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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Because the transition from hunting to hunter/gatherer to proto-farming to farming is hard.
i’ll give you a very abbreviated idea of what is considered a reasonably timeline of what happened over the course of many many many years, decades, centuries.
hunting and huntergatherer is pretty straight forward is pretty straight forward, I’m going to skip it.
proto-farming though – that’s the trick. The working theory (I am not a historian or archeologist, I’m skimmed some of their work) I’ve seen is this:
Hunter gatherers lived in ranges of many miles, wandering around their range looking for food, or migrating (and looking for food) but not staying in one place. The hunter gatherers collected berries, wheat, and other edible plant materials on their hunter gatherer rounds. And the left overs where thrown away or the seeds that made it through the digestive track were then planted on the ground. And this way the crops that the hunter gathers ate would be spread along the range that they lived in. So every year they may find another berry plant or wheat plants where they would roam, and that would encourage them to return there again next year, which would spread more of those seeds. And that in turn would widen the area where there is food the hunter gathers could eat.
but this kind of spreading of seed like this is slow because our hunter gatherers don’t know that they are spreading the seeds.
eventually you get to an area that the hunter gstherers have past through enough and is fertile enough that the hunter gatherers can stay there more than a day or two. Maybe a week before moving on. That in turn spreads those seeds more in that area. And then after a couple more years, those hunter gatherers can stay for several weeks in that area instead of one week.
at some point in here someone gets the idea to intentionally *plant those seeds* instead of just letting them randomly fall where they may. So when they come back the year after that there are more plants they can harvest. And then there is more intentional planting. So the year after that when they return there are even more plants to work with.
and Slowly but surely the entire range is populated with plants that bear fruit. This makes it easier to gather food over the entire range.
eventually a couple people from a tribe of hunter gatherers says: “there is enough here, I’m staying right here.“ and they make a go of it while the rest of the tribe continues along the range. And eventually one of those people who stays manages to survive on the available plants and begins to figure out how to grow more of those plants.
And I’ve just compressed about 150,000 years into the text above. from there Stone Age agriculture is on the horizon.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens have been around for 300,000 years not millions of years. Modern humans have been around for 80,000 years, maybe as little as 40,000 years. There may have been some development in how the brain functioned that doesn’t really get picked up in the fossil remains at some point between those dates. The explosion of culture art and technology dates from around about then. 40,000 years ago -11,500 years ago was marked by ice age and interglacial climates with large shifts and vast amounts of land covered by the sea and then re-emerging.
For people with primitive technology and no scientific understanding the domestication of plants and livestock is going to take time which an unstable environment and nomadic lifestyle doesn’t grant. The earliest centre of farming was the middle east which had sedentary villages at least 20,000 years ago, supplementing their hunter-gatherer lifestyle by growing a range of crops on a small scale in gardens. They didn’t switch to farming until 8,000 years later. By this point the crops they have grown in gardens for 1000s of years are domesticated. But critically they probably didn’t have much choice.
Early farmers were malnourished, unhealthy and worn out compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors and their hunter gatherer contemporaries. It’s very likely that the switch to farming came because wild resources were over exploited and could no longer support the population. Farming culture developed spontaneously in a few unconnected places and then spread rapidly. This happened over a few thousand years everywhere from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Amazon. Before this occured humanity had spread into every easily reached part of the world and in most cases had caused the extinction, at least locally, of their favourite prey and scarcity of the other animals they hunted.
Once we started farming we had dense, fixed, connected populations that could develop and disseminate improvements in technology quickly. Those improvements led to more people, with more time to think of new things, a wider scope of viewpoints, and more connections to spread those ideas and learn from each other. Eventually we develop things that massively increase our ability to advance technology like writing, the scientific method, and computing, and here we are.
I’ve seen it said that we didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us.
The cultivation of wheat gave us a ready and reliable food source so that we didn’t have to hunt and gather anymore, so could devote our time and our brains to other things – civilisation.
I’d suggest reading “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari. Some of it is considered inaccurate, but it’s a very easy to understand read on how civilization (probably) came to be
As to your question about what took humans so long, you have to start at the point where we had evolved the right mental tools, which is believed to be roughly 500k years ago
Without the ability to pass down knowledge through writing (eg don’t eat the yellow and green thing with pointy bits), and the sheer amount of time required to slowly migrate around distances between getting wiped out by natural disasters, animals or other humans, it takes time to progress
Hunter gatherer lasted a long time until eventually the right combination of things happened to start taming the land (agriculture), which was probably the start of bigger groups of people staying in one place
Another interesting observation from Sapiens is about the human ability to tell stories / make shit up, which has the affect of tying groups of people together through these shared stories
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.
Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic Revolution marked the development of agriculture.
Agriculture really kicked off our evolution into society. Once we figured out how to grow our own food and breed our own animals, why continue moving around? Why not build a farm, and then a town and a city?
Interestingly, about 13,000 to 11,500 years ago, the younger dryas occurred. Following this global climate event, global temperatures suddenly stopped fluctuating for the first time in 100,000 years. And those stable temperatures are still with us today (well, maybe not since the 1900s).
The great thing about stable global temperatures? Predictable seasonal changes. It means we can plant food with confidence, and we can get better and better at it every year. I think it’s likely agriculture wasn’t that feasible in the long-term before this time.
What caused this global climate event that allowed civilisation to emerge? Theories differ, but I can’t rule out that our ancient alien overlords simply decided it was about time we got into farming
You don’t really have an argument here because humanity is the only species who have a civilisation.
I forget the name, but I read a book that argued that our brains simply were not capable of civilization until the last Ice Age, and it was the ice sheets themselves that pushed our brains to get smarter and smarter. The idea is that if you live near an ice sheet and it’s retreating, then you can move into that fresh new territory, and your tribe will prosper. But whenever the ice sheet is expanding, you have to be very smart indeed, or you will die and that led to a bunch of very smart people right there at the border of the ice sheets, and the timing exactly matches up. When the eye sheets last retreated, those smart survivors prospered and that is exactly when the first civilizations appeared.
Well you know. Sometimes cancer needs both a suitable precursor as well as a mutation to get itself started.
Farming was not necessary. When you have a tribe of 100, they can feed on natural resources, like get a banana from a tree. When we have 8 billion people, that banana tree is no longer enough to feed us all and the problem solving begins.
To start doing something new, there needs to be a problem first that is annoying enough for someone to get off of their bum and do something about it.
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