I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?
In: 178
A couple things here! First, how we conceptualize ‘civilization’ should be scrutinized a little. You’ve implied that civilization begins with farming. That is indeed what we are taught from the time we are young, and it’s not necessarily a bad framework. But people were existing in societies with varying degrees of plant and animal domestication for a long time before the first settlements.
One theory I have heard on this is that when the environment is plentiful and conditions are favorable, people seem to get along just fine. They have no need to settle or produce a great surplus. It seems to have been when conditions became harsh for one reason or another, that people had to make different choices.
Another interesting bit is that settling seemed to actually *shorten* lifespans, increase work, spread disease, promote division of labor, and lead to class divisions wherein one special tier of human was in charge of managing the surplus made by laborers. And well, the rest is history!
It depends on what you mean by took “humans” so long. Homo sapiens are roughly 300,000 years old. There was a lot more evolution that needed to take place after we split from our chimp cousins until we became modern day humans. After Homo sapiens emerged, things moved relatively fast. Within a 100,000 years or so, we were out of Africa, and everything kept progressing from there.
As to why we progressed to civilization and apes didn’t is somewhat simple: we evolved into smarter animals while they didn’t. We were the brainy cousins, they were the brawny cousins.
I’m not an expert by any means, but civilization is comprised of a variety of sciences, structures and engineering. Those things did not arrive all at the same time.
In order to develop those systems and sciences one would have to have free time to think, which in a nomadic society you most likely don’t have that free time.
This is why agricultural discovery was such a key element to human history. Being able to grow food in your backyard instead of constantly moving to new areas to find food opens up more time to think and plan for what will eventually become civilization.
There are a couple of ideas about this.
1. Certain parts of the world were not condusive to agriculture for a very long time.
Read the book guns, germs, and steel. It goes into detail about where, how and why modern civilization evolved the way it did. Nomadic cultures, poor soil and global temps, etc. Forced mans hand and the inability to settle.
Another tidbit is that it took a few thousand years for us to figure out what foods we could feasibly growband harvest. Way back, folks were eating a lot of random shit and dying all the time.
Now the 2nd (a more modern theory)
Once anatomically modern man came along, We didn’t take that long to figure it out. Man settled in fertile parts of the globe, and started societies.
There have been multiple civilizations rise and fall in the last 180,000 years due to global cataclysms. The most recent of which that we now have evidence of, was the younger dryas period (11,800-12,000 years ago) which decimated the planet, forcing humanity to start over once again. We have very little evidence in terms of structures, tools, etc from previous civilizations of that time due to erosion. Throw an iPhone in the dirt and it won’t be there in 10k years.
For all we really know ,there may have been advanced civilizations well before us, with different tech and all that, unrecognizable today.
An interesting example of this is gobekli tepe, in turkey.
Mega structure built some 40k years ago. Until recently, it was believed man was incapable of such great feats of engineering at that time. So.. who knows.
I’m not sure we have a definitive answer to this. But civilization is dependent on a food supply that doesn’t require everybody to spend their days looking for and processing food, which is to say, it depends on agriculture.
Much of human existence was during various ice ages, when agriculture wouldn’t have worked so well, even if people had known how to do it. So first, the Earth needs to warm up. Second, people need to actually need to develop agriculture. If wild food is plentiful, there’s little need to develop it. So conditions need to be just right for agriculture to develop.
But once it does, the result is like an explosion. It’s kind of like when we developed computers. As little as fifty years ago, there were very few of them. But once someone developed the spreadsheet (in the mid ’80s), suddenly every office had to have one, and they spread around the world.
What do you mean by civilization? When we stopped being nomadic and settled down? That depended on the ppl. We tended to follow animals.
As far as the monkey thing, the popular theory is that we were an entirely different species all together. While we share a common ancestor, that ancestor predates us quite a bit. Going really far back.
You’ve asked a lot, so bear with me.
Apes have changed and evolved. They haven’t become humans, but that’s not where their evolutionary branch is headed. But they have changed over the last millions of years, same as us. Recently, some apes/primates have started crafting basic tools to do jobs, which is a major step on civilization development.
We cannot say for absolute certain, but here’s a few things:
Human’s (homo sapiens) have been around approx 300,000 years. The 6 million years of evolution would include a lot of previous divergent evolutions from other lifeforms, including other homo species.
When we were just evolved, we didn’t have languages, we had more basic sounds (think grunt and point sort of communication). Language allows for ideas to be passed on more easily, and between generations.
Add to that that, ultimately, hunter gatherer lifestyles were effective, and account for 90% of human history. The idea that if it’s not broke don’t fox it comes to mind. Then at some point they switched. It’s not understood exactly why we switched, as hunter gatherers had more varied diets, and often worked less. It’s theorized that once humans gathered enough food, they had the freedom to tinker with things like agriculture, as they weren’t at fear of starvation.
This is where civilization can now develop. We had language to convey abstract thoughts, like beliefs, and planning, and teach each other how to grow foods and navigate using stars, and enough food that we didn’t have to spend all our energy worrying about whether we could eat tomorrow. So we could focus on things that didn’t matter in an immediate survival sense.
Very broad strokes there.
The answer: shortage of females. Most human wars are about the hand of some bride and evasion of jealousy that kills everyone in their way.
They took an eternity to breed wide-hipped women who won’t die during childbirth and leave the man into becoming a woman thief. They finally could create families AND forge family bonds by giving away their birth-ready daughters.
Civilization happened due to women
There is a concept called the law of accelerating returns. https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
At it’s core, this concept is about the fact that each tool that is created allows new and better tools to be created. We are most familiar with this idea in Moore’s law, which says that the amount of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.
Moore’s law is a subset of the law of accelerating returns and Kurzweil argues that the same principle applies to any complex system, even evolution. When we moved from single cells organisms to multicellular ones this allowed far more efficient body plans that could better shape the world and help them survive. Warm blooded animals can expend cat amounts of energy that cold blooded animals can’t keep up with. Farming allowed is to build cities and gather groups of people who did nothing but think. Medical technology allows us to live longer and thus we can have doctors that have decades more experience and can do even more research.
This is an exponential curve which means that it starts very slow, as you don’t have many tools to work with, but accelerates over time up to infinity. That is where the concept of the technological singularity comes from, it is where our technology grows so fast that we can’t keep up with it. He believes that the specific tool which will complete that process is AI
While his concept suffers under the Whig interpretation of history (which states that the future is always more advanced than the past) the basic concept that each invention builds on the previous ones and makes future intentions easier to build is almost axiomatically true.
Civilizations are an emergent phenomena. Civilizations are complex societies characterized by development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, currency, and symbolic systems of communication.
Each of these qualities develops in response to a society’s prevailing need. No one creates a civilization; it is the sum of a society’s activity. Only in view of a society’s historic progression does its status as a civilization become apparent.
So the direct answer to your question is that no one “needed” the elements of a civilization until when these were discovered and implemented.
Latest Answers