Civilization Dawns: Traveling to Temples
And now, it begins;
the things that make us, us.
Civilisation: Humans “Setting Down“
The journey of humans from a nomadic hunting species to a mostly farming species is complex. People “settled down” and started farming more than once at different places, at quite different times. It happened earliest in Mesopotamia but it also happened in Africa, China, and then thousands of years later in South and Central America. A lot of the research in the area is very new, particularly outside in Africa and the Middle East. However, there are some real similarities in the ways it happened, and once it happened people almost never went back to being nomadic. Let’s dive in.
When did people start “settling down”?
Civilization is quite a loaded word. It seems to separate, to imply that certain people are “not civilized” and because of that, we shouldn’t care about them.
This is absurd. The nomadic peoples who continue to roam the planet, sleep under the stars and remain connected to the land and each other are to be treasured (see more on that here). Indigenous Australians and their beautiful stories of the creation of the Universe by the rainbow serpent and the Native Americans and their gorgeous culture and rituals are some of the most heart-stirring of any peoples’. We have a lot to learn from them.
Regardless, a very consistent pattern emerged at the end of the Stone Age. People stopped moving around as much and started to settle down in the same place. Their diets changed from hunter-gatherer diets to agricultural ones, eating mainly grains and crops. They started building more and more permanent settlements. And once people settled down, they almost never went back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle (there is one amazing exception – see Cahokia).
This settling down happened at six different places across the globe, at quite different times. The earliest was 3,000 BCE in Ancient Sumeria, but it was followed closely by India and Egypt. However, the same process ended up happening several thousands of years later in China and a few thousand years later again in South and Central America. We have a diagram here showing how this happened and we talk about it all a lot more in future posts.
The different places humans first developed agriculture were all very far away. There was a surprising amount of cultural exchange in the early ancient world, ancient China definitely knew about ancient Rome. However, back 5,000 years ago, these places were entirely independent. They weren’t copying each other. People just decided to start settling down and living together completely independently. It’s remarkable and almost seems to suggest there is something special about that way of living.
Despite the differences in time and place, there were great similarities in these Civilisations. They all developed and used grains as the main source of food for their people. They all developed ways of recording information, often surprisingly similar ones, evolving from basic pictures and drawings (hieroglyphs in Egypt, the ancient Chinese script, cuniform in Sumeria). The languages all had pretty similar concepts, money, numbers, names etc. They all studied the stars and had an understanding of the seasons and weather to plant crops. They call came up with stories and gods, often to explain the world around them and domesticated some animals.
There were of course differences. In Sumeria, they wrote on clay tablets, whereas in Egypt they create ‘papyrus’ a type of paper made out of reads. China went straight to paper. Their art was quite different, a lot of early Chinese art developed around jade carving, whereas Sumeria and Egypt did much more painting and building of massive structures like the Pyramids. However, they were all creating solutions to the same problems, how to survive and work together.
We have posts around each of these civilizations in great detail on the next page (see here). Each one is worthy of many lifetimes of study. The rest of this post is going to focus on why this transition from being nomadic to being sedentary occurred and what it looked like.
Why did people settle down?
Asking why humans settled down, is in our view, the most important question in human history. Almost everything in the modern world, agriculture, technology and medicine relies on humans staying in the same place – it is the dominant way of living for our species. The question is very hard to answer. All we have is the archeological records of the civilizations. We can look at the skeletons to see changes in health, and see where people were living longer, doing better and eating more food. But it’s hard to really know ‘why’ humans do anything – particularly ones who died more than 5,000 years ago.
Firstly it was almost certainly not a snap decision, it was gradual. Instead of humans suddenly deciding to stay in one place, it’s more likely that they just started migrating to the same places, over and over again.
For instance, maybe a few people realized there was one particular area that was really good for growing edible plants. So, they started to come back to it every year. Then, they realized if they threw their rubbish and discarded animal bones in a particular spot, with some seeds, when they came back, the plants would grow better. Over time, they probably started doing this in a few places, bouncing back and forth between them as they were slowly shaped to become more habitable. Maybe they then left a few people at those places, while the majority left migrating until over time, all of them remained.
We have evidence of a few sites like this, that were returned to over and over by humans. One of the earliest man-made structures that has ever been discovered is a place called Golbekli tepe – and it is very special to us here at The Universal Story. It is dated to about 9,000 years BCE, so this is just a bit before the earliest cities existed. However, it is a massive stone temple structure, somewhat like Stonehenge. There is evidence that there was great feasting at regular intervals here over years, but it seems very unlikely that anyone really lived there permanently. There are a few other sites like this around the world, Stonehenge for instance being one of them: communal gathering places that pre-date large-scale settlements. They clearly had some very special meaning to people who returned to there, but one that is hard to really describe.
We think, if you are looking for the emergence of civilization and culture, these structures are where you should look. Our best guess is that they were used as communal gathering places, where large numbers of tribes came together, probably to exchange gifts and feast. They are the earliest sites that show large groups of humans starting to co-ordinate, build trust and a common culture. They are the very seeds for the modern world. We, here at the Universal Story, think they are some of the most sacred sites on Earth. We should treasure them.
So what does this all mean?
Human cultures are so different. And the different histories of different cultures are all so different. And it is so hard to keep in your head, any sort of overall picture about what human history looks like. One can just kinda give up and say that it’s all relative and there really is no human history or universal story.
But there is. There is one, single Universal Story that takes us from the origins of the Universe, the evolution of life on earth, the evolution of humanity, to the founding of our great ancient civilizations all the way through us in the modern-day. Six different human cultures, without talking, without co-ordinating all developed grand civilizations independently. Each was different. Each was beautiful. But each was the same attempt by humans to try and understand the world around them and their place in it. Our history is a wonderfully complex tapestry with so many threads. But it all heads in the same direction.
