Eli5 why did humans take so long to create civilizations?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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