Just how old is civilization?

[Ajidica]

I think that depends on how we define "environment". If we consider livestock animals to be part of the human environment, then I'd tend to consider the cultivation of large domesticated populations- not least the creation of the horse as we understand it- to qualify as "extensive reshaping".

At that point, every human society becomes a civilization, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of having "civilization" as a term.

The sticking point I'd have with TK's definition is is "socially-directed": directed by who, with what degree of deliberateness? There is a vast difference between a god-king supervising the creation of extension waterworks, and a diffuse set of traditions and taboos around livestock breeding, but both could be plausibly described as forms of "social direction".

Its ambiguity like that which makes me favor "was the society able to write about itself" as the determinant.

 

[Traitorfish]

At that point, every human society becomes a civilization, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of having "civilization" as a term.

If we see "civilisation" as a characteristic which is attributed to a society, a set of criteria that need to be satisfied in order to access the Civilised Cool Kids Club, then sure. But maybe we should see "civilisation" as a process, as something a society does, and the point of distinguishing "civilisations" is to distinguish the different ways in which a human population mould their environment to their needs.

This is pretty much the argument advanced by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, that "civilisation" is something that almost every human society beyond the simplest hunter-gatherers has produced to some degree. I don't know if I agree, but it's worth considering. There's certainly nothing in particular that says we must define "civilisation" such that it excludes a certain portion of all human societies to that definition as workable.

 

[innonimatu]

I agree with that argument. In fact I would have the dawn of civilization put as far back as some 40000 years ago, or even more. Time is unforgiving and we have little more than stone tools found from that era. But we do have statues, spears, the beginnings of fired clay objects, musical instruments, and paintings. There must have been languages already, and oral traditions, teaching how to produce these tools. There's evidence of ritual burial, therefor the beginnings of religious ideas: other things that must be maintained, passed down. They didn't build monuments, they didn't write in anything hat survived for us to find so far, but these humans already had civilizations. The Inca "wrote" in strings, if they had vanished a thousand years before contact with another literate civilization to write histories that have reached us, would he know? What would be there to find?

 

[Tee Kay]

Lumping the myriad societies from the Straits of Gibraltar to Kyushu, and from the North Sea to the Straits of Malacca as merely "Eurasian" seems to be trying to erase distinctions between them.

Yes

This discussion necessarily entails talking about what different societies have in common. If you want to spin that uncharitably as "erasing distinction" then yeah whatever.

I'm not sure how one could count the Chernagov culture as a civilization. A common material culture does not imply a shared identity unless we want to fall into the Imperialist viewpoint of dividing people up based on surface characteristics rather than how they identified.

My working definition doesn't take into account how people self-identified, specifically because we can't know that for certain for many older cultures - or even some contemporary ones arguably - and it feels kinda silly to exclude let's say the Indus Valley because they might identify more with their individual city-states or whatever.

Given their effect on world history, I would say they are a little more than an edge case!

Hang on, are we measuring civilisation by whether they have an arbitrary large impact on history? Is variola major a civilisation?

Which of course raises what constitutes "extensive".

Yes, that can be argued over.

Its stuff like that, and the difficulties in dealing with material cultures, is that we have no idea how people understood each other. At least "can write about how they understand themselves and preserve" is a pretty bright line, historically and archaeologically speaking.

Our contemporary civilisation writes more than ever about how they understand themselves and I still have no idea how we understood each other.

The sticking point I'd have with TK's definition is is "socially-directed": directed by who, with what degree of deliberateness? There is a vast difference between a god-king supervising the creation of extension waterworks, and a diffuse set of traditions and taboos around livestock breeding, but both could be plausibly described as forms of "social direction".

Sure there's a vast difference between those two, but you're correct both can plausibly be described as "social direction", and I'm fine with that personally.

At that point, every human society becomes a civilization, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of having "civilization" as a term.

I did exclude steppe nomads to a point, and smaller groups of hunter gatherers of the kind most of us probably were prior to about 10,000 BC. Again you're right it hinges on the "extensive" qualifier. I would say having civilisation as a synonym for literate also defeats the purpose of having a separate term though.

If we see "civilisation" as a characteristic which is attributed to a society, a set of criteria that need to be satisfied in order to access the Civilised Cool Kids Club, then sure. But maybe we should see "civilisation" as a process, as something a society does, and the point of distinguishing "civilisations" is to distinguish the different ways in which a human population mould their environment to their needs.

This is pretty much the argument advanced by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, that "civilisation" is something that almost every human society beyond the simplest hunter-gatherers has produced to some degree. I don't know if I agree, but it's worth considering. There's certainly nothing in particular that says we must define "civilisation" such that it excludes a certain portion of all human societies to that definition as workable.

I basically agree with this take; not coincidentally I've read a lot of Fernandez-Armesto.

 

[sendos]

How old is civilization? You can break that question down with other smaller questions.

How old is agriculture? How old are humanity's first towns and cities? How old are humanity's first roads? How old are humanity's first cultures and religions? Etc etc...

 

[innonimatu]

Agreed, that would have saved is some off-topic arguments here. My question/point can be restated as a claim that all of these things are likely much older than has been assumed during the 20th century. What we are s a product of evolution as "civilized" groups for many tens of thousands of years, not just your old idea of the 10000 years neolithic.

 

[Ajidica]

How old is civilization? You can break that question down with other smaller questions.

How old is agriculture? How old are humanity's first towns and cities? How old are humanity's first roads? How old are humanity's first cultures and religions? Etc etc...

That just strikes me as postponing the question. What is agriculture? What makes a city? When does a tribal belief system become a culture and religion? If "civilization" is used to describe every modern human, being instead used to describe humans no longer hitting each other over the head with an antelope thighbone and grunting, it doesn't strike me as a particularly useful term given how little we know about that whole period and transition.

 

[Gelion]

I think a very good first sign of civilization that was defined was a first trace of a broken and healed leg bone in humans. Meaning that someone took care of a person for as long as it took for them to heal. I think it is a very good and poetic starting point.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'd use "brewing beer" as a good starting point. That allows multiple starting points in time and place.

 

[mitsho]

Sigh, the human mind and its wish to categorize everything… Some things are just fuzzy, up and down in different paces in different places. So, my question rather is: Why do you want to know? How is determining a cut-off point that probably will be arbitrary to a degree useful? Can we classify some groups and make nice lists, create nice visualizations with maps? Cool, and?

 

[innonimatu]

And the Neolithic gets pushed further back!

Over the past four years, Dietrich has discovered that the people who built these ancient structures were fuelled by vat-fulls of porridge and stew, made from grain that the ancient residents had ground and processed on an almost industrial scale1. The clues from Göbekli Tepe reveal that ancient humans relied on grains much earlier than was previously thought — even before there is evidence that these plants were domesticated.[...]12,000-year-old meals using methods from that time. Looking even further back, evidence suggests that some people ate starchy plants more than 100,000 years ago.
[...]
Dietrich’s discoveries about the feasts at Göbekli Tepe started in the site’s ‘rock garden’. That’s the name archaeologists dismissively gave a nearby field where they dumped basalt grinding stones, limestone troughs and other large pieces of worked stone found amid the rubble.
As excavations continued over the past two decades, the collection of grinding stones quietly grew, says Dietrich. “Nobody thought about them.” When she started cataloguing them in 2016, she was stunned at the sheer numbers. The ‘garden’ covered an area the size of a football field, and contained more than 10,000 grinding stones and nearly 650 carved stone platters and vessels, some big enough to hold up to 200 litres of liquid.
[...]
Arranz-Otaegui was working at a 14,500-year-old site in Jordan when she found charred bits of ‘probable food’ in the hearths of long-ago hunter-gatherers. When she showed scanning electron microscope images of the stuff to Lara González Carretero, an archaeobotanist at the Museum of London Archaeology who works on evidence of bread baking at a Neolithic site in Turkey called Çatalhöyük, both researchers were shocked. The charred crusts from Jordan had tell-tale bubbles, showing they were burnt pieces of bread10.

Beer and bread 14000 years ago? Probably further back, much further, we just lack the archeological remains. Civilization was a very long process, stretching further back than whats commonly assumed until recently.

 

[Lexicus]

And the Neolithic gets pushed further back!



Beer and bread 14000 years ago? Probably further back, much further, we just lack the archeological remains. Civilization was a very long process, stretching further back than whats commonly assumed until recently.

stuff like this makes me wish we had time travel because i really want to know what was going on

 

[AmazonQueen]

stuff like this makes me wish we had time travel because i really want to know what was going on

But as soon as you have time travel you are going to start interfering with whats going on so you won't really know what had been going on if you hadn't travelled there.

 

[Lexicus]

But as soon as you have time travel you are going to start interfering with whats going on so you won't really know what had been going on if you hadn't travelled there.

nope because i'll be a ghost

 

[AmazonQueen]

nope because i'll be a ghost

Convenient

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

In order to say when 'civilization' started (or ended, for that matter) you first have to define what you mean by civilization not only by what it IS, but by what it is NOT: what is the difference between 'civilized' and 'non-civilized', and recognize that any such definition will have to be both precise and broad enough to encompass an enormous variety of human societies. Because, almost by definition, Humans are very adaptable, and both adapt to their environment and also adapt the environment to their own purposes. But if you try to use that as the definition of Human (as some have), then you wind up giving the vote to beavers, who adapt the environment around them at least as much as most pre-city-dwelling humans did!

Writing is a poor definer. Non-literary or 'semi-literary' forms of memory are malleable, but amazingly persistent: the tribes of the Pacific Northwest have orally-transmitted stories that accurately describe the flora and fauna at the end of the last ice age in the area - 10,000 years ago. The Lakotah had pictographic 'Winter Count' calendars that accurately recorded events during the year and turned out to be precisely accurate when checked against neighboring literate records from Spanish, French and English speakers. Writing helps, but it is not a requirement for a defined and cohesive multi-generational cultural group.

Technology doesn't work either. Those 'steppe nomads'(Central Asan Pastoralists) actually adopted pastoral herding after starting out as settled river-side hunters-gatherers/herders.fishers and (very primitive) farmers. And as pastoralists, the archeological evidence indicates now that they invented the spoked wheel chariot, the hard saddle for horseback riding, and (possibly independently of other peoples) the composite bow. They also managed to exploit extensive copper, tin and other mineral deposits and produced some of the earliest lost-wax cast copper and bronze objects - a very sophisticate metallurgical technique also invented elsewhere, but possibly later.

In other words, while 'civilization' has been traditionally associated with 'living in a city'. Living in any kind of city (once you find a definition of 'city' - another slippery one) does not appear to be a requirement to have advanced technology, extensive trade, and multi-generational 'collective memories' preserved for longer than written records have been in existence.

Mind you, living in a city surrounded by walls and other people may make it easier for a given individual to be 'civilized', as in having access to the fruits of technology and regular meals, and the benefits of mass population concentrated in cities have proven decisive in the long run, but it took a while: early cities also concentrated infectious diseases, so that they had a net population loss without constant migration of peoples from outside - voluntarily or involuntary, as taking slaves from enemies seems to have been part of every early urban group.

I have a pretty good idea when people started living in cities - the archeology keeps coming up with new finds of city sites, but the trend is pretty clear that people started living in one place in larger-than-individual-family groups about 14,000 - 12,000 years ago (Incipient Jomon, Natufian cultures) and started producing concentrations of 1000 or more unrelated people about 10,000 years ago (Jericho, Tel Qaramel, Motza).
But I'm not so sure that 'living in cities' constitutes the first, or final, or precise definition or indication of 'Civilization', even though the Civ games assume that . . .

 

[PiR]

nope because i'll be a ghost

That's how the myth of ghosts was created.

 

[Absolution]

Sigh, the human mind and its wish to categorize everything… Some things are just fuzzy, up and down in different paces in different places. So, my question rather is: Why do you want to know? How is determining a cut-off point that probably will be arbitrary to a degree useful? Can we classify some groups and make nice lists, create nice visualizations with maps? Cool, and?

So true.

But still, each one can describe with prosaic words what a civilisation is for him or for her, and give examples.
Comparisions between different views will also be interesting.
And thus, we get a softer and more "fuzzy" variation of the same discussion.

Civilization was a very long process, stretching further back than whats commonly assumed until recently.

But then there's a point in time when everything gets together really fast, into a much more civilised form of society.
In certain places, and they are called Cradles of Civilisation exactly for that.

It took about 1500 years or less for the southern Mesopotamian marshlands to tranafer from the unclear periods of argueable civilised society that are discussed here into a full scale civilisation.

For this reason, there is a justification to distinguish these times and forwards in a clearer term. If "civilisation" is not a good term for you, we may search for an alternative. But there is certainly a relatively short runaway point or period by which we can tell a major difference.

(And was at different times in different places)

 

[Birdjaguar]

But as soon as you have time travel you are going to start interfering with whats going on so you won't really know what had been going on if you hadn't travelled there.

View only time travel is the best solution to that problem.

In order to say when 'civilization' started (or ended, for that matter) you first have to define what you mean by civilization not only by what it IS, but by what it is NOT: what is the difference between 'civilized' and 'non-civilized', and recognize that any such definition will have to be both precise and broad enough to encompass an enormous variety of human societies. Because, almost by definition, Humans are very adaptable, and both adapt to their environment and also adapt the environment to their own purposes. But if you try to use that as the definition of Human (as some have), then you wind up giving the vote to beavers, who adapt the environment around them at least as much as most pre-city-dwelling humans did!

Writing is a poor definer. Non-literary or 'semi-literary' forms of memory are malleable, but amazingly persistent: the tribes of the Pacific Northwest have orally-transmitted stories that accurately describe the flora and fauna at the end of the last ice age in the area - 10,000 years ago. The Lakotah had pictographic 'Winter Count' calendars that accurately recorded events during the year and turned out to be precisely accurate when checked against neighboring literate records from Spanish, French and English speakers. Writing helps, but it is not a requirement for a defined and cohesive multi-generational cultural group.

Technology doesn't work either. Those 'steppe nomads'(Central Asan Pastoralists) actually adopted pastoral herding after starting out as settled river-side hunters-gatherers/herders.fishers and (very primitive) farmers. And as pastoralists, the archeological evidence indicates now that they invented the spoked wheel chariot, the hard saddle for horseback riding, and (possibly independently of other peoples) the composite bow. They also managed to exploit extensive copper, tin and other mineral deposits and produced some of the earliest lost-wax cast copper and bronze objects - a very sophisticate metallurgical technique also invented elsewhere, but possibly later.

In other words, while 'civilization' has been traditionally associated with 'living in a city'. Living in any kind of city (once you find a definition of 'city' - another slippery one) does not appear to be a requirement to have advanced technology, extensive trade, and multi-generational 'collective memories' preserved for longer than written records have been in existence.

Mind you, living in a city surrounded by walls and other people may make it easier for a given individual to be 'civilized', as in having access to the fruits of technology and regular meals, and the benefits of mass population concentrated in cities have proven decisive in the long run, but it took a while: early cities also concentrated infectious diseases, so that they had a net population loss without constant migration of peoples from outside - voluntarily or involuntary, as taking slaves from enemies seems to have been part of every early urban group.

I have a pretty good idea when people started living in cities - the archeology keeps coming up with new finds of city sites, but the trend is pretty clear that people started living in one place in larger-than-individual-family groups about 14,000 - 12,000 years ago (Incipient Jomon, Natufian cultures) and started producing concentrations of 1000 or more unrelated people about 10,000 years ago (Jericho, Tel Qaramel, Motza).
But I'm not so sure that 'living in cities' constitutes the first, or final, or precise definition or indication of 'Civilization', even though the Civ games assume that . . .

As I said up thread: Civilization begins when a community brews "beer".

 

[Zardnaar]

Theoretically hunter/gatherers could brew beer using wild grains yes?

Same with bread?

Building communities seems a good demarcation point and I think the oldest structure found is 35000 years in a cave.