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?
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Archaeologist here. This is really one of the fundamental questions of archaeology and unfortunately there isn’t a simple clear ELI5 answer. When you’re asking about “civilization” the roots lie in what we call complex societies. This is a technical term that describes societies with entrenched social stratification and division of labor into specializations, among other things. Many people might think this goes along with the transition to agriculture in certain places about 10-12k years ago, but the key feature seems in fact to be related to the capacity to produce food surpluses and to store those surpluses. This goes back further than agriculture to what we call complex Hunter gatherers, by at least 20k years ago.
Now, if I’m interpreting you correctly, the big question you’re really asking is why did these features start to appear at the end of the Pleistocene and not some earlier time? After all, the Holocene epoch that we’ve lived in for the past 12k years is really just one of the warm intervals between glaciations that have cycled for the past 2.6 million years. And humans appear to have had the exact same intellectual capabilities as today for at least 300k years. We really don’t know the answer here and it’s a topic of active research. One hypothesis is that for some unknown reason, human populations started to increase significantly around the end of the Pleistocene, putting pressure on groups to specialize and target certain resources that could be stockpiled against shortages. Storing foods leads to sedentism, which leads to agriculture, which leads to capital-C Civilizations.
The real answer probably has to do with a really complex interplay of environmental, technological, and demographic factors, as well as some random historical occurrences. I will report back when we actually figure all this out.
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