Eras in civilization 7

[AffineConstant]

Ironically, hunter-gatherers had a much healthier and more varied diet than early farmers. Therefore, early agriculture was not the major life improvement we intuitively assume. However, agriculture triggered a population boom, as the sedentary lifestyle reduced the number of miscarriages, allowing more pregnancies to come to term. As such, agriculture developed not by spreading techniques to hunter-gatherers so that they become farmers themselves, but by slowly overwhelming hunter-gatherer populations.

More importantly regarding our discussion about eras, agriculture and animal husbandry didn't come in one day. It was a slow domestication process over several millenniums to create new more productive breeds of wheat, corn and rice, and to transform aurochs into cattle, wild boars into pigs, mouflons into sheeps, oryxes into goats. During Neolithic, pottery, masonry and irrigation also increased food output. With a higher food output came the fact that one person could feed several allowing labor division, but that only came slowly.

Bronze age on the other hand lead to a much faster development. It both increased again agriculture output and offered a significant military advantage. However, it required more complex trade networks, requiring to control tin and copper deposits often very distant from one another. All this lead to a big improvement in technologies, inventing the wheel, sailing, code of laws, mathematics and writing. It was undoubtedly a major revolution. The iron age was equally impactful, building a lot more efficient tools and weapons, leading to vastly bigger empires to emerge, triggering itself another technological booming with the development of horseback riding and directly leading to the classical age (science, litterature, philosophy, currency, etc.).

Next big revolution was the age of discovery, triggered by mastering high seas navigation. While before that, established trade routes required goods changing hands several times to cross thousands of kilometers, it was suddenly possible to directly reach any harbour in the world. Beyond the trade advantage it also allowed a direct access to all knowledges and techniques invented anywhere in the world leading to a new technological boost. This is what triggered the agricultural revolution in the 18th century resulting in another demographic booming that will ultimately lead to the industrial revolution. But let's not assume that the industrial revolution will suddenly make the life of the common man better, that will only come with mass consumption by the middle of the 20th century.

The population boom from agriculture has more to do with the fact that humans starved to death every winter if the local population grew larger than the given lowest amount of food an area could provide each year. But with agriculture you can get better at it, thus the exponential growth of human population.

Sadly the "age of discovery" was never the cause of any revolution, or at least "mastering the high seas" was not the cause of it. Trade networks across europe had spread from the current day eastern mediterranean to along the coast of africa and up the UK and more since the bronze age. In the Indian ocean a few trade fleets from China reached down all the way to Africa at a few points. From Oceania others crossed the whole of the Pacific, humans have been quite good sailors for a long time. The thing that really cracked for Europe in the 1400's was much more boring to most people, and that's modern banking. Systemitized lending and borrowing of money deposited and stored by others is either boring and/or rage inducing to most, so much so the Catholic church banned it for centuries. But it's so much more efficient as a way to "make use of money" that the real revolution was an economic one, suddenly European countries could afford to build ever bigger, more complex ships that were outfitted ever better, all to sail across the sea and get yet more money in return. Just like with agriculture that's where you get your exponential growth from, but I'm not sure "the banking era" has the same romantic or heroic ring to it.

 

[Marla_Singer]

The population boom from agriculture has more to do with the fact that humans starved to death every winter if the local population grew larger than the given lowest amount of food an area could provide each year. But with agriculture you can get better at it, thus the exponential growth of human population.

Semi-Nomadic lifestyle solved the winter starvation issue. The problem is rather that the long, heavy-loaded walks required by seasonal move was awful for pregnancies. As such, the fertility rate was around 2 live births per woman, leading to a pretty stable population. With sedentary lifestyle, number of live births per woman significantly increased, however population weren't immune to starvation. Hence why pottery was signifcant as it allowed grain to be stored in granaries.

Sadly the "age of discovery" was never the cause of any revolution, or at least "mastering the high seas" was not the cause of it. Trade networks across europe had spread from the current day eastern mediterranean to along the coast of africa and up the UK and more since the bronze age. In the Indian ocean a few trade fleets from China reached down all the way to Africa at a few points. From Oceania others crossed the whole of the Pacific, humans have been quite good sailors for a long time. The thing that really cracked for Europe in the 1400's was much more boring to most people, and that's modern banking. Systemitized lending and borrowing of money deposited and stored by others is either boring and/or rage inducing to most, so much so the Catholic church banned it for centuries. But it's so much more efficient as a way to "make use of money" that the real revolution was an economic one, suddenly European countries could afford to build ever bigger, more complex ships that were outfitted ever better, all to sail across the sea and get yet more money in return. Just like with agriculture that's where you get your exponential growth from, but I'm not sure "the banking era" has the same romantic or heroic ring to it.

Control of trade is arguably the most important lever of power and the first incentive for expansion since the Upper Paleolithic (shells, amber), and it never changed to this day. If most cradles of civilization are built along rivers (Nile, Mesopotamia, Indus, Yellow river), that was to control their trade routes. Initially during Bronze Age, the birthing civilizations of those areas grew into coastal Empires controlling maritime routes (Egyptians, Sumerians) which will expand much further during the Iron Age as actual sea Empires (Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, etc.).

Yet, maritime trade could never really move too deep in the high seas because navigators had no ability to locate themselves correctly (evaluating latitude can easily be made watching the stars, but evaluating longitude was much harder). Along Western Sahara, there is a very strong stream going Southward, meaning that during all those millenniums, sailors from the Mediterranean could actually travel South from Morocco to Mauritania, but the problem is that they couldn't return. The interest has always been there, many efforts were made, many lives were lost but they all failed, from the Phoenicians to the Vikings and the Arabs). Carthaginian sailor Hanno claimed that he explored the Western African coast as a one-time event but his way to make the return (the hardest part) isn't documented.

In 1415, Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator was only yet another one to make the attempt, frustrated to face a wide sea he couldn't take advantage of, putting Portugal at the dead end of all trade routes. Portuguese are cod fishers, like the Vikings before them, and cod is a high seas fish. So they had the ships to wander far from the coast, but they couldn't position themselves, as everyone else before them. Yet after 12 years of efforts, Portuguese will discover the Azores and that will change everything. Indeed, that allows a return from Africa, not in following the Coast but in heading deep in the High Seas from Senegal to the Azores, then in heading East to Lisbon. This will open the way up to Cameroon, that will be reached by the 1450's. Yet they couldn't go further because they were blocked by another stream, this time Northward, preventing them exploring beyond to the South.

The solution was already known, doing the same thing, heading into the High Seas rather than in following the coast, yet no island were found to give a cape. And it took again 30 years for the Portuguese to perfect the Mariner's astrolabe to position themselves in the Western South Atlantic, eventually reaching the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, rewarding 73 years of efforts. Yet by that time, everything changed. Because now, sailors could position themselves anywhere on planet earth, and no sea would limit them any longer.

And why is it so meaningful? Because not only it allowed the Portuguese to directly, quickly and safely reach any harbours in the world, but they had a monopoly on it, being unrivaled and unthreatened in the depth of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean that only them could reach. The fact that monopoly will quickly be shared with Spain (Tordesillas), and later the Dutch, the French and the English doesn't change much. This is what will allow Western Europe to take control of global trade. Before that, Western Europe was certainly less advanced than other civilizations such as the Byzantines, China, the Arabs or India that were all located on the silk road. Yet the silk road, which ruled world trade during 1500 years, was now bypassed, making it irrelevant.

Everything which will follow comes from that fact. The development of banking and financial markets are only a consequence of that, certainly not the cause. It is because Europeans could now venture where no one else could that there were new business to be developped in the first place, and therefore a need to finance it. Sorry that answer is longer than I'd have hoped for.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The population boom from agriculture has more to do with the fact that humans starved to death every winter if the local population grew larger than the given lowest amount of food an area could provide each year. But with agriculture you can get better at it, thus the exponential growth of human population.

Early agriculture on the one hand provided a relatively stable food supply - emphasis on the Stable, as opposed to the literally Catch As Catch Can lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer group.

But the other side of that was that early agriculture was extremely vulnerable to changes in conditions. A few years of low rainfall, or extra flooding, or some plant disease, and Stable became Extremely Unstable. In those cases, early cities based on the agricultural output were abandoned. Catal Huyok probably the best known example, but a whole swathe of early cities show drastic population variations, down to 0 in places.

Sometimes this was due to Mega Events, like the Lake Ojibway Event that produced drought across Anatolia and parts of the Middle East, but many appear to have been local. But also remember, the food storage methods were such that even a few consecutive years of 'crop failures' were catastrophic - the Bible's "Seven Lean Years" was enough to send the population, literally, looking for greener pastures - and fields, and crops.

Civ games encourage us in the idea that history and prehistory is one long upward climb from grubbing for bugs to hunting to farming to visiting MacDonald's for food, but in fact there are a lot of mis-steps along the way: early cities like Catal Huyok and the Cucuteni cities show lots of evidence of people moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and then back to hunting and gathering or transhumant herding ('semi-nomadic' - moving the herd from one fixed area to another seasonally) when the farming failed.

Oh, and parentheticaly, the 'modern' banking techniques were originally developed to allow easy movement of payments from one part of Europe to another: specifically to the great Trade Fairs of Northern Europe for buyers in the Italian city states, and only much later (centuries) were the same techniques adopted to overseas trade outside of Europe. And methods for financing (specifically, for spreading the potential losses out among several people) Long Distance sea trade: building and outfitting ships, obtaining crews and cargo, and risking it on voyages overseas, had already been developed in Classical Athens almost 2000 years before the Age of Discovery, so also cannot be directly held responsible for much later events.

 

[AffineConstant]

Early agriculture on the one hand provided a relatively stable food supply - emphasis on the Stable, as opposed to the literally Catch As Catch Can lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer group.

But the other side of that was that early agriculture was extremely vulnerable to changes in conditions. A few years of low rainfall, or extra flooding, or some plant disease, and Stable became Extremely Unstable. In those cases, early cities based on the agricultural output were abandoned. Catal Huyok probably the best known example, but a whole swathe of early cities show drastic population variations, down to 0 in places.

Sometimes this was due to Mega Events, like the Lake Ojibway Event that produced drought across Anatolia and parts of the Middle East, but many appear to have been local. But also remember, the food storage methods were such that even a few consecutive years of 'crop failures' were catastrophic - the Bible's "Seven Lean Years" was enough to send the population, literally, looking for greener pastures - and fields, and crops.

Civ games encourage us in the idea that history and prehistory is one long upward climb from grubbing for bugs to hunting to farming to visiting MacDonald's for food, but in fact there are a lot of mis-steps along the way: early cities like Catal Huyok and the Cucuteni cities show lots of evidence of people moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and then back to hunting and gathering or transhumant herding ('semi-nomadic' - moving the herd from one fixed area to another seasonally) when the farming failed.

Oh, and parentheticaly, the 'modern' banking techniques were originally developed to allow easy movement of payments from one part of Europe to another: specifically to the great Trade Fairs of Northern Europe for buyers in the Italian city states, and only much later (centuries) were the same techniques adopted to overseas trade outside of Europe. And methods for financing (specifically, for spreading the potential losses out among several people) Long Distance sea trade: building and outfitting ships, obtaining crews and cargo, and risking it on voyages overseas, had already been developed in Classical Athens almost 2000 years before the Age of Discovery, so also cannot be directly held responsible for much later events.

Oh I'm not saying agriculture was some instantaneous jump, just that it's not lower miscarriage rate that really made the human population grow, instead it was the steadying of food supply. The most interesting failures of agriculture to me were the early lack of variety and planting techniques. Climate disasters have been a popular archaeological explanation for much, but may have become exaggerated in their effect. On the other hand it doesn't take a disaster at all for someone that doesn't know how to grow different crops in different soil to fail at growing crops when moving to a new place.

And as for modern banking, what I'm specifically referring to is deposit banking and state banks. Financing expeditions isn't the cause of the banking revolution that started in Italy around the 11th century, just an eventual effect. It started in Italy in part because the Roman Empire had very primitive banks, and that's even where the word comes from. But also because it was a popular destination for Jewish immigrants, who began taking the established practice of financing long trade journeys and applying it to other things like growing crops.

Eventually this system grew by accident into the most important part of the banking revolution. These proto banks went from trading their own money for agreements on future grain harvests, to trading other peoples money for them, to very crucially, using the money people had parked in the bank for their own trading purposes while the money was there. Initially it was a bit like double book keeping "sure, your money is here waiting for you, but while you're not using it I'm just going to use it for a bit...". The effect of this is incredibly important, it's a way of increasing the overall amount of money an entire society has access to while nominally guaranteeing that all this extra money will be repaid with (on average) the same amount of work/goods/services/etc. No more being reliant on "how much gold or silver there happens to be around" if there's not enough, nor worry about inflation if there's too much gold/silver around, the amount of money nominally increases to exactly meet how much people can output. Of course there tons of asterisks there, but that's for in depth economics and not Civ VII.

Regardless this system is what caused Europe to go from just another place in the world to so immensely wealthy they could wander around conquering and suppressing the rest of the planet. An earlier version of the printing press had been invented in what is today Korea some time ago. Gun powder and the compass had come from what is today China. The middle east had kept record and advanced the state of the art of mathematics after the collapse of the Roman empire caused the loss of much (including things like the recipe for concrete). But what really stood out as far as I can tell in Europe is modern deposit/lending banking, it's the one really unique thing they had.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Oh I'm not saying agriculture was some instantaneous jump, just that it's not lower miscarriage rate that really made the human population grow, instead it was the steadying of food supply. The most interesting failures of agriculture to me were the early lack of variety and planting techniques. Climate disasters have been a popular archaeological explanation for much, but may have become exaggerated in their effect. On the other hand it doesn't take a disaster at all for someone that doesn't know how to grow different crops in different soil to fail at growing crops when moving to a new place.

Not only was agriculture not an instantaneous jump, it was frequently combined with other food sources, like herding, hunting, gathering, and especially exploiting local marshes and water for waterfowl and fish. It actually took a long time - possible centuries - before agriculture became such an important part of the food supply chain that failures in it were catastrophic.

The problem is, by the time agriculture becomes the most important part of the food chain, it is partly because the population is stationary and concentrated in settlements large enough to be called (at least) Proto-Cities - populations in one relatively small place that exceed 1000 - 2000 people and can no longer be adequately fed by hunting or even intensive fishing (earliest use of fibers has been traced to weaving fishing nets long before anybody concentrated in a city, so that food source, at least, was already being used to the maximum extent they could) so that repeated failures of agriculture, like several years of climactic drought meant that the settlement became impossible to sustain.

Any 'steadying' of the food supply took not only the initial use of agriculture, but also development of the agricultural Enhancers - flood or channel irrigation, simple plows and draft animals, more diverse crops and selecting seeds from each crop that produce better until you have plants specifically better for your terrain, climate and situation, and better preserving of food by better storage (central granaries are one of the signs of a well-organized very early 'city'). A Huge advance was the 'secondary products revolution' - the discovery that the milk from your draft animals (cattle/oxen) could be turned into cheese which can be stored through the winter to provide a food source in the early spring - the 'starving time' for many early populations that relied on agriculture extensively.

 

[reddishrecue]

The future of agriculture and food supplies: Refrigeration and cooling systems. There were even some primitive trains that had ice inside of them as they transported meat before the refrigerator was invented.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The future of agriculture and food supplies: Refrigeration and cooling systems. There were even some primitive trains that had ice inside of them as they transported meat before the refrigerator was invented.

As I mentioned above, constant-temperature food storage by placing the granaries below ground are a feature in prehistoric settlement sites. As far back as Classical Greece, Rome and China they were 'harvesting' ice in winter, storing it insulated structures (again, frequently by packing it in insulating materials like straw below ground level) and using it to cool or preserve food and drink in the summer.

In 1868 the first US patent was issued for an ice-refrigerated railroad car, and the combination of fast transport by rail and preservation of everything from meat to fresh fruit and vegetables (a fruit-specific refrigerated car was developed by 1875, to avoid both spoilage and bruising in transit) meant that food could be delivered virtually anywhere the railroad ran.

In game terms, it means that the railroad changes the city radius to Infinite: you can draw any food or production materials from anywhere to any city, as long as they are all rail-connected.

 

[reddishrecue]

As I mentioned above, constant-temperature food storage by placing the granaries below ground are a feature in prehistoric settlement sites. As far back as Classical Greece, Rome and China they were 'harvesting' ice in winter, storing it insulated structures (again, frequently by packing it in insulating materials like straw below ground level) and using it to cool or preserve food and drink in the summer.

In 1868 the first US patent was issued for an ice-refrigerated railroad car, and the combination of fast transport by rail and preservation of everything from meat to fresh fruit and vegetables (a fruit-specific refrigerated car was developed by 1875, to avoid both spoilage and bruising in transit) meant that food could be delivered virtually anywhere the railroad ran.

In game terms, it means that the railroad changes the city radius to Infinite: you can draw any food or production materials from anywhere to any city, as long as they are all rail-connected.

That's interesting to know people did that in primitive times.
Its no wonder why in civilization 1 railroads used to boost food and many things when built all over the city radius.
Civilization 2 changed that with refrigeration and supermarkets. That was a good change I thought.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

That's interesting to know people did that in primitive times.
Its no wonder why in civilization 1 railroads used to boost food and many things when built all over the city radius.
Civilization 2 changed that with refrigeration and supermarkets. That was a good change I thought.

Luckily for the archeologists, a large underground granary tends to remain visible or detectable for many, many centuries, and grain residue makes them pretty easy to identify, so they have been in Mesopotamia, China, Anatolia, and other sites.

In my Perfect 4X Historicalish Game (Civ XXXXIII?) the advent of Railroads (and steam-powered sea trade) would be a Singularity Event that changes many of the basic concepts of the game:
City Radiuses go from 1 - 3 tiles from the city edge to Wherever the Railroad Runs
ALL Production, Gold and other resources are totalled not by individual city, but Wherever the Railroad Runs
Units moving by Railroad have, in the game's time scale, Infinite Movement Wherever the Railroad Runs
Railroad (or Harbor) would be Required to move Industrial Quantities of goods like Iron, Coal, later Aluminum and Steel for Trade or Production requirements, and to build Industrial Enterprises like Steel Mills, Automobile Plants, Electronics Factories, etc.

Industrial and later Nations Run on railroads and later, on trucks and Highways, and the game has never adequately showed that as the real consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Oh I'm not saying agriculture was some instantaneous jump, just that it's not lower miscarriage rate that really made the human population grow, instead it was the steadying of food supply. The most interesting failures of agriculture to me were the early lack of variety and planting techniques. Climate disasters have been a popular archaeological explanation for much, but may have become exaggerated in their effect. On the other hand it doesn't take a disaster at all for someone that doesn't know how to grow different crops in different soil to fail at growing crops when moving to a new place.

The idea that nomadism was motivated by the scarcity of food supply is totally disproven by paleohistorians nowadays. Among the thousands of skeletons that were found, those showing signs of hunger or malnutrition hardly exist. During paleolithic and mesolithic, there was only a very small number of Humans living in wide open spaces with largely more game than needed, there was no food supply problem at all. Nomadism was only motivated to follow the seasonal migration of game, not to wander around in unknown lands with a hungry stomach desperately looking for food. It's also established that sedentism locally appeared and disappeared here or there sometimes even before the last glacial maximum (20,000 BC). Indeed in areas with a temperate climate in which game wasn't itself migrating, there was no fundamental reasons to move. However, sedentism rarely lasted very long, leading populations in most cases to move back to nomadism.

By 13,000 BC however, the Mediterranean climate that emerged in Near East allowed the Natufians to durably settle. It is established that sedentism predated agriculture in the region by several millenniums. And it is also established that sedentary lifestyle leads to higher fertility. It is that higher fertility, leading to higher population density, which initiated the food supply issue. Therefore food supply wasn't historically a nomadic problem but a sedentary problem. Now the big question is why they stayed in excessive number if food supply was endangered. The logic would have been to simply move out. From what I could read, we don't have any definitive answer to that. That food supply problem may have, after a good while, led sedentary foragers to grow their own food as a dietary supplement. Yet it is important to understand that available crops had an absolutely awful productivity initially, therefore it will take centuries for grown food to supplant gathering.

As such, agriculture isn't the cause of population increase, but its consequence. It's true however that agriculture, allowing for a sustainable sedentary lifestyle will later accelerate the population booming. And genetics proved now that first farmers from the Near East will spread in all directions bringing agriculture with them, overwhelming the local native hunters-gatherers that lived in various surrounding regions before them.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The idea that nomadism was motivated by the scarcity of food supply is totally disproven by paleohistorians nowadays. Among the thousands of skeletons that were found, those showing signs of hunger or malnutrition hardly exist. During paleolithic and mesolithic, there was only a very small number of Humans living in wide open spaces with largely more game than needed, there was no food supply problem at all. Nomadism was only motivated to follow the seasonal migration of game, not to wander around in unknown lands with a hungry stomach desperately looking for food. It's also established that sedentism locally appeared and disappeared here or there sometimes even before the last glacial maximum (20,000 BC). Indeed in areas with a temperate climate in which game wasn't itself migrating, there was no fundamental reasons to move. However, sedentism rarely lasted very long, leading populations in most cases to move back to nomadism.

By 13,000 BC however, the Mediterranean climate that emerged in Near East allowed the Natufians to durably settle. It is established that sedentism predated agriculture in the region by several millenniums. And it is also established that sedentary lifestyle leads to higher fertility. It is that higher fertility, leading to higher population density, which initiated the food supply issue. Therefore food supply wasn't historically a nomadic problem but a sedentary problem. Now the big question is why they stayed in excessive number if food supply was endangered. The logic would have been to simply move out. From what I could read, we don't have any definitive answer to that. What seems very likely, however, is that it was this food supply problem that led sedentary foragers to grow their own food as a dietary supplement. Yet it is important to understand that available crops had an absolutely awful productivity initially, therefore it will take centuries for grown food to supplant gathering.

As such, agriculture isn't the cause of population increase, but its consequence. It's true however that agriculture, allowing for a sustainable sedentary lifestyle will later accelerate the population booming. And genetics proved now that first farmers from the Near East will spread in all directions bringing agriculture with them, overwhelming the local native hunters-gatherers that lived in various surrounding regions before them.

To add a bit - and this is based on input from my old archeology professor from about 1970 who had physically been on many of the major site digs in the Near East from the 1930s to the 1950s - they had already then identified an 'intermediate' stage between Urban sedentism and hunter-gatherer 'nomadism': the Transhumant. That is, several populations moved annually back and forth from winter lowland sites (along the Tigris and Euphrates) to summer highland sites (in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, the modern border between Iraq and Iran) with semi-domesticated herds of pre-woolly sheep and other food animals, and as agriculture got more productive slowly settled in the lowlands along the rivers where primitive irrigation could ensure fairly steady food production. They were, in essence, already half-sedentary long before agriculture became the important source of food, exploiting river fish and waterfowl along the rivers and Possibly started the process by following seasonal migrations of the herd animals and then only later domesticating them.

As an aside, in our modern Human Dominated world, we tend to forget just how many animals originally shared the planet with us, and in what massive numbers. Some fairly substantial settlements have been discovered and at least partially excavated and explored, dating back well before the advent of agriculture as a primary food source: they relied successfully for centuries on herd animals that migrated annually and so passed close by the settlement (which also meant that Calendar is not strictly associated with agriculture - knowing when the Four Legged Meatloaf was coming back was crucial to 'stocking up' and being prepared to smoke or salt away the mass of food), fish in rivers, waterfowl and fish in marsh/wetlands, gathering wild plants that, as Jared Diamond noted from neolithic people he did field work among, they knew how to use virtually every part of every plant for Something: food, medicine, fiber.

Another pertinent point is that as far as I know, no early agricultural site was completely dependent on agriculture: hunting, herding, fishing, gathering all contributed at various times and places, so identifying a settlement as Agricultural actually means identifying it as 'mostly agricultural', estimating the percentage of food supplies they got from planting rather than the other sources they (at least so far as we've discovered) also exploited.

 

[AffineConstant]

The idea that nomadism was motivated by the scarcity of food supply is totally disproven by paleohistorians nowadays. Among the thousands of skeletons that were found, those showing signs of hunger or malnutrition hardly exist. During paleolithic and mesolithic, there was only a very small number of Humans living in wide open spaces with largely more game than needed, there was no food supply problem at all. Nomadism was only motivated to follow the seasonal migration of game, not to wander around in unknown lands with a hungry stomach desperately looking for food. It's also established that sedentism locally appeared and disappeared here or there sometimes even before the last glacial maximum (20,000 BC). Indeed in areas with a temperate climate in which game wasn't itself migrating, there was no fundamental reasons to move. However, sedentism rarely lasted very long, leading populations in most cases to move back to nomadism.

By 13,000 BC however, the Mediterranean climate that emerged in Near East allowed the Natufians to durably settle. It is established that sedentism predated agriculture in the region by several millenniums. And it is also established that sedentary lifestyle leads to higher fertility. It is that higher fertility, leading to higher population density, which initiated the food supply issue. Therefore food supply wasn't historically a nomadic problem but a sedentary problem. Now the big question is why they stayed in excessive number if food supply was endangered. The logic would have been to simply move out. From what I could read, we don't have any definitive answer to that. That food supply problem may have, after a good while, led sedentary foragers to grow their own food as a dietary supplement. Yet it is important to understand that available crops had an absolutely awful productivity initially, therefore it will take centuries for grown food to supplant gathering.

As such, agriculture isn't the cause of population increase, but its consequence. It's true however that agriculture, allowing for a sustainable sedentary lifestyle will later accelerate the population booming. And genetics proved now that first farmers from the Near East will spread in all directions bringing agriculture with them, overwhelming the local native hunters-gatherers that lived in various surrounding regions before them.

To point out: Sedentism appears comes from the early experiments with agriculture. Some of the earliest agriculture wasn't "farming" as we'd know it, but recognizing that plants grow from seeds and deliberately planting them in places they might grow as the group moved. However if they keep following herds and the herds don't go where things are planted already the group just wasted all that effort. Staying behind then, slowly adapting to sedentism even with the absolute earliest versions of agriculture, can lead to a more steady food supply and a slow increase in population and give a reason to stay in the first place. Certainly it wasn't until crops were engineered that agriculture first civilizations sprung up, but "humans populations weren't limited by food" is a bit silly, all animal and plant populations otherwise adapted to an area are limited by food. No wide spread animal stops making more of itself long term voluntarily because there's a poulation that doesn't stop and they outcompete any that do, that's evolution. No widespread evidence of malnutrition isn't good evidence of a lack of a bottleneck, wild animals don't generally have the appearance of mass starvation but are still limited. If humans were bottlenecked by food they could do what animals do and limit how fast they breed to a level they percieve as sustainable, hamsters literally eat their own young to avoid wasting calories in food limited areas. Horses will stomp lame children to death to avoid waste. If these animals have strategies to avoid starvation that avoid the appearance of mass starvation, then certainly humans were capable of such as well. In fact modern humans are fully cognizant of food scarcity and actively work to optimize for it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6009842/

"Humans didn't constantly die of famine" is very poor evidence of humans not facing predictable food scarcity.

 

[Marla_Singer]

To point out: Sedentism appears comes from the early experiments with agriculture. Some of the earliest agriculture wasn't "farming" as we'd know it, but recognizing that plants grow from seeds and deliberately planting them in places they might grow as the group moved. However if they keep following herds and the herds don't go where things are planted already the group just wasted all that effort. Staying behind then, slowly adapting to sedentism even with the absolute earliest versions of agriculture, can lead to a more steady food supply and a slow increase in population and give a reason to stay in the first place. Certainly it wasn't until crops were engineered that agriculture first civilizations sprung up, but "humans populations weren't limited by food" is a bit silly, all animal and plant populations otherwise adapted to an area are limited by food. No wide spread animal stops making more of itself long term voluntarily because there's a poulation that doesn't stop and they outcompete any that do, that's evolution. No widespread evidence of malnutrition isn't good evidence of a lack of a bottleneck, wild animals don't generally have the appearance of mass starvation but are still limited. If humans were bottlenecked by food they could do what animals do and limit how fast they breed to a level they percieve as sustainable, hamsters literally eat their own young to avoid wasting calories in food limited areas. Horses will stomp lame children to death to avoid waste. If these animals have strategies to avoid starvation that avoid the appearance of mass starvation, then certainly humans were capable of such as well. In fact modern humans are fully cognizant of food scarcity and actively work to optimize for it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6009842/

"Humans didn't constantly die of famine" is very poor evidence of humans not facing predictable food scarcity.

I agree that the idea Nomadic or semi-Nomadic foragers had a better diet and food security than early farmers is counter-intuitive, yet just to be clear I haven't made that up by myself, I learnt it first in a book from French Paleohistorian Marylène Patou-Mathis and that made me more curious to know so I did a lot of additional research on the internet in both English and French to make sure there was a scientific consensus on the topic (Arte documentaries also brought me additional translated German sources). Trying to be as accurate as I can be, the study of bones lead to the conclusion that semi-Nomads had less nutritional deficiency, lack of vitamin C, anemia and lived older than early farmers. Early farmers had a less diversified diet making them smaller with poorer teeth due to an excess of carbohydrates coming from the starch that can be found in wheat. Those studies aren't based on isolated individuals but in large quantities of bones gathered accross the years.

Yet despite that poorer health, it also makes no doubt that early sedentary populations had a higher fertility rate. Nomadic populations only had about 2 living births per woman, meaning that the populations remained steady. The higher fertility of sedentary populations changed that. Also, it is pointed out that Human populations were really scarce at the time. It is estimated there were only 500,000 people in Europe by 10,000 BCE (that makes on average about 1 people every 10 km²). As Nomads lived in limited group of 30 people, that means on average one of such groups every 300 km².

Now I've been wrong to tell earlier that the eary farmers demographic booming could explain their pressure to expand. According to Prehistorian Hermann Parzinger, population density in early Neolithic were too small to assume that was because of overcrowding, so the question remains open.

 

[Marla_Singer]

You can certainly make a case for Trade = Civilization, since there is archeological evidence for trade in commodities and Useful Stuff from the very first urban settlements: obsidian for blades traded clear across the Mediterranean basin and out of Anatolia as far as Egypt, seashells and amber for decoration traded from the Levantine and Baltic coasts all the way to the inland Near East. And there were probably a mass of items too perishable to show up in the archeological record that were also carried some relatively long distances - the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization was making decorative objects out of gemstones sourced from Central Asia - 400 to 1000 kilometers away overland at a time when Overland meant On Foot: no telling what else the 'traders' were also carrying, because it's a pretty safe bet that no one was going to make that trek empty-handed in either direction..​

​

Most games set in any kind of historical background simply do not recognize the importance of Trade, or the terrain that makes it possible: rivers, for example, were Highways from before writing: the earliest non-dugout log boats are Nile rivercraft and Mesopotamian reed boats on the Tigris and Euphrates, but Civ VI assigns no importance whatsoever to rivers for Trade or Trade Routes, only as sources of drinking water for your cities (and the new Millennia game doesn't even manage that: as far as I can tell from their Demo game, rivers are just pretty blue lines on a map with no significance at all, at least in the first three 'Ages' of the game that the Demo covers)​

Sorry Boris I'm switching threads but I think this one better suits the discussion than the one on the Industrial Revolution. What you're telling here is very interesting and made me think. As earlier told, sedentism happened several times in History but never lasted for multiple milleniums before it came into the Near East from 13,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE. The thing is that in such very long periods of time, it's extremely difficult for populations to remain at the same location because of the multiple calamities that could occure. As such, if they stayed, it's because they had an important reason to stay.

Reading your post, I then wondered, what if that reason to stay wasn't trade? Near East is a natural crossroad between the Nile and Mesopotamia, between the Mediterrannean and the Red sea, between the Bosphorus Strait and Isthmus of Suez. All this to say the region is difficult not to pass through for any trade route. As such, settling there would give a very unique access to pretty much any ressource that were travelling around.

Also maybe I'm overthinking but it's located at the junction of 3 important landmasses (Africa, Asia and Europe), and as much as it's certain that people from that period couldn't travel such long distances in their lifetime, they very certainly did in multiple generations (we're talking in millenniums here), meaning that the region was ideally located to accumulate knowledges coming from very different populations.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

To add a bit - and this is based on input from my old archeology professor from about 1970 who had physically been on many of the major site digs in the Near East from the 1930s to the 1950s - they had already then identified an 'intermediate' stage between Urban sedentism and hunter-gatherer 'nomadism': the Transhumant. That is, several populations moved annually back and forth from winter lowland sites (along the Tigris and Euphrates) to summer highland sites (in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, the modern border between Iraq and Iran) with semi-domesticated herds of pre-woolly sheep and other food animals, and as agriculture got more productive slowly settled in the lowlands along the rivers where primitive irrigation could ensure fairly steady food production. They were, in essence, already half-sedentary long before agriculture became the important source of food, exploiting river fish and waterfowl along the rivers and Possibly started the process by following seasonal migrations of the herd animals and then only later domesticating them.

As an aside, in our modern Human Dominated world, we tend to forget just how many animals originally shared the planet with us, and in what massive numbers. Some fairly substantial settlements have been discovered and at least partially excavated and explored, dating back well before the advent of agriculture as a primary food source: they relied successfully for centuries on herd animals that migrated annually and so passed close by the settlement (which also meant that Calendar is not strictly associated with agriculture - knowing when the Four Legged Meatloaf was coming back was crucial to 'stocking up' and being prepared to smoke or salt away the mass of food), fish in rivers, waterfowl and fish in marsh/wetlands, gathering wild plants that, as Jared Diamond noted from neolithic people he did field work among, they knew how to use virtually every part of every plant for Something: food, medicine, fiber.

Another pertinent point is that as far as I know, no early agricultural site was completely dependent on agriculture: hunting, herding, fishing, gathering all contributed at various times and places, so identifying a settlement as Agricultural actually means identifying it as 'mostly agricultural', estimating the percentage of food supplies they got from planting rather than the other sources they (at least so far as we've discovered) also exploited.

There would have been times when several, perhaps many people of a group could not make the journey. Older people, pregnant women in particular. I wonder how much of an impact that would have had on the sedentary vs wandering lifestyles. If you leave people behind for a time, then you would want to make sure there is enough food and other requirements.
Any thoughts on how that would affect the passing on of oral traditions, and creating systems to allow some members of a group to remain in place rather than undertake possibly life-threatening journeys?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

There would have been times when several, perhaps many people of a group could not make the journey. Older people, pregnant women in particular. I wonder how much of an impact that would have had on the sedentary vs wandering lifestyles. If you leave people behind for a time, then you would want to make sure there is enough food and other requirements.
Any thoughts on how that would affect the passing on of oral traditions, and creating systems to allow some members of a group to remain in place rather than undertake possibly life-threatening journeys?

The actual process probably varied between and among different groups, but I can correct a couple of points:
1. pregnant women can travel. They can travel even when they are in the last trimester. In fact, that is one of the salient points of the entire Christian Foundation Story: Mary traveling while pregnant with Jeshua to Bethlehem. This was not unusual.
2. In at least some groups, people who could not travel with the tribe were simply not part of it. We don't know how widespread this was, but it was definitely present in enough groups that the prohibition against eating pork became a general cultural motif among both Arabs and Jews - both derived from originally transhumant tribes. Pigs have many virtues, but they cannot be easily driven like sheep or cattle, so if you raise and eat pigs, you no longer move seasonally and so are no longer part of the original group.
3. While we cannot say for certain about the original transhumants 6 - 10,000 years ago, the northeastern American natives were also transhumant, moving from seaside villages in the summer to inland villages in the winter, and on at least some occasions people stayed behind and wintered on the coast. That was at least partly because the summer was the fishing season and they stored masses of smoked or dried fish in the villages so that the tribe had plenty to eat in the early spring when they returned, which meant there was also food stored for anyone remaining there (the Pilgrims arrived in mid-winter and looted one of the coastal, unoccupied villages for food). Potentially the ancient groups could have done the same, for whatever reasons required someone to stay behind

Certainly settling down in one place permanently had a number of advantages in potential inclusivity and potential lower infant or maternal mortality rate. Nevertheless, humans were mobile hunters/gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years without dying out from either mortality, so that advantage alone would not be crucial: more certain access to food from both agriculture and the protein from marshland waterfowl and fish and the ability to protect both people and food supplies by fortifying the permanent habitations and granaries with permanent walls probably was more important.

Note that virtually all the earliest cities did have some kind of walls, ranging from rammed earth in pre-Chinese settlements in China (by 3500 BCE) to earth mounds and timber palisades in eastern Europe and the Balkans (6000 BCE) to stone or mud brick walls (6000 - 4000 BCE) in a range from North Africa to India - wherever people had reason to foresee raids, they seem to have very quickly figured out how to raise fortifications and defenses, even fairly sophisticated ones - the earliest towers in stone or brick walls to provide flanking fire show up by 4500 BCE in Central Asia! The City With A Wall became so entangled in human thought that possibly as early as 1900 BCE Wall and City were becoming synonyms in early China.

Since a permanent fortified wall is one very definite advantage over nomadic, pastoral or transhumant activities, and such walls are extremely expensive in manpower and materials, I suspect they were a prime factor in Improving Lives By Settling Down, possibly as much as the food supplies from settled agriculture

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Sorry Boris I'm switching threads but I think this one better suits the discussion than the one on the Industrial Revolution. What you're telling here is very interesting and made me think. As earlier told, sedentism happened several times in History but never lasted for multiple milleniums before it came into the Near East from 13,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE. The thing is that in such very long periods of time, it's extremely difficult for populations to remain at the same location because of the multiple calamities that could occure. As such, if they stayed, it's because they had an important reason to stay.

Reading your post, I then wondered, what if that reason to stay wasn't trade? Near East is a natural crossroad between the Nile and Mesopotamia, between the Mediterrannean and the Red sea, between the Bosphorus Strait and Isthmus of Suez. All this to say the region is difficult not to pass through for any trade route. As such, settling there would give a very unique access to pretty much any ressource that were travelling around.

Also maybe I'm overthinking but it's located at the junction of 3 important landmasses (Africa, Asia and Europe), and as much as it's certain that people from that period couldn't travel such long distances in their lifetime, they very certainly did in multiple generations (we're talking in millenniums here), meaning that the region was ideally located to accumulate knowledges coming from very different populations.

On the one hand, there is evidence of trade in non-perishables like shells, obsidian, gemsones, etc from the very beginning of human permanent settlements in the Near East. On the other hand, most of the intensive archeological exploration started in the Near East and its surroundings (Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia) so that doesn't really indicate that the Near East had more trade than other regions (India, China) just that we've been looking in one place more intensively and for a longer period of time.

On the other hand, there is evidence that the Indus Valley Civilization before 2500 - 3000 BCE was trading with Central Asia for some identifiable goods (mostly gemstones and 'luxuries'), so we can surmise that trade was General to the settled communities, but I don't think we can say from the existing evidence, which is very limited, that the Near East had More Trade per capita than anywhere else.

We can say, bolstering your thesis, that they traded in All Directions - domesticated cattle were introduced from India, obsidian obtained from the Mediterranean and Anatolia, seashells from the coasts of the Levant and Egypt, and later Horses introduced through the Caucasus from the Central Asian steppes. Especially the addition of two of the most useful domesticated animals, cattle and horses, from two different original directions, was extremely important. However, the same combination was introduced to India when the Aryans arrived with horses from central Asia to augment the existing cattle already there, and later the horses and cattle were brought into China from Central Asian contacts between 1600 - 1300 BCE, so the pattern isn't exclusive to the Near East - possibly just easier (or at least, happened earlier) because of the multiplicity of contacts.

And as for populations staying in one place, I have to point out that they didn't - at least not always. One of the most influential instances was after the Lake Ojibway incident of approximately 6200 BCE, which caused widespread drought across the Near East and a consequent movement of people bringing their new agricultural technologies (draft animals, plows, domestic seeds) into northern Anatolia, northern Greece, modern Bulgaria, and eventually up the Danube River valley into central Europe and, it is now hypothesized, bringing agriculture to Europe along with a new genetic mix of people with it.

I tend to be suspicious of 'single reasons' for major events in history or prehistory (like, today archeologists seem to be a little Too Quick to ascribe every change to some local Climate Event, backdating our current situation by 10,000 years or more. Climate and weather certainly are influential, but cannot be used as a single 'catch-all' for every change in human conditions). But, I think a case can be made that the successful advent of permanent urbanization and 'urbanistic' society building (Civ's notional Start of Game) in the Near East after numerous 'false starts' there and elsewhere, could be ascribed to a 'fortunate' combination of:

A good suite of useful plants and animals - several types of domesticatable Wheat grains, 'hairy' sheep and goats and small equines like the donkey and hemippe, all more or less capable of being domesticated

Available raw materials. The Near East had more timber than now, as well as mud and reeds from, extensive marshlands along the rivers, and fairly easily-accessed deposits nearby (Anatolia, Caucasus, Egypt) of copper, lead, silver, and gold, all metals that can be worked with a slightly-enhanced camp fire. In all, a Learning Kit for construction and metallurgy.

Access to Trade. As posted, a crossroads with access to goods from three continents, and evidence of extremely important goods and processes arriving from all of them: cattle, horses, tin, obsidian, gemstones, and later 'technologies' like lost-wax casting (a Central Asian invention) the spoked wheel chariot (also from Central Asia), the composite bow (either North Africa or Asia) and the olive tree, apples, and wine grapes, which brought with them whole new techniques of agricultural processing into useful products.

This, of course, smacks of Jared Diamond's thesis that Geography Is Everything, which I don't quite buy entirely (we now have too many examples of early urbanization in wildly different biomes and climates, from Near East to central China to American deserts, mountains, plateaus, and jungles - there seems to be something besides simple Geographical Good Fortune needed to explain them all) but the geographical fact of Access certainly may have contributed to the rise of the Near East urbanization.

 

[BuchiTaton]

Oh, I like the idea of giving each civ unique era names a lot! Though I assume coming up with era names for, say, pre-Columbian civs would be quite the bummer; it would be like Age of Legends, Age of Contact and... Age of Betrayal

This is even worse than use the regular because two reasons:
1- There is already a system of Eras for American cultures that is Formative, Pre-Classical, Classical and Post-Classical.
2- What are supposed to be "Age of Contact" and "Age of Betrayal", their relation with Europeans?
For many American cultures these were just a few years, months or days apart. Also by doing this we are presenting American civs as determined to be isolated and be "betrayed" by other civs? That is just a different flavor of determinism, an even worse since it present them as destined to be "disadvantaged".

 

[GeneralZIft]

Out of Context CivFanatics

Pregnant women can travel. Source: the Bible

 

[Evie]

Illustration, not source.

The claim that pregnant women cannot travel is asinine on the face of it. That doesn't require evidence, a source or proof ; all of human history is testament to the point that pregnancy does not prevent travel. Sure, limiting physical exertion is best practice where reasonably feasible, but "best practice where reasonably feasible" and "cannot be done" are miles apart.

The importance of the Bible claim is not that the bible says it happened: it's that nobody questions it. Not the people who look for divine intervention in every word of the bible, nor the people who look for proof of biblical error in every word. Nobody has ever raised Mary traveling in her last term as some sort of miracle ; nobody has ever raised it as a proof the bible is wrong. Because nobody who has a clue view the idea of a woman traveling late in her pregnancy as anything other than commonplace.