First civilizations - common factors?

[Kraxis]

Was the incident you talked about the one shown in Cousins? If so, they start off by beating the buttresses on local trees to gee themselves up (I've seen footage of US marines doing similar before a patrol), then are silent throughout the patrol until they reach the target. Some jumpiness at the start, but their movement become more deliberate as they near the borders until they form the regular column seen in the pictures. Once they reach the ridge that borders their territory, they sit in a line, scanning the valley below, still silent. When they spot something, they move off in column towards where they saw the movement. When they get there, they sit and wait and watch. Chimp comes down, fight follows.

Dolphins are supposed to indulge in even larger scale wars, but it's harder to describe their tactics in human terms, as terrain is not much of an issue, and they are too agile to follow clearly. I've certainly seen footage of two schools clashing.

Yes... I have only seen that one, but from how natural it comes to them to act this different from the percieved view of chimps, I must assume that it is in fact something they share more broadly.

You know, I have heard about this dolphin issue, just forgotten it, but isn't that more similar to lionprides fighting hyenas (or similar)? Fighting over the best territory/eliminating the worst competitors. Meaning there is a clear connection to the livelyhood of the group, while our wars (and apparently those of the chips) are often for less physical reasons, indeed sometimes for no clear reason at all besides pure hatred or bloodlust.

[Avicenna]

- What caused slavery?
Lack of cheap, disposable labour

- What caused larger-scale warfare as opposed to the more biological teasing and scaring games? The biological scaring and teasing games could be spotted as late as in tribal warfare around year 0, as well as today sometimes in football supporter fights But what caused the determined struggle to kill opponents? When was the first case we can consider an example of this in nature totally unique behavior, which differs us humans from the lower animals?
Conflict of interests, eg in the Warring States period in China when different families who were all influential and with military support, all fought, vying for the throne of the Emperor.

- What caused human sacrifice? I mean, not the normal explanation "people believed in religions and wanted to sacrifice to the gods". I mean - why did they initially decide their gods wanted sacrifice? Also could there have been Freudian subconscious thoughts behind human sacrifice, such as wanting power to kill competitors for women, or competitors for power?
Maybe the priests wanted power, and invented stories about the gods. eg the Mayan priests were the only ones to be able to talk to their 'Gods', keeping them and their family powerful for generations. Also, having human sacrifice would show them how bloodthirsty the gods were even in times of peace, so if you offend them something very bad would happen.

- Could carthaginian infant sacrifice have begun as birth control, later gone wrong by becoming a religious tradition?
It isn't actually definitely true, with only Plutarch and some other Romans mentioning it. Maybe the babies found were just stillborn and buried together.

- When did power over a group become a goal of an individual? In biology, it's status and rank that matters, not power to tell people to do things, or power over deciding whether someone should be allowed to live or not. Leaders in nature don't have the same control over the subjects as human leaders have. So when did humans start getting hungry for power in this way? Hungry for depriving people of their free will and self-control by being able to control their actions, through power?


- When were the first weapons made for killing humans, rather than hunting, made?
- Did making fire really have such a huge impact on man? Initially, they couldn't grow things, so the usage of fire to prepare fields from forest couldn't have mattered in the early stages. Did making fire cause religion and mysticism, as is sometimes claimed?
Religion, and also as defense from animals as early as the last ice age, I believe.

- Why did gold become valuable? It can't be that it's rare, because panda extrement is rare, but isn't a valuable trade good because of it. Is it that humans have a thing for shiny things, in combination with being rare? Truly, the only reason why gold is valuable is because there's a silent agreement that gold is valuable. End that agreement, and gold is worth nothing, because it can't be used for anything practical (very few exceptions at least, and even fewer exceptions in pre-civilization societies and early civilizations).
Shiny objects are usually precious in a human's view. Silver is also valuable, and was even more so than gold in the Egyptians' point of view. In China it was jade that was valuable due to a lack of gold mines.

- Where the first cave drawings/art really art? Couldn't the drawings of animals they hunted have been used to instruct new, young hunters? Did spirals and geometrical figures really have a religious importance, or where they just decorations? Geometrical figures are quite natural things for a modern man to draw on a paper when you don't know what to draw and just move the pen around. So wouldn't the geometrical figures rather be explained because it's a biological-mathematical necessity that geometrical figures are simpler to draw?
The cave drawings were religious I think. The fire in the cave would make it appears as if the drawing was moving, so again the priests use this to become influential and powerful in the tribe.

- Usage of clothes - did this happen before or after humans got less hairy than their relatives? What is more probable: that clothes were made to cover certain... uhm... parts, or to keep warm?
Probably look more intimidating to others. Gradually as the humans wore clothes, they lost their fur and clothing was necessary to keep warm. I think.

- When exactly did people stop "worshipping" fertility and start "worshipping" sex? When were the around ice-age period with pregnant women and phallos men statues replaced by only phallos cults?
When religion came to be.

- When did explosion of birth numbers begin? Much indicates that "casualties", diseases, suffering etc. was higher in early farming societies than in hunter and collecting societies, at least until growing of wheat, corn etc. had been altered to become more effective. So the only way the population in farming societies could increase more in numbers than population in hunter societies would be by a huge explosion of number of children born. Why did humans suddenly have significantly more children and start overpopulating, which has for example today made a nomadic hunting life-style became impossible?
There wasn't an explosion of birth. Birth and death rates were always very high, and recently (somewhere a few centuries back) medical advances lowered the death rates, while the birth rates remained high, thus the population skyrocketed.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Re chimps: The passage quoted below is also pretty interesting IMO. Many scientists claim humans have more common DNA with bonobos than common chimps, but these two species are the ones we're most closely related to. So - are we humans bonobos or chimps? It seems like we might have a combination of both in our behavior:

Professor Frans de Waal, one of the world's leading primatologists, avers that the Bonobo is often capable of altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness, patience and sensitivity.

Recent observations in the wild have confirmed that the males among the Common Chimpanzee troops are extraordinarily hostile to males from outside of the troop. Murder parties are organized to "patrol" for the unfortunate males who might be living nearby in a solitary state. This does not appear to be the behavior of the Bonobo males or females, which both seem to prefer to "make love" with their group rather than seek "war" with outsiders. The Bonobo lives where the more aggressive Common Chimp doesn't live. Possibly the Bonobo has given a wide berth to their "murderous" stronger cousins. Neither swim, and they generally inhabit ranges on opposite sides of the great rivers.

[Kraxis]

Yeah... the Bonobo is indeed the good side while the chimp is often the evil side. And yes it is more closely related to us, but even more closely related to chimps as far as I have understood.

[rotorgun]

A good popular science book on human civilisation is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

Add to that another popular science book the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Now popular science books aren't always based on peer reviewed papers. In fact some of them are published in a glossed up manner to bypass the whole review process.

But as primers these ones are pretty good.

Guns, Germs, and Steel yes indeed, was made into a tolerable documentery I recently watched on Nashville Public Television (yes, they do occasionally pump in the sunlight down here) about a month ago. It was a frank look at European Imperializm and the colonization of Africa. Very good look at human aggression at its best.

[Alexanderofmacedon]

They screwed up Africa. They screwed up some of India too. Imperial bastards!

[rotorgun]

They screwed up Africa. They screwed up some of India too. Imperial bastards!

Indeed! Speaking of India, I read a good book recently about the possiblility that the Indus River Valley might have been the site of a civilization much earlier than in Mesopotamia. I can't recall the title right now, but it was very convincing. It is possible that many of the ideas for civilization came from there to the west. It kind of ties in with the notion of some modern day archeaologists that claim 10,000 BC might have been the "dawn of civilization. The evidence is inconclusive, but intriuging.

[KrooK]

If I mention well first cities (if we could call these things cities) were Ur,Uruk in Mezopotamia and Jericho.

[Aenlic]

Remember that archaeology has a huge blind spot. It can only make guesses based on the study of finds that have been made. It tends to ignore possibilities which don't have easily explored sites. Early archaeology tried to make pat answers based on limited, but very real and accessible evidence. On top of that you have the usual bias of one group trying to prove it was first or best or oldest or smartest.

Imagine the dismay of the Chinese government when it was proven that the Takla Maklan desert mummies were European. Imagine the dismay of the entrenched historians when it was proven that Scandinavians got to North America, and even settled it, half a millenium before Columbus. Imagine the political fallout in academia if it is ever conclusively proven that Zheng He's fleet did indeed reach the west coast of the Americas. Politics and racial bias and entrenched paradigms are as much a part of archaeology as they are in any other field of academe.

Against that background in archaeology, is the fact that our understanding of pre-written history is based only upon what we have so far found. There are areas which we haven't yet explored, like the deep jungles and the places which are now underwater but weren't up until the end of the last ice age raised sea levels. Where do civilizations start? By rivers, we assume, for the ease it gives to agriculture which is the one necessary ingredient for a large populace to congregate in cities. But what of the coasts? What of those places where rivers meet the coasts? Coasts which were, in some cases, hundreds of miles further out than they are today. The possibilities have been essentially ignored by archaeology, because they couldn't be studied. And yet, archaeology makes assumptions based on what is plainly only part of the data.

There is some evidence, and maybe someday we'll be able to find out more, of a city that once existed in what is now the Gulf of Khambhat, in the Gujurat Plain of India.

What if the first major civilization began in a lush jungle setting, with structures made from wood instead of stone? What would be left to study, if it were overgrown and decayed, as would happen in such a setting? We are only now beginning to discover some signs that a rich agricultural civilization flourished in the pre-Columbian Amazon basin, because the usual signs of civilization were hidden from view, decayed and overgrown and flooded. They didn't leave behind temples of stone like the Inca and the Maya; but they did exist, perhaps even as late as the Spanish explorers, giving rise to the Seven Cities legend. If a Spanish explorer going by boat up the Amazon were to find a series of large towns built out of jungle material, with thriving agricultural works, what would he call them but cities?

Look at the pyramid cities in the Peruvian Andes which are just now being fully excavated, having been assumed to be just odd hills on the high plain. They weren't hills. They were a huge city, with massive temples, in the middle of what it now a desert forgotten and ignored until someone had a "hey, what if?" moment.

We know the sea levels rose after the end of the last ice age. Archaeology has a difficult time with the concept of possible sunken evidence. It is hard to find, nearly impossible to investigate and was thus, largely, ignored as the science of archaeology developed.

We now know that the former Black Sea lake region was inhabited. Ballard found the mounds characteristic of centuries of dwelling building on top of the detritus from previous generations, along what would have been rivers prior to the flooding of the Black Sea some 7500 years ago. We know that the oldest evidence of gold working was in the same general area, along the Danube leading down into this same Black Sea lake region.

The Indus valley civilization is a prime example. We are only just now beginning to delve into what was or wasn't there. It is made more difficult by the conditions. What happens to the evidence of city building when the civilization moves or is conquered or dies out and the material they used to build is easily washed away by millenia of monsoon rains? If you build from mud brick, what happens when it isn't constantly repaired by a thriving civilization after thousands of years of heavy rain? It disappears.

Archaeology, as a science and not just the province of amateurs, is little more than a century old. The assumptions made based upon what was known are continually being overturned, as our ability to investigate grows more sophisticated. One of those assumptions is that Ur, and Mesopotamia, were the "cradle of civilization" based upon what we knew at the time. The sites are comparatively easy to access. There is a written record which reaches back far enough to link to even earlier pre-written legends and with the available remains to study. So assumptions were made. But the archaeologists who made those assumptions didn't know about the Black Sea flood. They didn't know about the Indus river finds. They didn't know things which we still have not as yet discovered. I expect that the assumption that Mesopotamia was the first is going to be found wrong in the not too distant future, as our ability to investigate previously ignored areas increases. We know that the Black Sea flood predates the Mesopotamian civilizations by several millenia. We know that the Indus river settlements were contemporary with Mesopotamian cities, and may have been as large and possibly older. So much still that we don't know. We don't know what existed in the massive Amazon river basin, or what were once the fertile plains of high Peru. We don't know what existed in the fertile river deltas along the coasts of every land mass, prior to the rise of the seas some 10000 years ago. We do know, now, that there is much we don't know. I'd hesitate to make claims of "first" civilization based on what was possible to discover 100 years ago.