Cultures around the world have been building temples and tombs and cities for thousands of years; most people think of Europe, but there’s also the Americas, parts of Africa, parts of Asia. Everyone can name some famous historical buildings or ruins from multiple countries.
Why is it then that other people didn’t? I’ve never heard of or seen anything really permanent built by the Australian Aboriginals for instance – arguably the oldest culture on earth – and I’m Australian!
In: Culture
Food. You can’t make cities if you don’t have enough concentration of food to feed that city. Today only a small portion of the population need to work to produce food, but it wasn’t like that in the past.
– Agriculture is hard, you need a lot of knowledge, good soil and good plant to be able to do it with decent result. A lot of people were not able to do it yet, or were in situation where living of hunting and gathering just gave more result for their effort. So they had to move and couldn’t stay in the same place for enough time to develop a city.
– There was a LOT of technological development in agriculture over the years. As those technology spread people were able to produce more food in a certain area, allowing cities to grow. And I’m not talking about tractor or stuff like that, there was a lot of development in agriculture over the years. Finding the best type of crops and spreading that knowledge, using stone tools, domestication of animal to work on the farm, crop rotation, irrigation, etc. In the beginning, we simple didn’t had enough technology to make farming productive enough to feed cities, and so only in the most fertile region huge civilisation were able to prosper. Anywhere else, each square kilometre of field just didn’t produce enough food. As technology progressed, less fertile regions were able to produce enough food and cities started to appear all over the world, but it take time to knowledge and know how to spread. In Australia they had the disadvantage of being isolated, Europe could learn through merchant about a technology developed in China and they had a far larger population that could come up with new idea, so the development was faster.
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