From Peter Nimitz's Nemets substack:
A brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian Farmers to the Present
In the beginning, it was cold. Glaciers covered most of North America and a large part of northern Europe and Russia. Sea levels were 120 meters lower than today, leaving vast expanses of now-drowned lands open to terrestrial life. The Sahara Desert was even vaster then than in the present. Most of mankind lived in coastal or riparian lowlands around the world, taking advantage of the nutritional wealth that flowed to them from the water.
The races of man in the Ice Age were more diverse than those of the present. While the last expansion out of Africa ~70,000 BC absorbed or exterminated all of the other hominids of Eurasia, the great mixings caused by agricultural states, metalworking tribes, and wheeled transportation had yet to occur. Societies thrived not through intense specialization allowing for exploitation of a wide range of ecological niches, but through exploitations of specific ecologies alien to their neighbors and rivals. The fishermen, foresters, or big game hunters might slay each other in battle; but without knowledge of the fish-hook, edible forest plants, or megafaunal behavior held by others they could do little to seize each other’s homes. Indeed, certain ecologies in Africa may have provided a refuge for the last remnants of non-human hominids even after the end of the Ice Age. Men evolved apart, as they had many times before.
Many Ice Age men undoubtedly dreamed of civilization - at the time perhaps understood as an orderly life with predictable and reliable sources of food and water. A few men tried to make civilization in the Last Ice Age. An underwater megalith off of the coast of Sicily and a paleolithic village in Israel are signs of such failed attempts more than twenty thousand years ago. There are undoubtedly others in the drowned lands which in time will be found by underwater exploration. The colder, sparser, and unpredictable climate doomed them all.
While the uncertainty of human life in the Ice Age appeared a curse, it was in some senses a blessing. Man was taller than he would be again until modernity, and likely more intelligent too. The human population of the world was only a few million, so there was plentiful game. While life was violent, brutish, and short - it was well fed. Evidence that genetic selection for disease resistance occurred mostly after 2,500 BC suggests that disease burdens in the paleolithic may have been have less severe for man as well.
The end of the last Ice Age coincided with the the rise of the Natufians. The Natufians were hunter-gatherers in the Levant who harvested wild cereals to supplement their diets - an important step towards a sedentary lifestyle and civilization. The Levant had become a crossroads of North Africa, Europe, and Asia towards the end of the Last Ice Age. The ancestors of the Natufians interacted with peoples as far east as Tajikistan, as far west as Morocco, and as far north as Greece. Those Ice Age contacts left little (if any) genetic impact to the east and north (genetic connections between the Natufians and the peoples of North Africa remain debated), suggesting that they were indirect and ephemeral even if they left lasting cultural influences.
The earliest known censuses date to the Bronze Age, which complicates historical population estimates. Archaeologists, geneticists, and paleobotanists have come up with a number of methods of estimating relatives prehistoric population sizes. One is the summed calibrated radiocarbon probability method. The summed calibrated radiocarbon probability method is based on the idea that the number of identified and dated archaeological sites can be used as a proxy of past population size in well studied regions. While sensibly criticized for a number of reasons, it is nonetheless a useful approach that can sometimes corroborated by other methods.
Per that method, the Natufian population grew gradually in the 2,000 years after the end of the last Ice Age (about 12,800 to 10,700 BC), as did the population of the rest of the Middle East. The Younger Dryas period (10,900 to 9,700 BC) ushered in colder climatic conditions that caused a decline in population in much of the world. The Levant was an exception. Its population, the Natufians, multiplied fivefold over that ~1,200 year period due to their successful exploitation of wild cereals expanding their food supply. Part of the Natufian success was due to the climate change’s moderation in the Levant. Elsewhere, peoples who embraced similar cultural shifts towards intensive harvesting of cereals or outright agriculture in the period between the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas died off in the renewed cold or reverted to hunting and gathering. Those almost-civilizations of 12,800 to 10,700 BC, such as the one in the Horton Plains of Sri Lanka, are only dimly known through palynology.
It was at the end of the Younger Dryas around 9700 BC that the fire of civilization was rekindled successfully. It flickered and dimmed at a number of points across the next 11,700 years, but was never altogether extinguished as it had been in the Ice Age. Indeed, the dimmest periods of the later ages are brighter than the most illuminating periods of the earlier. The forces of Progress could be retarded or destroyed in large parts of western Eurasia, but they always survived somewhere to spread again. In the Ice Age the areas that could support agriculture were quite limited, so when a civilization fell its memory and legacy was unlikely to survive on the barren periphery. In the Holocene (the last 11,700 years that have followed the Younger Dryas cold period), the warmer climate has allowed for the periphery of civilization to be large enough that it provide refuges from which it can again be restored.
The First Age of civilization in western Eurasia lasted from the end of the Younger Dryas in 9700 BC to the First Fall in 8300 BC. It is also known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. The population of the northern Levant perhaps doubled in the two centuries immediately following the end of the Younger Dryas. The warmer, wetter, and more consistent climate increased plant biomass in the region much as it did elsewhere. The greater population allowed for the construction of ritual sites like Göbekli Tepe and fortified towns with populations in the thousands such as Jericho.
First Age life was still hard in spite of improved climactic conditions. Wild wheat and barley shatter upon becoming ripe, scattering their seeds around. For farmers, that is quite undesirable. They want the seeds to stay in the plant upon ripeness so that they can be harvested and eaten. In the early 10th millennium BC, only about a quarter to a fifth of harvested einkorn wheat didn’t shatter upon ripeness. By the beginning of the seventh millennium BC, about nineteen-twentieths of heads of wheat didn’t shatter. Farmers were breeding (intentionally and accidentally) tougher rachis in cereal crops to prevent shattering, but it would take thousands of years for their project to come to fulfillment. While the farmers of the First Age could grow more calories per acre than their hunter-gatherer predecessors, their crop yields were still considerably lower than their successors....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Mr. Nimitz:
September 2, 2023 - "Do the seeds of long-term progress sprout from the embers of collapse?"
September 9, 2023 - Climate Change and Civilization: "Crisis of the 23rd Century"
And more generally:
April 2019 - An Empire Brought Down By Dust
October 2019 - "Lessons From The Last Time Civilization Collapsed"
September 2020 - Ten Civilizations or Nations That Collapsed From Drought
February 2021 - "How A Eurasian Steppe Empire Coped With Drought"
August 2022 - The Correlation of Rainfall And Assassination In Ancient Rome (plus the Moche people go bust)
March 2024 - "Why Civilizations Collapse"
Usually it's drought. A couple times it was a drought by-product, dust. More after the jump.*
And why, wary yet inquisitive reader may be wondering, are we going on about this stuff?
Because you don't want to be taken by surprise. Live one's life, take care of one's business, be aware of what's possible, roll with the changes....
November 2024 - "How Late Zhou China Reverse-Engineered a Civilization"
And though not directly related, the quite fascinating "Global Warming, It’s Always a Shore Thing":
Cute title. I was going to try to get even cuter with "On this day in history, Jericho founded 9600 B.C.", the joke being that no one knows when/what day Jericho was founded, just that it's been around for a long, long time.As a joke it is not all that funny. Sorry....
Possibly also of interest:
Last touted December 31, 2023 in: The Economist: "When civilisation collapses, will you be ready?"
....If you're into the recreating civilization thing see Open Source Ecology's Global Village Construction Set: Machines: Global Village Construction Set
Finally: "What was the longest-lasting civilization?"
My Chinese friends and acquaintances say it is the Chinese civilization. When I ask why that happened they say it is because Chinese people are superior.
When I tell them that is racist they laugh....
