innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,156
Not the game
Which would you call the oldest human civilization? Which is the breakthrough tech for the dawn of it?
Does it require written records to be counted as civilization? Of perhaps urbanization? Might artistic expression suffice? Or just took-making, which might or might not be older?
I have come to believe that the dawn of civilization lies hundreds of thousands of years back. All of these are probably as old, it's just that the evidence decayed away, and the population so sparse generally that any remains which survived were either subsequently destroyed by new development or lost. Civilization probably started with "per-modern" hominid species!
There is one interesting piece about the history clothing that I wanted to mention here. This actually sticks to the convention that civilization is about 10,000 years old, with the agriculture urbanization in the fertile crescent, etc.
But in mentioning the previous known history of clothing worn by humans, the use and processing of animal skins, I believe a strong case is made for civilization having started with those. Technologies were developed,, transmitted, sometimes lost, sometimes kept and developed further as humans pushed into more hostile borderlands, harsher climates. This already required a developed culture and its transmission, social organization, trade and relatively large groups.
Art of course is documented in caves for some 40,000 years ago. Large wood sculptures has been found tens of thousands of yeras old, but only by very lucky chance was this one preserved. How was the culture of the people who produced these, possibly the same people who ritually buried their clothed dead 30,000 years ago, we cannot know, it's lost. But it was civilization. It didn't all spring up suddenly 10,000 years ago. We're heirs to a very old history of slow development.
Which would you call the oldest human civilization? Which is the breakthrough tech for the dawn of it?
Does it require written records to be counted as civilization? Of perhaps urbanization? Might artistic expression suffice? Or just took-making, which might or might not be older?
I have come to believe that the dawn of civilization lies hundreds of thousands of years back. All of these are probably as old, it's just that the evidence decayed away, and the population so sparse generally that any remains which survived were either subsequently destroyed by new development or lost. Civilization probably started with "per-modern" hominid species!
There is one interesting piece about the history clothing that I wanted to mention here. This actually sticks to the convention that civilization is about 10,000 years old, with the agriculture urbanization in the fertile crescent, etc.
When the Pleistocene ended 12,000 years ago, there was a new development with clothes. Global temperatures increased dramatically and, along with the melting of continental ice sheets and the rise in sea levels, environments became wetter and more humid. Adapting to these moist conditions, people shifted to making their clothes with fabrics woven from natural fibres such as wool and cotton. Compared with leathers and furs, fabrics are better at managing moisture. The woven structure is permeable to air and moisture and, in warm climates, wind penetration can help to cool the body. Moisture from higher sweating rates could evaporate more easily from the skin and also from the fabric, adding to the cooling effect. The warm and wet period after the last ice age, called the Holocene, coincides with a momentous transition, the beginning of the Neolithic era when people started to engage in agriculture.
The agricultural transition was a turning point in humanity’s relationship to the natural world, altering the environment profoundly and enabling the rise of cities and civilisations. My surprising suggestion is that there was a connection between the textile revolution and the agricultural revolution. By implication, this technological change in clothes led to the Anthropocene, a phase of humanly induced global warming that started with agriculture and was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution.
The novel hypothesis that fibre production stimulated the transition to agriculture signifies a radical departure from conventional thinking.
But in mentioning the previous known history of clothing worn by humans, the use and processing of animal skins, I believe a strong case is made for civilization having started with those. Technologies were developed,, transmitted, sometimes lost, sometimes kept and developed further as humans pushed into more hostile borderlands, harsher climates. This already required a developed culture and its transmission, social organization, trade and relatively large groups.
While clothing is one of the most visible of all human technologies, in the field of archaeology it’s almost invisible. Compared with stone tools surviving from the Lower Palaeolithic more than 3 million years ago, clothes perish rapidly and rarely survive beyond a single millennium. Among the notable exceptions are a pair of 3,000-year-old trousers worn by nomadic horse-riders in Central Asia, and a 5,000-year-old linen tunic from ancient Egypt. We have only a few precious cloth fragments from the early Neolithic, in Peru and Turkey. Not a shred of clothing survives from the Pleistocene, with just a few twisted flax fibres – used perhaps for strings or thread – found at a 34,000-year-old site in Georgia.
All the evidence we have for ice-age clothing is indirect but, nonetheless, the available evidence shows that people had tailored clothes in the last ice age. The world’s oldest eyed needles are found in southern Russia 40,000 years ago, and one needle in Denisova Cave is said to be 50,000 years old. In the vicinity of Moscow at a site called Sunghir, 30,000-year-old human burials have thousands of beads neatly arranged on the skeletons. Russian archaeologists think that these beads were sewn on to fitted garments, including trousers with legs and shirts with sleeves. Some of the skeletons appear to have two layers of garments, indicating the presence of multiple layers, so the Sunghir burials document the world’s oldest underwear. Artworks across Eurasia begin to show people wearing clothes from that time, including the so-called ‘Venus’ figurines.
[...]
Research teams in Germany and the United States analysed the genomes of head and clothing lice to estimate when the clothing parasites split from the head ones. One advantage of the lice research is that the results are independent from other sources of evidence about the origin of clothes, such as archaeology and palaeoclimatology. The German team, led by Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, came up with a date of 70,000 years ago, revised to 100,000 years ago, early in the last ice age. The US team led by David Reed at the University of Florida reported a similar date of around 80,000 years ago, and maybe as early as 170,000 years ago during the previous ice age.
Our ancestors probably started to wear clothes long before the last ice age, when species such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus endured cold winters during earlier glacial cycles dating back to the Early Pleistocene, more than 1 million years ago. [...]The genetic analysis of modern clothing lice can inform us only about clothes worn routinely in some human populations up until the present day. Earlier hominins could have adopted clothes (and acquired clothing lice in the process) and then discarded clothes during warm climate phases, without leaving any genetic trace in modern-day lice.
Art of course is documented in caves for some 40,000 years ago. Large wood sculptures has been found tens of thousands of yeras old, but only by very lucky chance was this one preserved. How was the culture of the people who produced these, possibly the same people who ritually buried their clothed dead 30,000 years ago, we cannot know, it's lost. But it was civilization. It didn't all spring up suddenly 10,000 years ago. We're heirs to a very old history of slow development.