Where did I put my car keys, and when did civilization begin?

Some mysteries, like "Where did I put my car keys?" can be solved by discovering new information.  Some of the more interesting ones, though, may resolve by realizing you were asking the wrong question in the first place.

For example, physicists spent a long time trying to understand the medium that light waves propagated in.  Just like ocean waves propagate in water and sound waves propagate in all kinds of material -- but not in a vacuum -- it seemed that light waves must propagate in some sort of medium.  "Luminiferous aether", they called it.

But that brought up questions of what happens to light if you're moving with respect to that medium.  Sounds in the air will sound higher-pitched if you're moving through still air toward the sound, or if the wind is blowing and you're downwind, and so on (examples of the Doppler effect).  There didn't seem to be a "downwind" with light.  The Earth orbits the Sun at about 0.001% of the speed of light, not much, but enough that a careful measurement should detect a change in frequency depending on which direction light is moving and where the Earth is in its orbit.  But it didn't, and people spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was happening with the aether until Einstein put forth a theory (special relativity) that started with the idea that there was no aether.

I just got done scanning through the older posts on this blog to see whether I'd discussed a question that comes up from time to time, in various forms, when discussing human prehistory: "What happened a few thousand years ago in human evolution, that enabled us to move from hunter-gatherer societies to full-blown civilization?"  The closest I could find was a comment at the end of a post on change in human technology:

How did civilization and technology develop in several branches of the human family tree independently, but not to any significant extent in others?

This is not quite the same question, but it's still not a great question because it's loaded with similar assumptions.   All societies have technology and rules of living together, so we're really talking about who has "advanced technology" or "higher forms of social organization" or whatever, which are not exactly the most objective designations.  But even taking those at face value, I think this is another "wrong question" like "What happens if you're moving with respect to the aether?"

Even if you try to stick to mostly objective criteria like whether or not there are cities (civilization ultimately derives from the same roots as Latin civitas -- city -- and civis -- citizen), or whether a particular group of people could smelt iron, there's a lot we don't know about what happened where and when once you go back a few thousand years, and even where we think we do know, the definitions are still a bit fuzzy.  How big does a settlement have to be to be considered a city?  How much iron do you have to smelt before you're in the "iron age"?  Any amount? Enough to make a sword?  Enough to manufacture swords by the hundred?

Wikipedia (at this writing) defines a civilization as "any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system)" with eight separate supporting citations.  I didn't check the page history, but one gets the impression that this definition evolved over time and much discussion.

By this definition, civilizations started appearing as soon as writing appeared.  In other words, writing is the limiting factor from the list above.  The first known examples (so far) of writing, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, are about 5400 years old.  By that time there had been cities for thousands of years.  Terms like "state" and "social stratification" are harder to pin down from hard archeological evidence, or even to define objectively in a way people can agree on, but it's pretty clear that, however you slice it, they came well before cuneiform and hieroglyphics.

It may be hard to pin down exactly what a state is, but it's not hard to find examples that people will agree are states.  Most of the world's population now lives in places that most people agree are states, even though there are disagreements about which people are subject to the rules of which state or whether a particular nation's government is effectively functioning as a state.  Nonetheless, if you asked most political scientists whether, say, New Zealand, Laos or Saint Lucia is a state, you'd get a pretty resounding "yes".  Likewise, most people familiar with the subjects would agree that, say, Ancient Rome or the Shang Dynasty or the Inca Empire were states.

The problems come when you try to extract a set of criteria from the examples.  While Wikipedia defines a state as "a centralized political organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population within a territory" it goes on in the very next sentence to say "There is no undisputed definition of a state" (with two supporting references). Wikipedia does not claim to be an authoritative source on its own and I suppose it's possible that the page editors missed the One True Definition of "state", but it seems unlikely.  More likely there really isn't one.

Going with the "centralized political organization ..." definition for the moment, things get slippery when you try to pin down what it means to "impose and enforce rules".  For one thing, except (probably) in the smallest city-states, say Singapore or the Vatican, there is always a tension among various levels of government.

In the US, for example, the federal government is supreme over state and local governments, but in practice it's local laws that mostly determine where you can build a house, how fast you can drive your car on which streets and any of a number of other things that have more visibility in most people's day-to-day life than, say, federal standards for paraffin wax (I checked, there are several).  Certainly the supremacy clause of the Constitution means something, and few would disagree that the federal government imposes and enforces rules throughout the US, or that the US is a state, but on the other hand we also call 50 constituent parts of the US "states" and they impose and enforce their own rules within their boundaries.  Is the State of Wyoming a "state", then, in the sense given above?  If so, is the city of Cheyenne?

This may seem like splitting hairs over definitions, but when you consider something like the Roman Empire, where it could take weeks or months to get a message from the center of government to the far-flung provinces, and the people in those provinces often didn't speak the official language and largely practiced their local religions and customs, and the local power structure was largely still in place, though with some sort of a governor, who may or may not have been Roman, nominally in charge, it's a legitimate question what it might mean to be "part of the Roman Empire" or in what exact territory the imperial state could actually impose and enforce rules at any particular time.

If all you have to go on is excavated ruins without any written records, it's harder still to say what might or might not be a state.  There are monumental constructions going back at least 10,000 years, that would have required cooperation among fairly large numbers of people over years or decades, but that doesn't necessarily mean there was (or wasn't) a centralized government.  So far, no one has found any strong indication that there was.  It's possible that ancient monuments were built at the command of a centralized leadership, but again, there doesn't seem to be any strong evidence to support that, as there definitely is for, say, the Egyptian pyramids.

Likewise for cities.  It's hard to tell by looking at the ruins of a city whether there was a centralized government.  One of the earliest cities known, Çatalhöyük, shows no obvious signs of, say, a City Hall or anything other than a collection of mud-brick houses packed together, though the houses themselves have their own fascinating details.  But then again, neither would any number of large villages / small towns today show obvious signs of a central government.  There may have some sort of centralized government, somewhere, imposing and enforcing rules on Çatalhöyük, but there could very well not have been.  Current thinking seems to be there wasn't.

Empires like the Mongol or Macedonian ones built cities, but most cities in these empires already existed and were brought into the empire by conquest.  If we didn't have extensive written records, it would be much harder to determine that, say, present-day Uch Sharīf, Pakistan, was (possibly) founded by Alexander as part of the Macedonian Empire and was later (definitely) invaded by the Mongols.  While it's a fairly small city of around 20,000 people, it contains a variety of tombs, monuments and places of worship.  If it were suddenly deserted and all writing removed from it, and everything else in the surrounding area were covered in dirt, an archeologist who didn't know the history of the surrounding regions would have a lot of work to do to figure out just what went on when.

Present-day archeologists trying to understand human culture from 10,000 or more years ago are up against a similar situation.  What sites have been discovered are often isolated and what survives has a lot more to do with what sorts of things, like stonework and pottery, are likely to endure for millennia than what was actually there.

In addition, it's clear that while there were cities thousands of years before  Mesopotamian civilization, it's pretty clear most people didn't live in them, but in the surrounding areas, whether nomadically or in villages, and whatever traces they left behind are going to be much harder to find, if they can be found at all.  There's probably at least some selection bias, in that until perhaps recently, there has been more focus on finding signs of civilization, that is, cities, than looking for signs of villages or nomadic peoples.

The result is that we really just don't know that much about how Neolithic people organized themselves.  There are some interesting clues, like the existence of "culture regions" where the same technologies and motifs turn up over and over again across large areas, but it's hard to say whether that's the result of a central government or just large-scale trade and diffusion of ideas (current thinking seems to be that it's probably trade and diffusion).

One of the basic assumptions in talking about civilizations is that civilization requires stable and abundant food supplies so that people can remain in one place over the course of years and at least some people have time to do things besides procuring food.  The converse isn't true, though.  You can have stable and abundant food supplies, and at least the opportunity for people to develop specialized roles, without civilization developing, and that seems to be what actually happened.

Rice was domesticated somewhere between 8,000 and 14,000 years ago, and wheat somewhere in the same range.  Permanent settlements (more technically, sedentism) are at least as old, and there were cultures, such as the Natufian, that settled down thousands of years before showing signs of deliberate agriculture.  Overall, there is good evidence of

• Permanent settlements without signs of agriculture over periods of millennia (Natufian culture)
• Large-scale organization without signs of agriculture or permanent settlements (monuments at Göbekli Tepe about 10,000 years old, not to mention later examples such as Stonehenge)
• Cities without writing, or signs of centralized government (Çatalhöyük, about 9,000 years ago at its peak)
• Agriculture without large-scale cities, over periods of millennia (domestication of rice and wheat)
• Food surpluses without grain farming
• Large-scale trade without evidence of states

Putting this all together

• There's not really a widely-accepted single definition of what civilization is, particularly since there's no widely-accepted single definition of what concepts like "state" and "social stratification" mean
• It's hard to say for sure how people organized themselves 10,000 years ago because there's no written record and the physical evidence is scattered and incomplete
• There are clear signs, particularly monumental structures, that they did organize themselves, at least some of the time
• There are clear signs that they interacted with each other, whether directly or indirectly, over large areas
• The various elements of what we now call civilization, particularly agriculture and permanent settlements, didn't arise all at once in one place, but appeared in various combinations over large areas and long periods of time

In other words, there was no particular time and place that civilization began, and questions like the ones I gave at the beginning aren't really meaningful.

Human knowledge has continually evolved and diffused over time.  People have been busy figuring out the world around them for as long as there have been people, and as far as we can tell, people's cognitive abilities haven't changed significantly over the past few dozens of millennia.

Overall, we've become more capable, because, overall, knowledge tends to accumulate over time.  The ability to create what we now call civilization has been part of that, but there was no particular technological change, and certainly no genetic change, that brought about the shift from foraging societies to civilization, because it's not even accurate to talk about "the shift".  There wasn't some pivotal change.  There have been continual changes over large areas and long periods of time that have affected different groups of people in different ways.  We can choose to draw lines around those now, but the results may say more about how we draw lines than about how people lived.

None of this is to say that terms like "civilization" or "state" are meaningless, or that civilizations and states are inherently bad (or good).  Rather, it seems more useful to talk about particular behaviors of particular groups of people and less useful to argue over which groups had "advanced technology" or were "civilized", or to try to say when some group of people crossed some magical boundary between "uncivilized" and "civilized" or when some collection of settlements "became a state".

Among other things, this helps avoid a certain kind of circular reasoning, such as asserting that the people who built Stonehenge must have had an advanced society because only an advanced society could build something like Stonehenge.  What's an advanced society?  It's something that can build monuments like Stonehenge.  I don't think this really represents the current thinking of people who study such things, but such arguments have been made, nearly as baldly.  Better, though, to try to understand how Stonehenge was built and how the people who built it lived and then try to see what led to what.

This also helps avoid a particular kind of narrative that comes up quite a bit, that there is a linear progression from "early, primitive" humanity to "modern, advanced societies".  In the beginning, people lived in a state of nature.  Then agriculture was discovered, and now that people had food surpluses, they could settle down.  Once enough people settled down, they developed the administrative structures that became the modern nation-state as we know it, and so forth.

None of those assertions is exactly false, leaving aside what exactly a "state of nature" might be.  Agriculture did develop, over periods of time and in several places.  Eventually, it enabled higher population densities and larger centers of population, and, in practice, that has involved more elaborate administrative structures.

But that isn't all that happened.  People raised domesticated plants, and eventually animals, and otherwise modified their environments to their advantage, for hundreds or thousands of years at a stretch without building large cities.  Cities arose, but for almost all of human history, as in prehistory, most people didn't live in them -- that's a very recent development.

One problem with this kind of linear narrative is that it can give the impression that there was a sort of dark age, before civilization happened, where people weren't doing much of anything.  If we put the origins of modern humans at, say, 70,000 years ago -- again, at least to some extent this is a matter of where we choose to draw lines, but it couldn't have been much later than that -- then why did it take so long to get from early origins to civilization?  As far as anyone knows, that's a span of over 60,000 years.  What were we doing all that time?

If you require a sharp dividing line between "nothing much going on" and "civilization", this seems like a mystery.  If you don't need such a line, the answer seems pretty mundane, because we were doing pretty much the same thing all the way through:  steadily developing culture, including technology and art.  Eventually, at various times and places, what we now call civilization becomes possible, and some time after that, at some smaller number of times and places, it happens.

One note: This post draws fairly extensively from points made in The Dawn of Everything.  Along with discussing human history, that book explores what implications deep human history might have on how present-day societies might be structured.  I'm not trying to promote or refute any of that here.  Here, I'm more interested in deep human history itself, the stories we tend to build around what we know about it, and how the two can differ.