kalahari, a few
Aborigines in the Outback....). Why would a person give up freedom, equality,
leisure time, and health, and receive in return only hard labor, maltreatment,
malnutrition, and social inferiority? There is no good answer to that question,
if the farmer has only himself and his family to consider. In the early days,
why would the first farmers not look around at the myriad hunter-gatherer groups
all around them, and not say, "Heck with this!" That farmer could easily
support himself and his entire family by a much easier lifestyle; unless, there
were more people than that at stake. More like, an entire village. That would
involve instilling a very deep sense of community, and a tie to the land above
the ties of kinship, which is exactly what #5 on the list of primary
characteristics is all about! Without cities, there is simply no reason to take
up agriculture. With cities, it begins to make sense.
Before taking on the question of, "Why cities?" I want to address the remaining
primary characteristics. With our handful of farmers supporting the people of
the villages, we can see where specialization comes into play. These people
need something to exchange with the farmers for food, or else the farmers aren't
very likely to keep on laboring so strenuously. And so, we have
specialization. Hunter-gatherers, admittedly, have no such thing, or very
little of it. Everyone is able to do everything, more or less. Some people are
better at some things than others, some people more talented, but by and large,
everyone is at least competent in nearly every facet of life. It goes
hand-in-hand with the egalitarianism of the society--there is no one who
possesses some esoteric skill that you yourself could not master given the time,
inclination and talent. With specialization in state-level societies, we have
an immediately lop-sided situation: specialists are providing farmers with the
things they WANT, but the farmers are providing the specialists with the things
they NEED. This lop-sided arrangement was probably immediately seized upon by
those in the group quicker on the uptake: the original aristocrat. The massive
surplus churned out by the farmers came to be consolidated in a few hands; this
may have arisen from simple expedience. The egalitarian hunter-gatherers, as
they began to take up farming, would probably object to the market system we
usually think of. Moreover, the surplus was too much for the usual system of
reciprocity. This was most likely the dawn of the redistribution economy. All
of the surplus would be gathered at a central point, and then redistributed. In
theory. As we all know, those central points are all too prone to corruption.
Even in relatively weak chiefdoms, where the chief has more in common with Alan
Greenspan than George Bush, he becomes a very important ideological and social
figurehead rather quickly. In some chiefdoms, as in the Pacific Northwest, much
of a person's value comes from your rank. And rank is very specific; in a tribe
of 1,000 people, #956 knows exactly who #955 and #957 are.
I think it's from this redistributive apparatus that the first aristocracy
developed. These would have also benefited greatly from specialization; the
idea of a separate class who alone holds the secrets of a certain skill was
easily expanded. In fact, we can think of the aristocracy themselves as a sort
of specialist. We have specialists in crafts (artisans, potters, etc.), we have
military specialists and trade specialists. Only a merchant knows how to trade,
only a soldier holds the secrets of how to fight. And only an aristocrat knows
the secrets of how to be rich and powerful, so all we peasants had best simply
obey.
The Monopoly of Force is the idea that only the state can legitimately use
violence. Think of it; if an individual kills someone, it is murder. If the
state does, it is execution, or warfare. We do not hold a soldier in war as a
murderer; nor do we consider a murderer the same as a soldier. One is
legitimate, and one is not. In studies of war in non-state societies, this
often becomes a sticking point: do the Inuit have wars, or an extremely high
homicide rate? I would argue that the difference is an artificial one. I must
admit, even I can't help but bulk at the idea of murder being okay, it's
something very deeply encultured within us. But, it ultimately comes from the
idea of the Monopoly of Force, something used by every tyrannical and
totalitarian regime to ever terrorize the face of the earth.
True Law refers to a code of rules, memorized or written down, which are "set in
stone." Non-state societies have rules, we might call them, but they are
adapted to the situation, and often come up with on the spot. There is no solid
code, so much as a general, nebulous idea of what's proper and what is not. Far
different from our own society, is it not? A small-scale, non-state society
only has a few people, and very few infractions of social norms. Infractions
can easily be attended to on a case-by-case basis, on the basis of whether or
not their behavior was acceptable, and how best to address this particular case
so as to redress those wrongs and attempt to rectify the situation. Punishment
is rarely meted out for punishment's sake; rather, it is meant to rectify the
situation. But with agriculture, there is not only more people (and thus,
obviously, more infractions), but I think a higher rate of such infractions.
Not only are there more people, and all the attendant stresses with that, but
most of these people are also of the lower classes, classes reminded every
day--by everything from the clothes they wear to their language to their
food--that they are inferior to the aristocracy they serve. Inevitably, a great
deal of resentment is built up towards the system which engenders such abuses,
and any way of breaking that system is sought out. Of course, breaking that
system is, by definition, "crime." So, the much greater number of infractions
of social norms makes it impossible to address on a case-by-case basis. So, a
law must be laid down, "set in stone." A court does not attempt to discover if
a defendant's actions were acceptable or not, but whether they broke the Law.
The law is not adapted to particular circumstances; it may attempt to address
certain circumstances, but if your particular circumstances didn't occur to the
legislator, well, you're S.O.L. And then, a standardized punishment is meted
out. How does a murderer's life in prison rectify his action? But it helps to
serve the State, by deterring others, increasing the fear of the populace, and
serving as a reminder of what happens to those who oppose the State and its
all-encompassing power.
With the rise of the aristocracy, we see the remaining primary characteristics
fall into place. Class stratification, of course, with the division of society
into the rulers and the ruled. The surplus is concentrated primarily in the
hands of the aristocracy, who proceed to develop means of collecting that
surplus: through taxation, tribute, or both. At this point, we have all of our
primary characteristics in place, all of them springing from agriculture.
So, if agriculture and cities feed off each other, then why cities? Here is
where I think ideology is greatly undervalued as a means of state formation.
Teotihuacan, the first major civilization in Mesoamerica, managed to amass 90%
of the Basin of Mexico's population within its city limits. The first buildings
to be constructed there were temples: the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon.
These massive structures were built at Teotihuacan, because it was a holy site.
Pilgrims came from all about, to worship at this holy site where the Aztecs
later said the gods sacrificed themselves to begin the current cycle of time.
The locals almost certainly attempted to cash in on this, as locals at holy
sites always have. I'm certain a specialized religious class emerged at
Teotihuacan, who probably wanted to find ways of increasing their power and
prominence, and the pilgrimages. What better way, than to build a temple?
Pilgrims would come, and while there, help in its construction. Soon, the
pilgrims began to stay longer and longer, to work on the temples. While one
group was still living there, another would arrive. More permanent shelters
would need to be constructed, as the pilgrims would stay for very long periods
of time. By the time the Pyramid of the Sun was completed, the priests of
Teotihuacan probably had themselves a city. The destruction of Cuicuilco
probably didn't hurt at all, either. To support this growing population of
pilgrim-builders, farming needed to be intensified. Esther Pasztory argues
quite well for a theocracy at Teotihuacan, based on religious ideals of some
strange mix of egalitarianism and some sort of secrecy not alien to the
Classical mystery cults. Excavators at Catalhuyuk have suggested a similar
chain of events there. The Indus Valley and the Moche may well be the same, and
in Egypt, the rise of the pharoah--the first Egyptian state--is very clearly
based in religious ideology.
> JA:
> Writing may perhaps not be the main ingredient in a civilization, but will a
> civilization that has no writing be able to progress in technology?
Well, the Inkan "imperial style" houses lasted much better in Peru than the
Spanish houses, and I personally think the mathematical elegance of the quipu
line probably went unmatched until the computers of the 1940s.
Jason Godesky
J.E.F. Godesky
In Sumeria, like Teotihuacan, the first structures built at all the major cities
were temples, indicating a similar ideological basis.
Phili Deitker mentioned the difference in attitudes towards personal possessions.
This, I think, is also due to agriculture. The aristocracy wants to define what
belongs to them, and not to the lower classes. The farmers need to stake out their
fields as separate from the fields of their neighbors. This leads to the earth
itself becoming a commodity, and in most of the ancient states, the primary
commodity. With the surplus produced by agriculture and the lop-sided production,
the reciprocity system breaks down. No longer is everything shared in common, as
with hunter-gatherers. Now, personal property becomes not only something in the
cultural system, it becomes the most important part of the cultural system. Since
the aristocracy begin to define themselves by their control of the surplus--that is,
by their personal possessions--the ambitions of the lower classes to join the
aristocracy become concentrated on personal possessions. Contrast this to a
hunter-gatherer group. Their major resources are hunting grounds, watering holes,
etc. All of these resources provide plenty not only for oneself, but for all
neighboring groups, as well. There is no need to gather more than you need--what is
the point of expending labor at such a futile task? If it's more than you need,
then you obviously don't need it, right? Moreover, hunter-gatherers' resources are
much more scattered. With their lower populations, not only do they lack the
ability to guard (and thus claim as their own) any such property, they have no great
reason to do so, either. In a hunter-gatherer society, personal property makes
about as much sense as working 40 hours a week at McDonald's does for us and
refusing your paycheck at the end of it.
Some theories of domestication make it seem almost "inevitable." The "Oasis
Hypothesis" springs to mind. There are also theories about climate changes making
agriculture necessary. My objection to this is, every other species on the planet
has undergone these same stresses, but only humans have adopted agriculture. It is
obviously not so "inevitable" as such theories assert; I think these ideas spring
from a central axiom in our civilization, that ours is the grandest culture ever,
and the ultimate destiny of all mankind; the creation of civilization is what God
made us for. I'm sure you can see the error in such grandiose, ethnocentric
thinking. But try checking your own thinking against it; you may find yourself
doing it much more often than you might realize. I've trained myself over the past
five years to search out consciously that strain of thought, and I've not yet
managed to eradicate all the vestiges of it.
Jason Godesky
CurtAdams
(CurtAdams) wrote:
>>I thought I'd already said this; it wasn't simultaneous; Mesopotamia
>>came first. We know there was diffusion to Egypt and the Indus
>>Valley, because they grew Fertile Crescent crops, and to China,
>>because they used horses. So that leaves only the New World,
>>which by all current evidence was somewhat later.
>I don't think so, horsemanship were probably IE
>invention, probably introduced to china via the
>mongols via a ural/turko/mongolian route.
Yes, but the IndoEuropean crop set show they obtained
agriculture/civilization from the Fertile Crescent.
>Egypt
>was probably as influenced by events in NE africa
>as it was by early akkadian and mesopotamian
>culture.
But their crops are FC. They certainly weren't isolated.
>Chinas oldest 'civilizations' now appear
>to be on the order of at least 4800 years of age
>and rice agriculture in asia appears to be older
>than anywhere else in the world.
Yes, I've heard the business about rice cultivation being
very old. However, it comes from SE asia, while the
Chinese culture originated on the North China Plain, and
wasn't originally a rice culture. They picked that up as
they went along. There may have been earlier SE
Asian civilizations that were later overrun by the
current Chinese culture and those may have been independent
of FC culture. Lotsa "may"s there, though, and certainly
no evidence for simultaneity.
Bob Keeter
Deitiker <pde...@bcm.tmc.edu> wrote:
Snippage. . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . Other cultures
> domesticated other animals and plants
> independently of each other with the probably
> exception of the dog, which was domesticated when
> the human population was small or possibly by
> neandertals and borrowed from them.
Not that I would really doubt it, but would be very interested in
seeing any data that supports Neanderthals having any kind of symbiotic
relationship with canids. It WOULD be one more indication that maybe
they were not quite as stupid as some would like us to believe! ;-)
The canids, that is! ;-)))
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
Sorry, but we were talking about the definition of "civilization" not
"emasculation"! They aint the same! Gimme a Bud and bring on the
Football preseason! ;-)
Beaaaaaaaalch!!!!!
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<le...@rdos.net> wrote:
Snippage. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> Sorry, but I also find this theory totally wrong. Put your self back into
> the stone age, and without knowning anything about current civilization,
> and you'd definitely behave like an inferior stone-age human.
Please explain! EXACTLY what about the "stone age" human makes him
inferior? Now Im not one of those who insists that every human is
absolutely and unequivocably equal in every possible aspect, but this
is a bit of a generalization in your statement that needs some
justification. Would you be able to face down a wooly mammoth if Mssrs
Ruger and Weatherby were still 25000 years in the future? Does that
make you superior or inferior? Could you survive in a sub-arctic
winter if LL Bean didnt have down snow-suits?
Lets maybe be just a taid less judgemental on exactly WHO would be
labeled "inferior"! After all , they ARE family! ;-)
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<le...@rdos.net> wrote:
Yep, but that still doesnt explain what happend back there about 3000
yr BC! Where did the sudden urge to build cities come from?
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
> How about this? Civilization is a place where impulses which adversely
> affect others are controlled; primarily sexual and aggressive.
>
>
If the truth be known, we can call it whatever we want to, but with the
wealth of Anglicized Latin and Greek words that rattle around, Id think
that we'd have come up with something better than "civilization" to
describe what you propose! Civilization is, if you combine the root
words and the most common modern usage, the "building of cities";
could be Sodom and Gomorrah, but cities none the less! But then we are
talking more in terms of old stones and ancient people rather than
philosophical or ethical ideals! 8-)
Regards
bk
John Brock
You might want to check out "War Before Civilization: The Myth of
the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence H. Keeley. Apparently the !Kung
and other "primitive" people kill and injure each other a lot more
often than we have been led to believe. The level of violence does
vary greatly however from culture to culture and from time to time,
just as it does with us "civilized" people. Imagine that!!!
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
CurtAdams
>That is rather interesting of course. I've seen no evidence that ADHD or
>Asperger is present in eastern Asia or Africa. There are no active pages
>on Internet in Japan on ADHD or Asperger, and the only site on chinese
>is an US site that translated texts to chinese. Consequently, it's not at
>all proved that ADHD or AS is present everywhere.
Autism is indeed worldwide; that was one of the pieces of evidence that
led to the conclusion it's at least partly genetic. ADHD is obviously
a mostly cultural diagnosis at present. Certainly there are antsy
children everywhere. So I think we can conclude it's not Neanderthal
genes responsible for the syndromes.
Lorenzo L. Love
Someone has been reading too many of Crowley's ramblings.
The obvious reason for civilization is the re-domestication of the pussy
cat. The cats controling grain eating rodents enabled farmers to
accumulate the large stores of grain needed to support non-farming
occupations necessary for cities.
Lorenzo L. Love
http://www.thegrid.net/lllove
The cause of human evolution is no longer a mystery:
http://www.thegrid.net/lllove/pliocats.htm
Leif
You got me wrong. I meant that WE would be inferior to them if placed in
their
environment. We obviously wouldn't have much use of our knowledge of modern
culture, and wouldn't know how to behave our hunt in their society. We would
most
likely starve to death.
-Leif
Leif
Why would it have been sudden? I like to think this also was a gradual
process
that occurred during several thousands of years. Before it even could start,
the
right prerequists must have existed. After all, even Neanderthals made some
primitive shelters, and the step to build more complex houses and gather
them
at the same place isn't that large.
-Leif
Leif
> >Asperger is present in eastern Asia or Africa. There are no active pages
> >on Internet in Japan on ADHD or Asperger, and the only site on chinese
> >is an US site that translated texts to chinese. Consequently, it's not at
> >all proved that ADHD or AS is present everywhere.
>
> Autism is indeed worldwide; that was one of the pieces of evidence that
> led to the conclusion it's at least partly genetic. ADHD is obviously
> a mostly cultural diagnosis at present. Certainly there are antsy
> children everywhere. So I think we can conclude it's not Neanderthal
> genes responsible for the syndromes.
As for autism, it could very well be that some types of Autism is indeed
caused by a mal-functioning brain, and this is why the researches have found
Autism world-wide. As for ADHD and Asperger, I don't think there is any
evidence
that those would be present world-wide. As for the diagnosis beeing
cultural,
I don't think this is the case. Why then would it not be present in Japan,
but present
in South-America? After all, Japan is one of the leading technology
countries in the
world, with many of the same problems as are present in Europe and US, so
why
wouldn't people with AS or ADHD in Japan have the same problems? Japan is
not a totalitarian state where people can't organize or tell their opinions.
Also, it's not proved that Asperger is really a "autism"-related condition
anyway. It's classified as such because of some common denominators.
Research in this area is still
going on.
BTW, ADHD is not about "antsy" children anyway. It's based on a collection
of traits.
-Leif
James Michael Howard
this?"
James Michael Howard
about the advanced forebrain, civilizations have within them the seeds of
their own demise. So Sodom and Gomorrah were at one time civilized, then
they declined. The message of the story about Sodom and Gomorrah is that
when people loose the ability to ask "What will happen if I do this?," they
become uncivilized.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
Gerrit Hanenburg
>If Im reading all of the big words right 8-), this analysis of actual
>crania indicate that the "braincase" of even a pre-Neanderthal is for
>all practical purposes the same as for HSS? If so, unless intelligence
>and "cognitive ability" is somehow degraded by brow ridges and a
>slanting face, it would seem that they had the same physiological
>brain?
>
>Right?
Well, the Bookstein et al. analysis is only concerned with the
median-sagittal (midline) profile of the frontal part of the cranium.
That is not enough to make such a bold conclusion with regard to the
entire brain. However, as far as frontal morphology is concerned
Bookstein et al. found no _significant_ differences in morphology
between the Pleistocene and recent crania.
For all practical purposes it seems that much of the "hardware" was in
place at the Middle Pleistocene (the Bodo 1 cranium (600 kya) was the
oldest Homo specimen used in the analysis. Its cranial capacity has
recently been estimated at ca. 1250 cc, well within the range of
modern humans).
My guess is that cultural acceleration in the Holocene has more to do
with (critical) population size/density.
Gerrit
Gerrit Hanenburg
>Mr. Hanenburg, good input. However, the material you provided does not
>mention the subordinate structure, the prefrontal cortex. Can the book you
>mentioned provide evidence that the prefrontal lobes have not changed and
>that the changes may actually be in density of neuronal layers within the
>prefrontal lobes which would not be visible to the technology used?
The prefrontal cortex is right at the frontal pole of the brain. Any
major difference in the morphology of this area should be visible in
the median-sagittal profile as investigated in the Bookstein et al.
analysis.
Of course, subsurface differences at the microscopic level can not be
assessed with this method. A difference in packing density between
Pleistocene and recent human cerebral cortex is possible in principle
but speculative.
Gerrit
ejudy
>In article <3af1b59...@nntp.sprynet.com>, James Michael Howard
><jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>
>> How about this? Civilization is a place where impulses which adversely
>> affect others are controlled; primarily sexual and aggressive.
>>
>>
>
>If the truth be known, we can call it whatever we want to, but with the
>wealth of Anglicized Latin and Greek words that rattle around, Id think
>that we'd have come up with something better than "civilization" to
>describe what you propose! Civilization is, if you combine the root
>words and the most common modern usage, the "building of cities";
>could be Sodom and Gomorrah, but cities none the less! But then we are
>talking more in terms of old stones and ancient people rather than
>philosophical or ethical ideals! 8-)
>
>Regards
>bk
If culture is like the tree,
civilization is like its fruit.
throw away the subjective nostalgia-
you are left with the process of
ripening & rotting and seed dispersal.
James Michael Howard
comparing the brain at this level, there may differences in neuronal
densities in layers of the prefrontal lobe that may be significant without
affecting total size.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
James Michael Howard
I forgot I had this material; I apologize for not posting it earlier. A
study of "prefrontal gray matter volume" produced the finding that human
individuals classified as "antisocial personality disorders" (APD) exhibited
an 11% reduction compared to controls. Individuals who are classified as
"antisocial personality disorders" may also be classified as "uncivilized."
If one had an entire population of APD's, one would not have a cilivilized
population. This finding was reported just last year; I was pleased to find
it, since it supports some of my ideas. The study utilized MRI which is
quite sensitive. I suggest this MRI study is more sensitive than that of
Bookstein, et al. This is still indirect support of my hypothesis, but I
suggest it adds to my speculation that the advent of human civilization
relied on increased development (evolution) of the prefrontal lobes. (Here
is some material from the study. I can provide more if requested, or you
may look it up for yourself.)
"Results TheAPD group showed an 11.0% reduction in prefrontal gray matter
volume in the absence of ostensible brain lesions and reduced autonomic
activity during the stressor. These deficits predicted group membership
independent of psychosocial risk factors.
Conclusions To our knowledge, these findings provide the first evidence for
a structural brain deficit in APD. This prefrontal structural deficit may
underlie the low arousal, poor fear conditioning, lack of conscience, and
decision-making deficits that have been found to characterize antisocial,
psychopathic behavior." (Archives of General Psychiatry 2000; 57: 119-127)
Leif
It doesn't prove anything at all. The that fact social competence differs
between different individuals is a known fact, and you don't have to use MRI
or any other brain-messures to understand this. It's also pretty obvious
that not all individuals in a society needs to be social. Obviously some
tasks, like tracking, doesn't need this. Some functions are even carried out
better WITHOUT social skills. If this wouldn't be the case, individuals with
low social skills would be sorted out by evolution. Also remember that large
skills in one area usually means low skills in other areas.
This kind of nonsense presented by psychiatry is what makes me really mad.
-Leif
ejudy
>>words and the most common modern usage, the "building of cities";
>>could be Sodom and Gomorrah, but cities none the less! But then we are
>>talking more in terms of old stones and ancient people rather than
>>philosophical or ethical ideals! 8-)
>>
>>Regards
>>bk
>
>If culture is like the tree,
>civilization is like its fruit.
>
>throw away the subjective nostalgia-
>you are left with the process of
>ripening & rotting and seed dispersal.
Hey there, Bob!
But i also think the old stones interest us mostly because
they clue us into the profound LARGENESS of the
ethical/spirititual/philosophical/psychological
heritage of which we are a part.
Get dizzy here (~~really~~ pretty spinning shaman's coat)==>
http://museum.state.il.us/exhibits/changing/journey/objects/085costume.html
Then come back and tell me its just
some old cities. hehe.....
8^)
CurtAdams
>As for the diagnosis [of ADHD] beeing cultural,
>I don't think this is the case. Why then would it not be present in Japan, but
>present in South-America? After all, Japan is one of the leading technology
>countries in the
>world, with many of the same problems as are present in Europe and US, so
>why wouldn't people with AS or ADHD in Japan have the same problems?
There are antsy children everywhere and everywhen. In some places,
they are diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs/counseling. In some
places, they're just considered antsy and disciplined or ignored.
>BTW, ADHD is not about "antsy" children anyway. It's based on a collection
>of traits.
Another reason to be suspicious about the diagnosis, since the
various traits aren't universally present. Besides, antsy is also
a vague diagnosis covering the same traits.
James Michael Howard
healthyplace.com. These individuals are not just "not social," they are
threats to civilized places. They are not menatally ill. They exhibit lack
of control of their impulses. These are not "good trackers," they are a
type of sociopath.
James Michael Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
"Anti-Social Personality Disorder
Defined as: A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights
of others occurring since age 15 years old, as indicated by 3 or more of the
following:
failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as
indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest
deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning
others for personal profit or pleasure
impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or
assaults
reckless disregard for safety of self or others
consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain
consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing
having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another
The individual must be at least 18 years old.
There is evidence of Conduct Disorder with onset before age 15.
The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not associated with Schizophrenia
or a Manic Episode."
ejudy
>There are antsy children everywhere and everywhen. In some places,
>they are diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs/counseling. In some
>places, they're just considered antsy and disciplined or ignored.
>
>>BTW, ADHD is not about "antsy" children anyway. It's based on a collection
>>of traits.
>
>Another reason to be suspicious about the diagnosis, since the
>various traits aren't universally present. Besides, antsy is also
>a vague diagnosis covering the same traits.
>
>Curt Adams (curt...@aol.com)
>"It is better to be wrong than to be vague" - Freeman Dyson
Curt -
You sit fairly solidly in that old fashioned school in
which so many elementary teachers sit.
They are foolish idiots till they expand their knowledge base
to include a modified repertoire........ and damage
happens early on when the kids are labelled dumb or defiant.
If you realize their brain is different then you remove the
value judgements and get on with helping them build the
social structures needed to fit and keep self-esteem.
Otherwise, by highschool many have fallen thru the cracks.
And counseling is probably more for the parenting.
And some of the very brightest, most amazing people
have this condition. It is overdiagnosed and the medicines
are unfortunate........we don't really know if years down the
road all that medication in their little developing
brains might contribute to something......
Its the most highly studied of all childhood conditions.
And its a fascinating variation on human behavior.
It would be interesting to unravel the different factors
genetic and otherwise which contribute. I'm sure
variations on the theme have contributed to our strengths in
variety.
Leif Ekblad
This does sound a awfully lot like undiagnosed ADHD. Did you know that many
people in prison today have undiagnosed ADHD? There is of course a reason
why some people with ADHD get this kind of "diagnosis", and it's certainly
not
because they have any additional brain-damages or deficiencies. The reason
is
simple: lack of understanding and getting together with the wrong people. If
they instead had been treated with respect, they might have been successful
entrepreneurs.
Once more, I really don't see what this has to do with civilizations at all.
-Leif
Leif Ekblad
> >they are diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs/counseling. In some
> >places, they're just considered antsy and disciplined or ignored.
> >
> >>BTW, ADHD is not about "antsy" children anyway. It's based on a
collection
> >>of traits.
> >
> >Another reason to be suspicious about the diagnosis, since the
> >various traits aren't universally present. Besides, antsy is also
> >a vague diagnosis covering the same traits.
> >
> >Curt Adams (curt...@aol.com)
> >"It is better to be wrong than to be vague" - Freeman Dyson
>
> Curt -
> You sit fairly solidly in that old fashioned school in
> which so many elementary teachers sit.
> They are foolish idiots till they expand their knowledge base
> to include a modified repertoire........ and damage
> happens early on when the kids are labelled dumb or defiant.
Exactly. The real damage to these kids is not their different way of
functioning or impulsivity, it's the damage caused by not treating
them with respect. They can both end up in prison and become
successful citizens.
-Leif
Bob Keeter
wrote:
> >===== Original Message From Bob Keeter <rke...@earthlink.net> =====
> >In article <3af1b59...@nntp.sprynet.com>, James Michael Howard
> ><jmho...@sprynet.com> wrote:
> >
> >> How about this? Civilization is a place where impulses which adversely
> >> affect others are controlled; primarily sexual and aggressive.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >If the truth be known, we can call it whatever we want to, but with the
> >wealth of Anglicized Latin and Greek words that rattle around, Id think
> >that we'd have come up with something better than "civilization" to
> >describe what you propose! Civilization is, if you combine the root
> >words and the most common modern usage, the "building of cities";
> >could be Sodom and Gomorrah, but cities none the less! But then we are
> >talking more in terms of old stones and ancient people rather than
> >philosophical or ethical ideals! 8-)
> >
> >Regards
> >bk
>
> If culture is like the tree,
> civilization is like its fruit.
>
James Joyce would be proud. Not so sure about Leaky! ;-)
Regards
bk
J.E.F. Godesky
> this?"
Well, it's an example of frontal lobe activity. I'm not sure how much
hypothesis testing is involved in religion; after all, that's supposed to be
what separates it from science.
The problem is that all cultures have hypothesis testing, but only a very
tiny minority of cultures are civilizations. Naturally, there's a very long
chain of causations here, from the first microbe to the modern day. Just
like defining what caused humans to break away from the great apes, the trick
is finding the cause that all civilizations have, that nothing else has.
Cultures that are not civilizations have hypothesis testing. Hey, the people
of the Upper Paleolithic were the original scientists, mathematicians, and
artists! But they didn't have any of the earmarks of civilization. There's
no discernible settlement hierarchy, no indication of class stratification,
and certainly no cities. They had all those "good" things we like to think
of as indicative of civilization: sciences, art, religion, and hypothesis
testing. But these are found in all cultures, civilized or not. They lacked
the defining points. So, they didn't have civilizations. So, obviously,
while hypothesis testing allowed something that allowed something that
allowed something that allowed civilization, you can't really say it's the
cause of civilization any more than you can say striated muscle tissue is the
cause of civilization.
Jason Godesky
J.E.F. Godesky
> the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence H. Keeley. Apparently the !Kung
> and other "primitive" people kill and injure each other a lot more
> often than we have been led to believe. The level of violence does
> vary greatly however from culture to culture and from time to time,
> just as it does with us "civilized" people. Imagine that!!!
I have, and wasn't particularly impressed. What struck me most about his study was
that the overwhelming majority of the cases he cited were of horticulturalists, and
pastoralists--people I'd classify as agriculturalists, differing only in degree.
Also, he tries to differentiate between "murders" and "wars," which, as I've stated
elsewhere, is an artificial one that only makes sense when you accept the idea of
the Monopoly of Force (non-state societies do not). So, for instance, he'll
compare the number of people killed in Inuit murders and wars to the number of
people killed in American wars, and proudly proclaim how the percentage for the
Americans is so much smaller. I'd like to see the numbers, when the murder rate is
added in, as well.
Also, nearly all the incidents of violence recorded among hunter-gatherers occurred
only in their dealings with agriculturalists.
I have no illusions about some idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle; it can often be
quite violent. But I also believe you have a better chance surviving in the
Outback or the Kalahari than the safest American city. I much prefer William
Eckhardt's statistical analysis, _Civilizations, Empires and Wars: A Quantitative
History of War._
Jason Godesky
J.E.F. Godesky
> about the advanced forebrain, civilizations have within them the seeds of
> their own demise. So Sodom and Gomorrah were at one time civilized, then
> they declined. The message of the story about Sodom and Gomorrah is that
> when people loose the ability to ask "What will happen if I do this?," they
> become uncivilized.
A killer can be very methodical, and has no impairment to his ability to
formulate and test hypotheses. In fact, that's rather required to do the dirty
deed. Robespierre, by your definition, would not be civilized. But so far as
his ability to formulate and test a hypothesis, well, I think he'd be better at
it than me or you, most likely.
Jason Godesky
Bob Keeter
<le...@rdos.net> wrote:
Snippage. . . . . . . .
> Why would it have been sudden? I like to think this also was a gradual
> process that occurred during several thousands of years. Before it even
> could start, the right prerequists must have existed. After all, even
> Neanderthals made some primitive shelters, and the step to build more
> complex houses and gather them at the same place isn't that large.
>
OK. We'll do this the hard way. ;-) Shoulda done it the first time!
;-))
First off, "sudden" is a relative term. In nuclear physics, sudden
means fractions of pico-seconds. In the stellar evolution of the sun,
an event that occurs over hundreds of millions of years, can be
considered sudden! In this particular case, HSS has been prowling
around in all sorts of climates, localities, geographies, etc for
something in excess of 100,000 years. In the last 20th of that period
of time, he has been building cities. Took him 95,000 years to get
into the civilization thingy and its taken him 5,000 years to evolve it
to New York City, Frankfurt and Tokyo! That my friend is a pretty
rapid process when considered against the 95,000 years that HSS had
basically the same intellectual capabilities, but NO CITIES!
We can make that example even more pointed! Find me the OLDEST
citation for anything that could approximate a "city" in China, the
Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the New World. What is the
EARLIEST date associated with each? Take the oldest date and subtract
the youngest date. Less than 1000 years between them? If HSS was
wandering around for 100,000 years and then, ALL OF A SUDDEN, over the
span of ONLY 1000 years (actually quite a bit less I think, but that
would be overkill!) he starts building cities on 5 out of the 6
inhabited continents!
Hopefully we can ignore the diffusionists' conjectures, (since none go
back far enough to explain the latest Peru findings anyway!); and I
dont think that even the MOST "freethinking" diffusionist would have
Egyptians crossing the Atlantic in 8900 BC!
The basic questions remains, how do you have these events occur at
practically the same instance in time, across 5 very diverse cultures
spread completely around the world, if each "seed point" were a totally
separate, "statistically independent" event driven only by the
randomness of biological evolution! If it wasnt five totally random
events that just magically happened to cluster around a given point
(+/- 500 yrs or so) in the 100,000 year history of HSS, what kicked off
the city building? ;-))
Regards
bk
Bob Keeter
<G.Han...@inter.nl.nomail.net.> wrote:
Snippage. . . .. .
>
> Well, the Bookstein et al. analysis is only concerned with the
> median-sagittal (midline) profile of the frontal part of the cranium.
> That is not enough to make such a bold conclusion with regard to the
> entire brain. However, as far as frontal morphology is concerned
> Bookstein et al. found no _significant_ differences in morphology
> between the Pleistocene and recent crania.
> For all practical purposes it seems that much of the "hardware" was in
> place at the Middle Pleistocene (the Bodo 1 cranium (600 kya) was the
> oldest Homo specimen used in the analysis. Its cranial capacity has
> recently been estimated at ca. 1250 cc, well within the range of
> modern humans).
>
> My guess is that cultural acceleration in the Holocene has more to do
> with (critical) population size/density.
>
Now that is another one that I'll put in there with the sea level
issues! If the human population density hits a given level, (with
adequate frontal lobe development of course! ;-) ) you get cities!
Sort of like piling up enough uranium and it starts to get hot!
Shifts the focus a bit, but now we have to ask what might have caused
human population density to spike up at the same time! Population
density has been abundantly proven to be driven by such things as war,
human disease, climate, disease of food animals and plants, floods,
droughts, hard winters, hard summers, easy winters, mild summers, etc,
MANY of which are relatively localized phenomena by the way. Which of
these kinds of events would have triggered the hypothesized population
spikes and to have triggered them at about the same time! Even then,
the actual "perceptualizing" of cities must have been a fairly random
event, even after reaching "critical mass"! Occasionally it would have
been thought up by the village idiot and discounted and only
occasionally conceived by the more conservative village elders and
adopted! Why did everybody "see the light" at once? ;-)
Regards
bk
ejudy
>>
>> If culture is like the tree,
>> civilization is like its fruit.
>>
>
>James Joyce would be proud. Not so sure about Leaky! ;-)
>
>Regards
>bk
Now thats sweet ;-)
James Michael Howard
happen if I do this?" by the prefrontal lobes is the basis of the beginning
of civilization. This was countered by fact that this ability, in one form
or another, exists/existed in various human cultures that have not formed
into civilizations. Well, as I have already said, this is not a stagnant
ability. The usefulness of this ability expands with evolution, growth and
development, of the prefrontal lobes. The prefrontal lobes evolved during
hominid evolution. Evolution of the prefrontal lobes is the keystone of
human evolution. In the following quotation, it is stated that "Area 10 is
one of the cortical areas of the frontal lobe involved in higher cognitive
functions such as the undertaking of initiatives and the planning of future
actions." Well, the simple hypothesis "What will happen if I do this?"
extended with the ability to form hypotheses farther into the future allows
individuals to make civilizations rather than cultures. (Children cannot
form hypotheses involving the future as well as fully developed adults.)
Further, in the following quotation, the evolution of this area of the
prefrontal lobes is identified as exaggerated in humans. "Area 10 in the
human brain is larger relative to the rest of the brain than it is in the
apes, and its supragranular layers have more space available for connections
with other higher-order association areas. This suggests that the neural
substrates supporting cognitive functions associated with this part of the
cortex enlarged and became specialized during hominid evolution."
Why must "all" humans be identical, even from tens of thousands of years
ago. As pointed out in one of the posts here, frontal areas has been about
the same, but, I suggest, the technique could not pick up small changes in
overall size and, especially, neuronal density advances, in the prefrontal
lobe, perhaps just in area 10. I suggest this area has been advancing, it
advances in some circumstances and not others throughout history, and not
all modern human populations exhibit the same evolution of this area.
Evolution should produce differences in humans with time. The prefrontal
cortex and its ability to form the simple hypothesis "What will happen if I
do this?," and advances therefrom, is the basis of civilization.
Prefrontal cortex in humans and apes: A comparative study of area 10 (Am J
Phys Anthropol 2001 Mar;114(3):224-41).
"Area 10 is one of the cortical areas of the frontal lobe involved in higher
cognitive functions such as the undertaking of initiatives and the planning
of future actions. It is known to form the frontal pole of the macaque and
human brain, but its presence and organization in the great and lesser apes
remain unclear. It is here documented that area 10 also forms the frontal
pole of chimpanzee, bonobo, orangutan, and gibbon brains. Imaging techniques
and stereological tools are used to characterize this area across species
and provide preliminary estimates of its absolute and relative size. Area 10
has similar cytoarchitectonic features in the hominoid brain, but aspects of
its organization vary slightly across species, including the relative width
of its cortical layers and the space available for connections. The cortex
forming the frontal pole of the gorilla appears highly specialized, while
area 10 in the gibbon occupies only the orbital sector of the frontal pole.
Area 10 in the human brain is larger relative to the rest of the brain than
it is in the apes, and its supragranular layers have more space available
for connections with other higher-order association areas. This suggests
that the neural substrates supporting cognitive functions associated with
this part of the cortex enlarged and became specialized during hominid
evolution."
On Fri, 04 May 2001 21:37:19 GMT, "J.E.F. Godesky" <jef.g...@verizon.net>
wrote:
J.E.F. Godesky
being" should be more complex than that of a hunter-gatherer? Well, you're quite
right, no endocast can give you the detail required for such a supposition's
evidence. However, fortunately, we still have a few specimens of humans from
non-state cultures. Fewer every day, but a few. And I know of no evidence which
suggests any sort of neurological difference.
Besides, your hypothesis suggests that civilization is superior to other forms of
culture. I'm more prone to saying that civilization is either equal to, or
inferior to other forms of culture (okay, so I lean more towards inferior), but
both of these are value judgments which have no basis in any actual, objective
truth. No culture can be defined as "better" or "worse" than any other without
dragging in a subjective value statement. So, the fact that there is no evidence
to support a neurological difference between two cultures shouldn't come as such a
shock. We'd only expect civilized people to have more developed frontal lobes
(code for "are smarter") if we come at it from the rather ethnocentric viewpoint
that civilization is the One Right Way for Everyone To Live. The same basic
premise behind imperialism, colonialism, missionaries, and the "Great White
Burden."
Jason Godesky