The Movement of Civilization through the Neolithic and beyond…
For several generations, people across Western Europe and North America have taught their children — and I’m taking the liberty of generalizing — that the history of civilization begins in Mesopotamia (with the advent of farming and communication) along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, before people were properly organized and began to build the well-known massive pyramids in Egypt, who eventually passed along their knowedge to the Greeks, which was absorbed by the Romans. A few thousand years later, and here we are today: civilized.
The definition of actually being civilized varies. But at some point in our past a collective of humans were managed effectively, who not only determined but also agreed on common goals, were allocated tasks and achieved objectives. Time was precious and teamwork enabled efficiencies, and the subsequent growth of their community. They soon enough knew to maximize the amount of sunlight in the day, which changed depending on the season and their location; they understood the usefulness of a human was limited, contingent on age, whether a child, an adult or a senior; and winters were not amenable to harvesting food, either grown or foraged.
Although a harsh reality, movement was necessary to assure the happiness of the group, within a day, a season and a lifetime, until the advent of cities. The birth of civilization, recognized by the survival of languages now embedded in tablets, and building projects that first involved choosing an appropriate location, then quarrying, shaping, aligning and placing very large and hard stones, was spread across the Neolithic Era and into the Iron Age, a short amount of time given the fact humans homo sapiens sapiens have actually been evolving over the face of this Earth for the past 100,000 years. I’m surely not alone in wondering what our ancestors were doing during those previous 90,000 years.
Certain anomalies in the archaeological record have upset the apple cart recently, specifically since the unearthing of the megalithic Gobekli Tepi in Turkey. Its erection, though hotly argued, was planned and built by people we typically call hunter gatherers, capable of using an underlying geometric pattern in their design, and has been dated to 11,000 years ago, roughly thus 6,000 years older than Stonehenge in England.
Civilization requires a convergence of abilities — some might say a perfect storm — to finally bring (a place or people) to a stage of social and cultural development considered to be more advanced, and that “has sensible laws and customs”, according to the Collins dictionary. Let’s connect the dots, and ascertain who came before the Egyptians.
I believe, notwithstanding any new evidence to the contrary, that civilizations are interconnected when we span the bridge of time from the present to the dawn of our ancestors, separated by the melting of the Ice Age 12,800 years ago, long after those first homo sapiens who suddenly arrived in the human record at least one hundred thousand years ago. Spanning a few million years of evolution, homo sapiens are the remaining species of humans and who share the same cranial capacity of you and I.
It can be reasoned — given that only several hundred years ago we were sailing the ocean blue on wooden ships and now we send ships to explore the galaxy — our early ancestors did not sit around the same campfire night after night for 90,000 years, but chose to explore and create and invent and thus improve their daily condition year after year.
Smart humans have continued to evolve for several hundred thousand years and, humans being human, among them all some were leaders and some were followers, some were hunters while some were gatherers, some were thinkers and some were doers, some were fire pit masters and some were basket weavers. Yet, each new generation also enjoyed a few explorers who were not afraid to move and move they did, as had their own forefathers. People, especially young people, would grow restless, wanting to see what new idyllic lands or people lay beyond the horizon, over the next mountain range or just across the sea.
We can all agree today the young are the most likely among us to move, assuredly the ones to leave the safety of home and travel into the unknown, to test their own theories about what they might find — whether new food or new friends — and one day excitedly bring back the stories of their travels. Within each generation, some will choose to stay and enjoy the security of home, though some will choose to leave, demanding change, to embark on a new adventure, to find a new saga to proudly tell around the campfire, and impress the mate they desire. One way or another, people will not accept the status quo, and so will their children and their children’s children.
As you know, for the first seven years of my life I grew up in England, before crossing the Atlantic in 1967 with my family and moving to Montreal, the year Canada was celebrating its centenary. We celebrated an integrated mosaic of human activity that had become, we were taught, a wonderful tapestry and a testament to the adaptation of changes each subsequent generation had accepted, settling upon a land of greater economic prosperity than their parents, and to provide their own educated and healthy children an abundance of opportunity in a vibrant yet secure environment.
Over a brief period of 100 years, a process that had begun shortly after the American Civil War had ended in 1865, the young country flourished under the democratic management of many visionaries, sharing a seemingly common goal to unite new settlers from coast to coast to coast, though offending those people who claimed ownership to a land being settled upon. Bringing with it strength in numbers, unity was a benefit appreciated by the majority of Canadians generation after generation, preferring safety and security to an uncertain future left behind in their previous homelands.
Exchanging everything they possessed and venturing into the unknown, Europeans, in the wake of several generations of explorers and adventurers, while weighing a future of starvation and disease on one hand, four hundred years ago gladly sailed for a promised land of freedom and prosperity in America on the other. The stories were too attractive.
The Britons, known for their seafaring history, have recently trumpeted on television channels and websites the existence of Doggerland — a massive area of once-fertile earth now lying buried beneath the North Sea, which was flooded around 8,000 years ago, before finally disappearing under the waves a thousand years later, to be only re-discovered in 1931. It demonstrates the changes Mother Earth presents to its inhabitants, and that nothing can be taken for granted. Change is inevitable, and unavoidable; sometimes change is gradual, practically unnoticed, and sometimes it is catastrophic.
The three Stone Ages that currently describe that incredibly lengthy period of time whereby humans had to survive without the use of metal, running from the Paleolithic, roughly 3.3 million years ago, to the Mesolithic (which begins with the end of the Pleistocene roughly 12,000 years ago) and ends with the Neolithic — are a frame of reference in which we can view the evolution of humans based on collective activity, whether taking the time to find and chip flints to create formidable tools and weapons, or selecting and chiseling specific stones to make effective and efficient grain grinders.
The term Neolithic or New Stone Age is most frequently used to describe that brief time in prehistory when both cereal cultivation and animal domestication were introduced. The scientific community agrees today that agriculture developed at different times in different regions of the world. In fact, there is no single date for the beginning of the Neolithic. It spread. In the Near East, agriculture was developed around 9,000 BCE, in Southeast Europe around 7,000 BCE, when Doggerland was being drowned, and later in other regions. In East Asia, the Neolithic dawn is dated from 6000 to 2000 BCE.
It is during the curious Neolithic period that we see the rise of complex ancient civilizations and the sudden introduction and use of numerous inventions and advanced technology. The aforementioned Stonehenge is both huge and mysterious, and a striking example of Neolithic architecture. Yes, architecture, yet a structure designed and built by good ol’ hunters and gatherers. Curiously, the megalithic temple complex at Malta, several islands now located between Italy and Africa, was built 1,000 years prior, not to mention many other ancient structures found over the four corners of the planet also pre-dating Stonehenge and requiring quite an array of well-honed skills, from design to management, successfully erected without metal, and aligned with the stars in the sky.
Transitioning from nomadic hunting and gathering, albeit over several thousand years, to humans living in permanent homes and working within defined communities, Neolithic culture in the Near East is separated into three phases based on (1) agricultural developments: plows, (2) advances in architecture: walls, and (3) the production of pottery: kilns. Eventually, sedentary villages became well-known commercial hubs of integrated economic activity — whereby each possessed, shared and evolved the ability to cultivate crops, including deforestation and irrigation, as well as the grinding of seeds and the baking of flour, in order to maximize the production and storage of surplus food.
This lengthy pre-metal period, combining the use of antlers, leather, wood and chipped flints, subsequently enabled the sustained growth of populations, though fostering competition for food and knowledge. With respect to that increasing body of knowledge, finding and then grinding grain to then mix with other requisite ingredients to then bake, by the fireside and eventually in ovens, not only meant keeping a fire lit, but understanding the economies of scale involved to make numerous loaves of bread to feed the growing community of prosperous builders, who were also transforming skin into leather, grapes into wine, and shaping (and firing) clay to make bricks, as well as pottery, in their new ovens.
However, we now know in the village of Tell Abu Hureyra, the inhabitants were grinding grain between large flat stones from 13,500 to 9,000 years ago. In Çatalhöyük, people were building mud brick houses, and burying their dead, and adorning their walls with art. In China, 7,000 years ago, there were rice paddies, and in Mexico 10,000 years ago farmers were growing squash and maize crops taking advantage of the seasons.
The Natufians were biologically modern people, who lived along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Interments of their dead with grave goods, both in presumably abandoned houses and nearby caves, hint at ritual and spiritual beliefs, according to researchers. Pendants and beads made of shell, bone, and deer teeth additionally testify to a Natufian love of personal adornment.
From a dig-site in Jordan, dated to 14,000 years ago, archeologists have discovered the first evidence of baked bread — with flour made from wild wheat and barley, mixed with pulverized roots and water — and when added with roasted gazelle became in fact the first sandwich. Yet we also now know people living over 32,000 years ago in Southern Italy were grinding their collected wild oat seeds into flour, suggesting people began to understand the benefits of investing their time into food production many thousands of years before previously thought.
Çatalhöyük was an ancient street-less town that housed over 8,000 people, built during the Neolithic about 9,000 years ago using bricks, stone and plaster. By the quantity discovered, art was important to these people, as an immense array of paintings depicting everyday life, have been found on their walls and statues, as well as sculpted figurines of revered cherubic women, adorning living rooms accessed only through holes in the ceiling, where the roofs had atop them their communal ovens.
Although animals made the hard, physical labour of farming possible, while their milk and meat added variety to the human diet, bigger communities — and cities — begat bigger problems; infectious diseases, like smallpox, influenza, and the measles, all spread from domesticated animals to humans, from Ibex in Persia to commonly herded goats.
Apparently, sheep and cattle originated in Mesopotamia between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago, while water buffalo and yak were domesticated shortly after in China, India and Tibet. Draft animals including oxen, donkeys and camels appear much later — around 4,000 B.C. — coinciding with trade routes for transporting goods that humans were developing over time.
Soon enough simple tools and technologies were transforming the everyday life of urban humans, from uncivilized gathering to civilized gardening, for example, showly but surely crafting grain into bread, ore to metal, clay to pottery, grapes to wine, skin to leather and wood to lumber.
Gobekli Tepe, the rather unique “temple” located in southeastern Turkey is today the oldest human-made place of worship in the world, while the settlement at ‘Ain Ghazal in present-day Jordan is known as the earliest culture to produce large-scale human figures. Terra cotta pottery and fertility figures from the Neolithic era have also been found at Tell-Halaf in northern Syria and Tell-al-Ubaid on the coast of the Persian Gulf.
Over the past two decades, many new discoveries spanning unique scientific disciplines have pushed the dating of integrated human activity back through the Neolithic and into the Younger Dryas, most critically demonstrating how each consecutive environment has been used and eventually shaped to nurture the rapid development and growth of our modern societies around the world. The period of the Younger Dryas is one of dramatic change for both people and their environment.
About 14,500 years ago, according to the NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — Earth’s climate began to shift from a cold glacial world to a warmer interglacial state. Partway through this transition, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere suddenly returned to near-glacial conditions. This near-glacial period is called the Younger Dryas, named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that grows in cold conditions and that became common in Europe during this time. The end of the Younger Dryas, about 11,500 years ago, was particularly abrupt.
The Younger Dryas occurred during the transition from the last glacial period into the present interglacial (the Holocene). During this time, the North American, or Laurentide, ice sheet was rapidly melting and adding freshwater to the ocean. Scientists have hypothesized that, just prior to the Younger Dryas, meltwater fluxes were rerouted from the Mississippi River to the St. Lawrence River. Catastrophe followed.
A more northerly routing of meltwater has a greater impact on the salinity and density of the surface ocean in the North Atlantic, which scientists now believe can cause a slowing of the ocean’s thermohaline circulation and climate changes around the world. Multiple proxies for the thermohaline circulation indicate that such changes occurred during the Younger Dryas. Eventually, as the meltwater flux abated, the thermohaline circulation strengthened again and climate recovered.
Today we see the effects of the catastrophe when the Ice Age melted, rather rapidly. There were massive tsunamis, volacnoes and earthquakes that colletively wiped out flora and fauna. Before humans understood how to separate and melt ores, launching the successive Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, during the Neolithic Era, our ancestors had progressed from hunting and gathering — surviving — moving from one area to another, to eventually farming and managing plains alongside large and easily navigable river systems.
Although we are still teaching children modern civilization is a result of knowledge acquired and subsequently dispersed from the Ancient Egyptians to the Romans, we now should concede other prominent cultures in the Americas and Asia need to be addressed, as they too offer much to the spectrum of human activity — given their equally colossal achievements — requiring combined efforts to feed people, communicate goals and objectives and sell the benefits of megalithic projects to the people that have stood the test of time. It is, however, a result of surviving change successfully.
One needs to stop and think about surviving a global catastrophe, whereby when the ocean levels rose several hundred feet, and wiped out cities (and farms) clean off the face of the planet; remaining humans would eventually find shelter in caves, find fire and furs, teach our children about the past and illustrate our achievements upon the walls, and if cities were built hundreds of miles inland, they would — over the subsequent millennia — be overgrown by dense jungle. Today, with the help of LIDAR, these cities are being found.
Why a human could be convinced to build a megalithic structure, rather than continue to hunt and gather and thus feed his family, remains a mystery of history, yet megalithic structures are found around the world.