Early Human Civilizations
Having passed rapidly over human existence from 2.5 million years to 100,000 years ago (a short discourse from lack of solid information), we can learn a lot more as soon as human groups developed language/writings which left more reliable information. Writings, of course, are far more reliable than verbal hand downs from generation to generation.
But this might be a good point to consider whether God, the gift giver of our Universe and the creator of the laws which govern the evolutionary process, ever personally interferes with the process, on our personal behalf, and overrides the laws which govern the process. The tendency by humans has always been to envision a God who is human-like, thinks like us, and considers us high enough up on the evolutionary ladder that we can have a personal relationship with God (however we define Him/Her/It). It has been assumed that humans, alone among the millions of species which have existed at one point or another—- qualify, after death, for Heaven or a Hell. On face value, this is obviously self serving. But not meaningless. It provides individual humans with the strength and hope to endure the difficulties that come with the gift of life. Clearly such beliefs are sustained solely by faith alone, and science can be of no help. Logic, however, does not lend itself to support this belief. If God favors those who worship him, and they follow their inherited or marriage adopted religion/scripture, then by now there would be statistical evidence of such a relationship between God and His human followers. All people, in every religion, as part of their relationship to their God, pray to their God for the same kind of things: i.e. that we don’t die from a disease, or get killed on a battlefield, are able to do well in an athletic contest, or on an important written exam, or our children not get harmed (raped, run over by a car and so on), or our marriage last, and this list becomes quite long. Yet in all of history, there are no statistics that the followers of any particular religion, are spared in any of these areas. No teacher wonders why all the Buddhists get good scores on an exam, or any General wonders why few Catholics ever get killed on the front line, or why marriages of certain religions last, or why deathly car accidents seldom happen with followers of certain religions, etc. The Pope, each New Year, prays for global peace—which hasn’t yet ever happened. Whatever comfort prayers to God might bring, there is no evidence prayers work, or the stats would be there, and my religion obvious to all.
It also defies logic that if God wanted us to be a follower of a certain religion and scripture, why would God do this via inheritance? And what makes us think God likes us better than all other species? We all really do know that terrible things can happen to the best of people, and good things to the worst of people. The answer given is that we must have faith in our religious doctrines as the basis for getting to Heaven. The earlier religions in human history are easily subject to ridicule like killing humans to placate an angry God. For that matter, why would we think God has such annoying emotional states like anger, jealousy, revenge, etc.? If almighty God wanted a perfect world for all his creations, why wouldn’t He/She/IT just create such a perfect world and be done with it? We tend to create a God whose imperfections mirror ours, and dismiss all the personal tragedies in life as ‘God acts in mysterious ways’. 97% of species that ever existed since the start of the evolutionary process are now extinct—but many insist God’s chosen humans go to some imagined Heaven, making humans the only species in evolutionary history which God really loved—if God loves in the same manner we do. At any rate, we can believe we have a personal relationship with God, and we have many beliefs of varied sort, but beliefs are only as valid as the evidence for them. That some people declare, solely on their own faith, that they have a relationship with God, well——that is about as convincing as the mother who adamantly claims her son would never, ever, have committed such a crime. Not very strange, but her insistence doesn’t carry any weight in the court room. I have waited all my life, for someone who has conversations with God, to invite me over for a three way conversation. I suppose their answer might be that it is a private conversation, implying that God is not willing to share with others. It is all a bit “over the top” that God loves everyone but is only willing to share his ‘Word” via inheritance or private conversations.
But all the above leads to another question which is less absurd. Can we rule out the possibility that God does indeed tinker with His evolutionary process to ensure that life can move from water to land and from land to sky? To end up with the variety of dogs we have today, humans had to help the process along. Maybe God helps, from time to time, the direction evolution takes. After all, it seems to be the evolutionary process which matters, not individual members of any species. The evolutionary process is amazing in and by itself. Why do some people feel contented only if they are the focus of God’s attention? Is being lucky enough to have the chance to participate for a short length of time in the evolutionary process not enough? There seems no way we can resolve this via any kind of evidence. Thus, by logic, it seems God is not assisting any select group of humans, but whether God ever interferes with the direction of the evolutionary process is not something we can infer via any kind of evidence. It is also possible that God doesn’t ever intervene in the process and God doesn’t really know where it will ever end up or maybe it will just never end up. After all, if something originally came from nothing (God for example), can anything then go back to nothing?
We all admire how much more raw intelligence humans have compared to other species. Today, with the rapidly advancing AI (artificial intelligence) we are faced with the reality that we can now create machines with more raw intelligence than humans. What will this mean for the future? Will God then consider personal communication with these machines more interesting than conversations so many purport God has with them? And just to interject here another puzzling thing: We love our pets, we really do. If God loves us, wouldn’t He love pets just as much and admit them to Heaven? If God is selecting who goes to a believed Heaven, and I were God—then I would pick any of my life pets before I would pick me. Just trying to be realistic here—except claiming to know anything about God is hardly a realistic claim.
But let’s get back to early human history. At some point some humans ceased to be hunter/gatherers and settled into permanent communities with agriculture becoming a way of life. With this came new ways of thinking and communicating. This process began between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago. If these are nice round numbers that is because there is no way right now to be more specific. Here it is worthwhile to consider an appraisal of this switch from Hunter/Gatherers to Agricultural communities presented by Yuval Noah Harari, a Ph.D. in History from Oxford University.
Prior to forming communities, humans were as much subject to biological laws as any other animals. Mother nature was essentially running their lives. Right now is a good time to point out that we tend to pay perhaps too much attention to anatomical changes in the evolutionary process whereas in humans, especially, tremendous changes were taking place in brain power. This is much harder to document than changes in anatomy. As human brain power developed over time, humans became more and more masters of their own destiny. We started to use nature, instead of being totally controlled by nature. With language and writing more and more information could be passed on from generation to generation. Look at all the solid information available to us after we learned to read. We really did advance on the shoulders of those who came before us. Knowledge counts, and we really are a lot smarter than those before us—as a species, if not as individuals.
We said earlier that humans first tended to exist in groups no larger than 150. The way people communicate in a small group is different from how they communicate with each other in large groups. In the smaller group it is personal, very personal. For a large group to become cohesive, there has to be some commonly accepted concept (or myth Harari would say) which keeps them together. For example, everyone live in the same country, or be members of the same religion, or have the same ethnic origin, or same cultural background, or same economic background, or same political bent, and so on. But we need remember from the onset, while all of these factors can bind large groups of people together as a ’community’, it right away breeds seeds for discontent between large groups. So far, humans have not been able to break away from such discord. In fact, in some sense, the greater the binding of a common concept—the more likely there will be violence between opposing groups. Thus, while specific religions claim to be about peace and prosperity and good will between all men, it is simply not true, and most of history bears this out. In fact, the degree of violence is highest when a conflict is about religion. The ‘heathens’ tend to be then killed in the cruelest of fashions. Most of the worst methods of torture and death were invented by religions as the appropriate God willed death to heathens. Except maybe for Quakers and Buddhists, no organized religion I can think of is exempt from the previous sentence, and Buddhists probably are not either.
Once agricultural communities of size were established, and language/writing in place, human advancement as the dominant species on the planet rapidly (in evolutionary years) proceded. Not everybody in a large community had to be a farmer. Some could specialize and provide some substance or service to others in the community. Knowledge could be written down and preserved. The next generation would add to the knowledge base in an exponential fashion. Still, all of this was not without downsides. At this point individuals began to accumulate material wealth. No longer having to pack up and move quickly to where food was at a particular time of year meant those individuals who gathered the most material wealth became superior, in some way or another, to those with less. Of course, at least for the time being, community members were safe from outside groups of hunter/gatherers. On the other hand, those human outsiders from the smaller groups were not safe from their much more numerous neighbors in a much larger community. Not surprisingly, sooner or later, some ruler or rulers of the larger agricultural community decided it would be prestigious to enlarge the community by capturing surrounding tribes, near or distant. Along with this came the idea of slaves and captured persons as the perfect sacrifice of the conquered on alters as gift to the Gods. The good life, emotionally, was reserved for the victors, not the conquered. It might be fair to say, that anyone who is really ‘civilized’ does not take pleasure in torturing or making life miserable for other humans. It might even be fair to say that no one is really ‘civilized’ until the concept or ‘myth’ that binds humans together is, to them, the brotherhood of all humanity.
It need be remembered that human ethics changed over time too, or at least which humans deserved to be included in any ethical sphere. In earliest time of the human species, survival of the fittest applied as much to humans as any other species. Mother Nature pretty much decided which humans survived or not. For the purpose of this musing I define ethics as the Golden Rule—that we should treat others as we would have them treat us. This ethical concept is most developed in humans and has a genetic basis. All humans, everywhere, seem to agree this is an ethical concept and therefore I use it as the universal human genetic ethical basis. This of course will vary from human to human as any other trait— just as our will power is now scientifically accepted as having a genetic basis. We can test, for example, how much willpower a child (or adult) has. Furthermore it appears willpower can be used up over time. We once called it “breaking a slave in”. Like most traits in humans it all gets kind of complicated. But ethics and will power are connected genetically. In some sense, most of us want to be ethical to everyone but our will power in this area may be lacking because there are many unethical actions we can take which will ensure we will win, or have more material goods, or get an advantage by supporting the passage of certain laws, etc. Greed more often wins out over the Golden Rule. Power, titles, material goods, winning at most anything, reputation, control over others, and so on all can interfere with to what extent we treat others as we would want them to treat us.
I brought this up now because once humans live in communities greater than 150, ethics changes. It is easiest (some times) to practice the Golden Rule just for our own family and immediate relatives, but then it might spread to our religious congregation in proportion to the size of the congregation, or to our political base, or to our ethnic base, or to the country in which we live. It always seems interesting that those who sing the loudest and most emotionally during any national anthem seem to be those whose major interest in their country is what it can do for them—especially them and their clan of whatever. We see this today in the debate about protesting during the national anthem. Any group who tries to protest about how their group is treated becomes the subject of intense anger. “Go the hell somewhere else if you don’t like it here” is essentially the sole message. It is not much different from the slave owner who tells a protesting slave: “Go run away and die in the woods or get shot for running away if you don’t like it here. I feed you and house you and you are so ungrateful. At least you are alive so stop protesting or else.”. Of course the slave was not being fed or housed or treated in a manner the slave owner would like to be treated if they were the slave. Human interactions are always seeped in ethics.
Be this as it may, ethics is always part of evolutionary progress. Once humans started to live in larger stable communities, there could be no stability unless some concept or ‘myth’ existed as the cement which held them together. We have already listed what concepts or ‘myths’ might apply to do this. Very rapidly all kinds of tools began to be invented, improvements in the way crops were grown, or how tools could be made, the labor to do something could be lessened, and so on. Also large communities began to experiment with forms of government and how to keep order in a large community. Part of keeping order more frequently began by setting of some sort of ‘class’ system which essentially created levels of stature and worth for differing citizens in that community. Various systems of how disputes between members could be resolved were created.
But it also seems with complexity comes more stress, more matters which linger on one’s mind. Materialism became more and more important. Things mattered, and often mattered a lot. Then, of course one has to spend time protecting all the things that are now personally ours. Social matters needed attention. Sex became more and more a question of whose property a sexual partner was. Otherwise there would be fisticuffs all over the place and often. Since males were physically stronger (but interestingly females are stronger physiologically at all stages of life) they became the ‘owner’ of the relationship, the dominant partner. There were very few exceptions to this. As time passed and knowledge accumulated, parents knew how to take better care of children and the death rate for children went down, although the medical knowledge to fight disease took centuries to discover and maybe the biggest advance here came with the discovery of microbes and antibiotics which really took thousands of more years to get discovered. Thus, the advance of tools, politics, social structures, material goods, advanced far faster than effective medical treatments. In some respects life was ‘cheap’ for thousands of years more after larger communities became existent.
As to where these larger communities first arose depended on where the fertile land was for growing crops and this was almost always near a large river, where the soil was the richest from drainage of minerals from distant mountains. To a large extent, which societies became the most advanced depended on Mother Nature. This would remain true throughout future history after these first settlements.
The first weapons used by humans to kill animals and other humans were not used by Homo Sapiens but another hominid species 500,000 years ago. Homo Sapiens learned this from them. Archery probably dates to 20,000 BC., but the earliest people known to use bows and arrows were the ancient Egyptians who used it for hunting and warfare. This means early serious conflicts between different human groups must have been rather crude and vicious, like stoning or strangling to death or whatever. How common these conflicts were is hard to pinpoint because there was so much land available—good land, for human settlement, that it may well have been easier (and safer) just to move on. It may well be that more people were killed by animals than by other humans. A lot of huge animals existed, most of which are long extinct. As long as animals could get up close for the lack of long range weapons, humans would have been good targets. Fear of animals must have been right up front for these early human communities. Stones were right up there in the early days. They could stone animals and other humans to death. There are stone tips with animal blood that date back 64,000 years in Southern Africa. About 2500 BC the Egyptians began to ride chariots so they could rapidly approach closer to their prey—animal or human. About 1300 BC swords became available. Anything resembling a modern day gun was the matchlock gun in 1450. They had to be reloaded after every shot, but nevertheless, by the time Columbus invaded the Americas, guns were plenty efficient against an unarmed native population.
But, while guns enabled humans to get the upper hand against almost all animals, it also made it relatively easy to kill other humans and to wage war against any population not able to defend itself from these guns. We cans see the bind here between the Golden Rule and the use of guns to kill others. Guns have the advantage in any conflict. By the time a person or hostile society is able to implement the Golden Rule to decide a conflict, the opposition has settled the conflict by killing with guns.
Guns, of course, do not apply to these earliest settlements in the Near East, 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. Regarding domestic violence these communities lived relatively peaceful lives. Mother Nature would remain the biggest threat to their existence for thousands of years.
Because I keep finding more information in this search to know more about the Human evolutionary process, not everything is going to flow smoothly here. At this point I need to write a bit more about the sex lives of humans before the early civilizations about which we begin to have written records and more fossil evidence. We can tell a lot about how humans live from the objects and writings left behind. But hunter gathers left no writing and hardly had any objects at all, nor could they be much interested in having material objects since they moved around frequently from place to place. Even in their worshipping they had no place in their lives for statues or religious symbols of any kind. We said earlier that the early homo sapiens had had no real knowledge of where babies came from. And we have no way of knowing anything about their sex lives. Some researchers think they were very monogamous and had strong nuclear families. It could just as easily be argued that sex was just something they engaged in when they felt like it, and with whomever at the time would be a willing, or maybe even an unwilling partner. When babies were born no one knew who the father was or they may even thought the baby came from something they ate or was a gift from God. There is just no way of knowing. If they didn’t know who the father was then all the adults co-operated in raising the children as part of their group responsibility. It is possible that sex was a lot less important to them than it is at our present age. We learned from childhood that sex is going to be important and that it is involved with having children and that whatever couple fathered a child is stuck with raising the child, period. Which system is more ethical—nuclear families, or community families, is not clear. There certainly are no divorces in community families compared with all the stress divorces entail.
Some say we can extrapolate the answers from tribes of bushman in Australia who were still hunter gatherers when white persons found them long ago. The trouble is that these small groups of hunter/gatherers all had their own language, religion, norms and customs. This confirms what we stated earlier, that there was no pressure for hunter/gatherer groups to form bigger groups or have any interaction at all with other groups and there were hundreds of these small hunter/gatherer groups in Australia. This sounds deflating to early humans but let us consider horses. They are herd animals and the herds are relatively small, probably never exceeding the 150 number limit. They have no language but communicate limited emotions to each other. They can make sound to warn each other of danger, to call each other if looking for others, they eat together, they sleep together, they play together, they have sex together, they fight with each other for dominance and position within the group and that is about it. They certainly don’t sit around and chat with each other, or make plans about anything for the future. Remember, humans needed to develop anatomical structures to make language possible, and also to evolve enough brain power to enable discussions to take place in an abstract way. It took thousands of years to do this, but when it finally came together they formed larger groups around certain concepts (really myths) and these common concepts kept such large groups intact.
I am further enough into this musing to realize this will not be a musing about artifacts, pottery, clothing, style of government, culture, etc. so much as an attempt to understand why the human species ended up where we are today. For most of the 2.5 million years humans have been on our planet it was Mother Nature calling the shots, just as Mother Nature called the shots on all other animals. But when humans finally developed language and the ability to write, humans began to themselves play a more important role in the direction of their history. For example, whether we like it or not, or what the effect this has been on evolutionary history, the human species has been the most destructive species with respect to all other species, especially the larger species. It has been the human species which has driven more plant and animal species to extinction than any other species on our earth. Before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools, humans drove to extinction about half of the larger animals on the planet.
At first it might seem strange how humans could drive to extinction large animals that were much stronger than themselves and had nothing but primitive weapons—no guns or any other such sophisticated weapons. Part of the answer appears to be that these large animals in places like Australia, North and South America, New Zealand, etc. had no reason to fear humans. Humans did not have a very threatening appearance. Thus, before these large animals could learn to fear them, as the large animals in Africa did, they became extinct rather quickly. Australia was first invaded by humans around 45,000 years ago, a most remarkable feat for humans to even get there, but they did. Within a few thousand years, all of the larger species weighing 100 lbs or more in Australia disappeared. A lot of smaller species disappeared also and this is true everywhere humans invaded. Humans arrived in New Zealand about 800 years ago and within a couple of centuries the majority of the larger fauna was extinct along with 60 per cent of all bird species. Humans had become, as they spread to new territories, vicious ecological killers.
Humans first reached the Americas 16,000 years ago and by 10,000 BC humans had spread from Alaska down to the southern tip of South America. The fauna then was far richer than it is today. Within 2000 years of human arrival, most of the larger, really huge animals were extinct. North America lost 34 out of 47 genera of large animals. South America lost 50 out of 60. Sabre Tooth cats, who had been around for 30 million years, became extinct. So did giant ground sloths, oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, giant rodents, and mammoths. Only in Africa did the large species hold their own, in large part because the African continent was rather hostile to settled agricultural communities. Humans, like many other animals in Africa, had to migrate seasonally where the food and water were to be found. Only when ‘civilized’ humans rediscovered Africa and found it unmanageable, did Europeans leave after carving up Africa into specific states with boundaries that had little consideration for various tribes or the need to let Africans have free access to land as the seasonal needs changed.
Nature lost considerable control over human destiny when language and writing enabled humans to have increasing control over their future. Human culture then started assuming a larger role over future human evolvement in the evolutionary process. It is probably fair to say that violence became a way of life for humans as a species, albeit the use of violence as means to solve conflict was by no means universal among human populations, and it has remained that way right up to the present. Humans as a species were more like a plague of locusts. Destruction of any form of life in the way of humans, as they invaded all parts of the planet, was the operative mode. It seemed clear after a couple of million years passed since the first humans, and humans developed the ability to speak a language and had the intellectual capacity to formulate original ideas, that not only was human environment playing a role in human future but so was intellect, memory, and human emotional swings. For millions of years, size mattered among vertebrates but humans changed that, and for the most part human intelligence drove these larger species into extinction. Interpretation of all this is beyond my limited intellectual skill. But it does make me wonder, where is all this heading? Humans are now all over the globe and right now our activity is the reason for the 6th large extinction period in evolutionary history. Human overpopulation of the planet is now a reality, and if it doubles the next generation like it has in my generation, it is hard to see anything good coming of it.
In the past century human rights made significant advances for minorities, women, gays, and the handicapped. But when an overpopulated species begins to feel the pinch from inadequate natural resources to sustain enough species’ members in a prosperous life style, then tolerance for minorities begins to crack and then at some point all groups regress to a battle between themselves for as big a piece of the pie as they can get. I personally assume Mother Nature always bats last and all these problems being caused by human activities will eventually, on evolutionary time, be dealt with when eventually the shit hits the fan. It need be pointed out here that when ‘civilized’ humans invaded new territories the native populations were always driven to extinction or near extinction. All human established religions assume God loves humans the best of all species and has given us dominion over the earth and all living things. This seems a bit self serving. If I were God and created the laws which govern the evolutionary process, it is not clear that I would most adore a species which has developed a presence which is driving so many other species to extinction. All this is a difficult enigma.
I am going to pause here, because of the length, and continue on with this later.
