What is civilization anyway? One could describe it as "a place for my stuff", invoking comedian George Carlin's routine. One day we had so much stuff that we couldn't walk around without leaving some behind. And another day we had so much that we couldn't just pack up and go from a campsite we had to settle more permanently, to get more stuff. Being bipedal slowed us down as does the long time it takes for children to develop their big heads, which increases the investment from male hunters, to come home and share, and prevents female gatherers from going too far from camp, where the most important stuff is.
Civilization in a general sense is a situation where humans gain some command over nature so that they can remain in the same place and get used to the area to learn more methods of control. Culture comes from Latin cultus; to cultivate, to till. Sedentary existence, agriculture, domestication of animals, prediction and expectation of weather/climate, and some common social expression and communication are basic markers of society from this definition. For society to get growing, there had to be security that we could reap what we sowed. Protection from marauders, natural calamity like flood or drought, storage of surplus production which would enable greater division of labor.
Why did it take until about 10,000 years ago for some of us to settle down permanently? Humans spread all over the Earth from presumably a small single population, until some people stopped leaving or never came back to where they came from. The answer I think is the environment itself, the last ice age 2 million to 12,000 years ago, the Pleistocene and the Paleolithic. The last ice age was when we learned to live together after we transitioned from ape to human. It was by the end of the ice age that we learned to control fire, domesticate our first animal the wolf, other hominids went extinct, large land animals provided our opportunities for hunting and eventually went extinct, and Homo sapiens moved from Africa to Europe, Asia, and North America. Neanderthals in Europe disappeared around 30,000 years ago. Necessity caused all these factors and by the time the climate warmed, we were triumphant in our new environments, with the preconditions to settle down.
Our transition to hunting ape was perfected during the ice age, marking our transition from ape society. Colder temperatures began back in the Pliocene 5 to 2 millions of years ago when the trees began to disappear, forcing our ancestors to adapt to life on foot in the savanna. As the climate got colder and trees fewer, having a diet of some meat would have been adaptive. Rather than being dependent on nature, we could take the prerogative of finding our own food. Eating meat along with cooking it shaped our complex social organization, sharing food and greater parental investment in young, and enabled a big brain, providing lots of energy and decreasing our jaw size relative to the nut and fruit eating primates.
This change to hunting precipitated a social change from primate society, away from a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male on top to one with more equality between males as well as more investment in offspring. The alpha male had primary access to females, probably taking a few mates for himself. Hunting to the contrary was most likely a cooperative venture of acquisition with primitive tools, against large animals. A system of either sexual promiscuity or serial monogamy guaranteeing individual sexual access would have been more advantageous to male loyalty, and so the alpha ape had to die. During this time, a forced egalitarianism in small groups would develop to ensure the sharing of meat. Attachment to multiple females, by confusing paternity, or a single partner, guaranteeing paternity, would guarantee such paternal investment.
Sandor Ferenczi the Hungarian psychoanalyst made a connection between Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stage of latency and the last ice age.
"Having ventured so far beyond the knowable, we have no reason to shrink before the last analogy and from bringing the last great step into individual repression, the latency period, into connection with the last and greatest catastrophe that smote our primate ancestors...,i.e. with the misery of the glacial period, which we faithfully recapitulate in our individual life." Sandor Ferenczi, Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality 1913
Freud himself mentioned the theory in The Ego and the Id 1923.
"According to one psychoanalytic hypothesis [by Ferenczi], the last mentioned phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the superego from the ego is no matter of chance"
Latency is the period after age 5 or 6 and before puberty, around age 12-13. Sexual identification has already occurred during the previous genital stage. During this period sexual urges are held back and the child is able to make social relationships with fellow children of the same sex and through education take in the morals of adults, fully developing a superego. The sexual instinct is chilled during this cool off period so we can live together.
The ice age would have been miserable and therefore formative on our social character for two major reasons; climate and large predators. The former is obvious and is connected with the latter. Bergmann's rule states that a more massive organism has a smaller surface area to volume ratio (short and stocky), the effect of which is less heat loss. This means larger animals fare better in cold environments, also due to storing more fat. Woolly mammoths, giant beavers, saber tooth cats, mastodons and other megafauna roamed the Earth. To survive we would have to work together, hunt the megafauna together.
When the climate changed and the Earth warmed, humans emerged as one species. Humans do much better in warm climate it seems, having already learned to survive in various climates.Warmer temperatures open up new land for agriculture, the viking colony of Greenland during the medieval warming period as well as wine being grown in Britain as examples. The industrial revolution occurred soon after the end of the "little ice age" around the 19th century and temperatures have risen since along with massive population growth. There were 1 billion people in 1800, 1.6 billion at the start of the twentieth century, and 6 billion by the end of the century. The last two centuries have seen exponential growth, occurring along with the end of this little ice, lowering poverty rates and increasing populations.
This is a however somewhat pessimistic answer for the beginnings of civilization. Our entry into civilization was as dependent on the environment as much it was a break away from environmental influence. We learned to live together during harder times where we were forced to live in close quarters and cooperate for our survival, developing at best a negative or forced altruism in small groups of kin or near-kin.
The next ice age could mean the end of our interglacial success, a punishment for our decadence. Post-Christian western society still loves the idea of apocalypse, that there will be a cataclysmic end to humanity because of our attitudes toward each other and the world. More likely is gradual or bumpy decline. And it isn't as if nothing of the past would remain. Those of us descended from the collapse of the western Roman empire have the collective memory of the dark ages which followed. But the eastern Roman Empire continued on until the 15th century, and the Islamic Middle East had a golden age of science and philosophy. Glacial periods however are much longer than interglacial periods, lasting in the hundreds of thousands of years. Even with current global warming, the amount of fossil fuels if continued to burn will only last a few centuries and the natural climate cycle due to Earth's orbit around the sun will start to cool the climate. This is far into the future from our perspective though, and much will happen.
This is a however somewhat pessimistic answer for the beginnings of civilization. Our entry into civilization was as dependent on the environment as much it was a break away from environmental influence. We learned to live together during harder times where we were forced to live in close quarters and cooperate for our survival, developing at best a negative or forced altruism in small groups of kin or near-kin.
The next ice age could mean the end of our interglacial success, a punishment for our decadence. Post-Christian western society still loves the idea of apocalypse, that there will be a cataclysmic end to humanity because of our attitudes toward each other and the world. More likely is gradual or bumpy decline. And it isn't as if nothing of the past would remain. Those of us descended from the collapse of the western Roman empire have the collective memory of the dark ages which followed. But the eastern Roman Empire continued on until the 15th century, and the Islamic Middle East had a golden age of science and philosophy. Glacial periods however are much longer than interglacial periods, lasting in the hundreds of thousands of years. Even with current global warming, the amount of fossil fuels if continued to burn will only last a few centuries and the natural climate cycle due to Earth's orbit around the sun will start to cool the climate. This is far into the future from our perspective though, and much will happen.
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