I’ve been on a bit of a human history journey here lately, basically just jumping around various dates and eras to see what we know about the people of the time.
What occurs to me and what I haven’t come across yet, is how do towns and cities even get started? If I have come across that, I didn’t rightly understand what I was reading.
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Agriculture developed slowly over time, with increasing complexity. It would start with hunter-gatherer groups regularly returning to abundant areas to harvest them. Then, since humans are very clever, they would figure out ways to help plants in that area grow more food. Things like killing pests and removing weeds. This would result in both increasing effort and increasing yield. So more time was spent managing these crops, and less time was spent elsewhere hunting and gathering. That time would result in more food produced, meaning that the cultivated crops would make up a greater fraction of the caloric intake of the people cultivating them. Greater complexity could result in even more yield. Once you start tilling soil, sowing seeds, selectively breeding crops, making fertilizer, and building irrigation systems, farming becomes a full time job, and it produces enough food to become the primary food source in a society. It also produces enough food to sustain a much larger population.
Now you end up with a sedentary society that focuses primarily on cultivating crops. Hunting and gathering become a supplemental food source, and being nomadic is no longer advantageous. The main goal of society becomes agriculture. Now there is enough surplus that not everyone has to be dedicated to food production. People can specialize into different roles, and societal complexity continues to increase. Without a focus on mobility, people can start making things that they don’t have to be able to carry with them. Buildings to live in, walls for protection, heavy tools like plows and mills. Pretty soon you have a village. Societal complexity can continue to increase from there until eventually there are supercomputers, space ships, and nuclear weapons.
As for location, cities start in places where agriculture is viable. That depends on climate, access to water, and the presence of native plants that are suitable for cultivation. This is why so many cities, and pretty much all of the earliest cities, were built on rivers. They are a perfect place to farm crops. It isn’t until technology advances further that we can start cleverly overcoming geographic limitations, which is how a sun-blasted hellhole like Arizona ends up with 7 million people living in it.
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