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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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.
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