Times of Great Change:
The Rise of Civilizations
Review
150,000-200,000 years ago: Anatomically Modern Humans move out of
Africa to the rest of the world
Glaciation lowers sea levels, compress climates
Competition between species still going on, but AMH “winning”
AMH rapidly developing culturally
•70k ybp Symbolism with incised ochre
•65k ybp Microliths
•60k ybp Sea travel
•50k ybp Definite structures
•40k ybp Grave goods, cremation, hafted tools
•35k ybp Mobilary (transportable) art
•32k ybp Cave Art
•30k ybp Grindstones indicate plant processing
•26k ybp First ceramics
•20k ybp First heat treatment of chert
Microliths
Approximate times of AMH migrations
Upper Paleolithic Cultural “Surge”
Mobilary Art
Individual Identity
Wide Range of Tools
Cave Art
•Incorporates surface and texture of rock
•Development of perspective
•Different phases of development
•Reasons:
•Hunting magic
•Hunting training
•Totemic symbols
•Binary oppositions reflecting society
•Shamanic mental images
Mesolithic
12,000-8,000 years ago
The end of the Paleolithic:
•cultural florescence
•wide range of artistic achievement
•specialized hunting pattern
•well adapted to the Pleistocene glaciation.
Almost hypertrophic, that is, overdeveloped.
Eases off around 12,000 years ago.
Between 12,000-8,000 in the Old World we know little of human cultural
change.
In the New World we know more
•a continuation of the pattern of hunting with groups adjusting to the
changes in climate and the availability of animal life.
A slight transformation from nomadic life to settled life.
Into the Americas
Pleistocene Extinctions
50,000 years ago:
Worldwide die-off of the Pleistocene megafauna
At least 200 genera:
•Large herbivores (mammoths, mastodons, huge ground sloths,
cave
bears, woolly rhinoceros, other rhinoceroses, etc.)
•Carnivores that fed on them, the dire wolves and sabre-tooth cats.
There was no accelerated extinction of smaller terrestrial species,
plants, or marine organisms.
The following disappeared from America, Europe and Australia:
•All herbivores> 1000 kg
•75% of herbivores100-1000 kg
•41% of hervibores5-100 kg
•< 2% of hervibores< 5kg
See Whitney-Smith’s
Dissertation on the subject
Overkill?
In the Americas,
•Hypothesis that human hunting was part
of disappearance
•“Pleistocene overkill”
Very controversial
Likely involves more that human hunting,
including the dramatic climatic changes
going on as glaciers melted.
The adjustment to the end of glaciation was
no small matter: landforms changed, climate
changed and the distribution of plants and
animals changed.
So too did the level of population and their
distribution.
Incipient cultures:
A warning about the notion of "progress"
China, Amazon, Mexico and especially SW Asia began culture
changes that would eventually
• In some of these areas, cultures would follow courses
toward urban life
•Incipient means developing, and in some ways this is an
unfortunate choice of words.
•A linear idea that cultures progress
•A holdover to unilinear evolution: savages to barbarian
to civilized
Try this instead:
Cultures adjust to their natural and cultural
environments as they need.
Other cultures changed, but did follow a path toward large
populations, urbanization and large scale civilizations.
Cultivars:
The Natufian in Palestine and Khartoum in Egypt/Sudan had
prototypes of the earliest domesticated plants and animals in
more or less wild states.
Flannery suggests that in such areas, climatic change
stimulated a concentration on particular species.
People gradually shifted their attention to the use of
particular plants and modified them.
Cultivars are wild plants, but with some level of selection by
humans who use them.
Sumpweed
They are not domesticated, in that they do not depend on humans for
survival and propagation.
That is, they are not cultigens.
Happened in many areas-Marsh elder or iva, also know as sumpweed
Trying to preserve old ways of gathering, actually led to a new
economic food pattern.
Also see adaptations of old technologies into new tools
•Microliths using insertion technique used in sickles for cutting
seed-bearing plants.
The Neolithic and Domestication of
Plants and Animals
A time of dramatic change
The beginnings of settled life based on animal and plant
domestications
Earliest dates for food production are known from the
Near East: 12,000 to 6000 years ago (10,000-4000 BC).
Wheat, barley, sheep and goats, and cattle.
The real questions are how, when, and why did
domestication happen?
A simple, but
accurate view
Robert Braidwood’s nuclear zones
Regions with a natural environment that included a
variety of wild plants and animals, both possible and
ready for domestication.
Tigris/Euphrates, Nile, Indus, China, Mesoamerica,
Central Andes
Not a very useful model:
•Doesn't tell us why people began to focus on
particular species or
•Doesn’t give us mechanisms to explain it.
Adaptation is always a local problem.
Selective pressures favor new forms that result from
imbalances in the system.
In other words, there have to be reasons for change.
In terms of domesticates, what are the selective
pressures?
• Reliability of the food source.
• Production in adequate quantities to meet
population needs.
• Nutritional requirements must be met in terms of
calories,
vitamins, minerals.
• Does the food store easily?
Einkorn
Population pressure model (Binford)
Ties back to populations tending to locate on coasts during
the Mesolithic.
Environmentally rich areas
Populations eventually become to large for the coastal zones
to handle
There is pressure to move the excess into increasingly
marginal zones
Must focus on more marginal species such as the weeds and
grasses that eventually become cereal grains
Seems to hold in several areas of SW Asia and Central
America, but not in others
The Economy of Cities: Jane Jacobs
Animals domesticated by keeping captured wild animals in storage
"on the hoof" in corrals.
Selection for docility.
Wild plant seeds are gathered in copious quantities and stored in
granaries.
Earliest cities like Çatal Hüyük or Jericho do have granaries
before domesticates appear.
Granaries cleaned at the end of the year
Old seeds are thrown out and sprout just outside the granaries
People recognize they can plant these seeds, saving the best
seeds for just this growth, thereby
Selection for the largest and best producers.
Co-evolution: David Rindos
Humans are drawn, intentionally or otherwise,
into long term relations with plants and animals
and the general environment.
Humans become dispersal agents for plants,
protecting certain taxa - eventually causing
morphological changes in some of them.
The human impact on the environment creates
"anthropogenic locales".
Sedentism and Social Hypothesis:
Barbara Bender
How you organize societies has a big effect on
productivity.
Alliances and exchange
When there is a communication-exchange network
there is someone controlling activity and creating
surpluses.
She argues that it is not until this kind of society occurs
that you see domestication.
All can be fit into Braidwood’s nuclear zones
•Each nuclear zone is similar, but with local
adaptations.
•Which comes first, urbanization or domestication?
•How is urbanization defined?
•If large populations living in an aggregated
settlement, then that may have happened in many
areas before domestication.
•Joseph Caldwell defined Primary Forest
Efficiency with groups having populations of
1000 or more in a settlement without agriculture.
•Rich natural environment particularly made it
possible
Control of key resources
In areas of the Middle East, control of certain
resources such as obsidian, lapis lazuli,
bitumen and accompanying trade allowed
large populations to grow.
Beyond a certain level required abundant and
relatively reliable food resources to support
the population
Obsidian
Lapis lazuli
Bitumen with reed
impressions
How to Grow? Irrigate
Increases the environmental carrying capacity.
In each nuclear zone wild or near domesticates grew
readily but with low yields.
In each area, rainfall was insufficient for planting large
quantities of cultigens.
In some areas (Nile, China, Indus, T/E) annual floods
provided adequate moisture, but only if modified.
Use of the floodwater was variable from place to place
and required a complete readjustment of subsistence,
settlement, and social organization.
What does domestication allow?
Greater population
Surpluses
What do more bodies and surpluses allow?
Specialization of labor
Social Stratification
Social control
More rapid change
Centers of Early Civilization
Indus River
China
River
Valleys
Central Mexico
Andes Mountains
Nile River
Valley
Mesopotamia
(Tigris & Euphrates Rivers)
Each area is linked to an extraordinary web site
about the ancient civilization of the region
The Markers of Civilization
Urban Life
Mohenjo-daro
Harappa
Monumental Architecture
And along with that…
Writing
SW Asia Cunieform writing
Mathematics
Peruvian Quipu (both
math and writing)
Mayan
Complex religious rituals
Astronomy
Exotic trade goods &
lots of other “stuff”
Fine Arts
China
Mesopotamia
Conquest and Empire
The State
The Multiplier Effect
The greater the population, the faster the rate of change.
The greater the existing variety, the faster the rate of change.
The greater the environmental instability, the faster the rate of
change.
The greater the amount of intercultural contact, the faster the
rate of change.
Still, it took 3000 years to accomplish this readaptation
before the first urban centers actually develop
In other words, change can happen rapidly.
Is there a limit? Apparently.