Ever wondered how to make your own civilization?
How do create a society to dominate the known world?
Here is your simple guide to turn your neolithic clan into a civilization of the future!
And by future, I mean bronze age.
Here’s how to get to the bronze age.
What?
Got to start somewhere.
So, modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but ever notice how we only
have archaeological evidence of cities dating back to around 10,000 BC, and writing to around
3000 BC?
Turns out, this is nothing to do with being lazy, there was actually a good reason we
don’t have any ice age civilizations out there (that we know of).
The real reason is energy, specifically the energy that humans need, which is food.
Before 12,000 years ago, every human on the planet pretty much either hunted animals or
gathered plants to bring back to their settlements.
However, these settlements could never have been cities for the reason that they had to
be moved, like, on people’s backs, to follow animals and weather patterns.
Even if they could be permanent, though, there simply wasn’t enough free labor, since everyone
had to feed themselves, back in a world where 1,000 calories of work would yield more or
less 1,000 calories to eat.
The deal-breaker came when people in certain river valleys started farming, the key difference
with agriculture over hunting and gathering is that plants and animals on farms are under
the control of the humans.
This eventually led to the next revolution, which came when farming became so much easier
and more efficient that the average person could produce significantly more than they
would consume.
With this in mind, people started to specialize (mainly at first into defending their stocks),
and this is where the age of cities began.
Quite simply, this is where people started building permanent structures, writing down
how much stuff we had, creating large governments that control more than one city, and forging
new technologies (even some to better agriculture and accelerate this cycle).
This is where innovation can be, well… innovated.
You see the loop we’re on?
As soon as someone or some group invents new technologies, some of those technologies go
on to advance our agriculture.
When agriculture becomes more efficient, and can feed more people with less work, that
allows more people to specialize, and work more on the society.
Some of those people go on to play with metals, domesticate animals and create better technologies,
and some of those technologies go on to better agriculture, and pretty soon, we’re writing
stuff down, forging empires, financing economies, building huge temples to your gods, crossing
oceans on a regular basis, landing on the moon, and changing the face of the Earth.
This is why technology remained so stagnant for hundreds of thousands of years, until
around 10-15,000 years ago, and why we might see more innovation in, say, a year these
days than in the entirety of the Pleistocene.
The real technological advancement in this is how, in around 15,000 years, we went from
nomadic hunter/gatherers living in huts, to a global, almost spacefaring civilization
that can feed itself with cheeseburgers costing 99¢ a piece.
Sure, that’s partly due to economics of scale, but that’s also because we’ve kind
of got to process down from tracking down and hunting the cow to having a bunch of cows
under our control.
5,000 years ago, being fat was considered to be a sign of wealth; now, it’s considered
an epidemic, even a stereotype, but now we have space travel and YouTube videos.
In a sense, society can only progress more and more when eating is easier and easier
for people.
Thanks for watching this video, and if you found it informative and/or entertaining (hopefully
both) please be sure to like, share and subscribe to learn something new every Sunday.