Climate Change May Have Sparked Civilization

I usually give you an abstract of these things, but this online news article is rather short and well edited, and it's already an abstract of a scientific presentation. The ideas are very interesting and certainly revolutionary.

Regardless of the ultimate cause of civilization, some of Brooks's characterizations of city life are highly controversial. For thousands of years people have been voting with their feet and migrating from villages to cities even during eras when there was no environmental pressure to do so.

From Environment News Service, ens-newswire.com

NORWICH, England, September 7, 2006 (ENS) - Early civilizations emerged primarily because of severe climate change, according to new research released today. Natural changes to the climate diminished natural resources and forced previously transient people into close proximity in areas where water and productive land was still available, the study's author said.

"Civilization did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban, 'civilized' societies," said Nick Brooks, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research. "On the contrary, what we tend to think of today as 'civilization' was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilization was a last resort - a means of organizing society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions."

Brooks presented his findings today at the British Association for the Advancement of Science's Festival of Science in Norwich.

His research is largely based on analysis of archaelogical remains of the Garamantian civilization in southwestern Libya. The civilization emerged in the wake of changing rainfall patterns 3,000-5,000 years ago, Brooks said.

He contends similar connections can be linked to the emergence of early civilizations in Egypt, South Asia, South America and China between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago, when global climate changes caused a weakening of monsoon systems resulting in increasingly arid conditions. The changes in the climate were caused by natural fluctuations of the Earth's orbit, Brooks said.

The study challenges the widely held belief that the development of civilization was simply the result of a transition from harsh, unpredictable climatic conditions during the last ice age, to more benign and stable conditions at the beginning of the Holocene period some 10,000 years ago.

Brooks argues the development of civilization meant a harder life, with less freedom and more inequality.

Health and nutrition are likely to have deteriorated rather than improved for many, Brooks added, as the transition to urban living meant that most people had to work harder in order to survive, and suffered increased exposure to communicable diseases.

"Having been forced into civilized communities as a last resort, people found themselves faced with increased social inequality, greater violence in the form of organized conflict, and at the mercy of self-appointed elites who used religious authority and political ideology to bolster their position," Brooks said. "These models of government are still with us today, and we may understand them better by understanding how civilization arose by accident as a result of the last great global climatic upheaval."

 

Obviously the author feels the same way. Yet everywhere civilization sprang up, people voted with their feet and moved there from the surrounding villages, even when there was no impending famine.

Obviously the reason is that civilization turned out to offer much more than a reliable food supply--so much more that many people found it worth the cost in decreased privacy, fresh air, etc.

According to this theory, cities were invented for the one reason that was already known from Neolithic village life: economy of scale. Increasing the size of a production facility (in this case farms) and thereby increasing its rate of production results in a disproportionate increase in output (food) in ratio to input (mostly labor in those days but also water, seed, fertilizer, etc.). This creates a surplus. A surplus of food can tide a village over the winter, so its hunters don't have to travel vast distances through difficult snow-covered terrain in freezing weather to try to catch and kill the sturdy megafauna that haven't migrated south.

The larger surplus that a city produces can do better than that and tide it over an entire bad growing season. But beyond that, if times aren't too desperate, it has an unexpected effect: surplus labor. Huge farms are so efficient that the entire population doesn't have to work them in order to produce their own food. People who have a talent for making clothes, pottery, houses and other artifacts can devote their full time to it and become extremely creative and productive. So can people who make luxury goods like wine and desserts and people who enrich culture by creating music, visual art and poetry. So can people who are good at teaching, exploring, making favorable trade agreements with other cities, and discovering new and better ways of doing new and better things--technology.

City life is richer than village life. It may or may not be easier. It's clearly harder than the life of nomadic hunter-gatherers who, it's estimated, worked a 20-25 hour week, but as we city folks say, "you get what you pay for."

I'm not sure I agree with this assertion either. Again, to rehash points on other threads, Homo sapiens is a pack-social species. We need to live in harmony and work cooperatively as pack hunters for the survival of the species. (We're not herd-social, merely tolerating anonymous neighbors for safety from predators and convenience in attacking bountiful, inanimate food.) We have learned over the millennia that increasing the size of the pack, while developing new technologies that both support and take advantage of that size, results in increased survivability. Since the Dawn of Civilization human life expectancy rose from about 25 to about 35, providing more childbearing years, and in the last century it shot up to 75, providing more elders to manage the development of technology and the transfer of knowledge to the young.

One can split hairs about what is "instinctual," but our gigantic brains give us an unprecedented ability to refine and guide our instincts with learned and reasoned behavior. The programmable synapses are a good match for the preprogrammed ones. Humans today are perfectly at ease in cities of 20,000, two orders of magnitude larger than the tribes of the Mesolithic and with the qualitative difference that most of the inhabitants are neither related nor acquainted. If we were able to achieve that profound change in our attitude toward other people in a mere 15,000 years, are there any limits to what we can accomplish socially?

Civilization has developed so many new technologies that it has virtually freed itself from the concerns that prompted its creation. Global warming--if it happens--is not going to wipe out civilization because we'll just make more efficient use of agricultural resources. Perhaps only the rich will get meat, but the rest of us will never run out of tofu. Our coastlines may recede but there will still be plenty of room for all of us to live once we build new cities a hundred miles inland--perhaps it's time to buy stock in the housing industry.

As I have stated at great length (and with serious rebuttals by Baron Max) in other threads, e.g.,

http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=57841&page=4&pp=20

civilization is heading inexorably toward the creation of a single global culture. It has survived all the wars to date, always emerging with a smaller number of larger "tribes." The tribes still fight, but the fighting is not as bloody as it once was, and as often as not it is actually between not-quite-civilized factions of tribes who don't have the resources, support, home base, and organization to mount a full-scale war.

I think the future bodes very well for civilization.

See also the many threads in which I have postulated that it was our ability to create a multi-species community with dogs that inspired the confidence to learn to get along with other tribes of humans and create civilization in the first place.

 

The first farms were obviously collectives. People already lived together in nomadic units and eventually developed a pattern of settling in one set of caves in their summer hunting and gathering territory and another during the lean winter months when prey was scarcer and protection from the elements was important, or doing the same thing with portable dwellings like tents. When someone discovered how to grow a crop from seeds near the summer caves it must have taken generations before sufficient cultivation technology was developed to grow enough food to allow the tribe to stay put year round.

Given the pack-social instinct it's doubtful that these newly Neolithic people would have been quick to disperse, so their first permanent year-round dwellings would have been clustered in what eventually became villages.

Your arguments against division of labor being a factor in Neolithic farming are persuasive. I confess to making the assumption for the sake of granting the author's premise without giving it much thought, since I intended to argue against him anyway.

I'm sure that during thousands of years of village life, human curiosity, observation and reasoning brought the concept of division of labor and surplus to their attention. The expansion of agriculture to include animal husbandry expanded the need for protection from predators to include the sheep and not just the shepherds. One larger flock is more efficiently guarded than several small ones and the principles of animal husbandry were applied to the breeding of larger dogs for larger predators.

One person in the village turned out to be the most skilled at making shoes, while another specialized in pottery, another baskets, etc. This efficiency, even in a village, would likely have resulted in a modest surplus of labor so that one talented person might have been permitted to spend most of his time making ornamental objects or musical instruments, or teaching the tribe's lore to the young.

People with the best social skills might have assumed the job of traveling the land, trading their village's warm winter cloaks and beautiful wedding dresses for another's smooth wine and large dogs. They might have eventually set up a centrally located trading post to facilitate these transactions. Someone else built an inn next door for hungry and weary travelers. People from disparate villages met on neutral ground, benefited from the encounter, and after some time the idea of living cooperatively among people who were neither relatives nor close friends didn't seem so strange or dangerous.

I can't say that the climate change theory is wrong. But this scenario is just as believable, and it also explains the fact that people kept moving into cities when the outlying villages were not in danger of famine. Division of labor and surplus advanced civilization and people liked the resulting life. This seems to me to be more consistent with the commonalities of human nature throughout the portion of history that we are able to study.

 

Well sure, but that's a little off topic. The question is why did civilization arise in the first place. Considering that it happened in six different places (possibly seven, we don't know enough about Zimbabwe) over the span of at least seven thousand years, it's surely not a fortuitous accident. We generally assume it's a manifestation of our pack-social instinct coupled with our unique facility for inventing and using technology.

The paper suggests that it may have been a response to external forces. I disagree and provide supporting arguments for the traditional theory.

 

The Olmec and Inca civilizations were developed in the tropics. Egypt, India and perhaps Mesopotamia are subtropical. Of the world's six civilizations, that leaves only China out in the cold.

 

An original civilization in New Guinea? Huh?