The Ancients - The Origins of Civilisation

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

The world is constantly changing, and so has the perception of civilisation, but what exactly are the origins of this concept? Helping us answer this question from an anthropological and archaeological perspective, Professor Nam Kim joins Tristan once again on The Ancients. We explore how advances in these disciplines are helping to answer this long-examined question.Nam is an anthropological archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, on The Ancients, once in a while, we do cover the big topics. A few months back, we did a podcast all about the origins of warfare.

It has proven one of our most popular podcast episodes ever with Professor Nam Kim. And I'm delighted to say that Nam is back for a follow-up episode today on the origins of civilization. This is a gripping, this is an enthralling chat. It's an ancient world tour. Once again, we're going global. We're looking at cases from across the ancient world to try and answer this question from the anthropological viewpoint. Just before we get into it, I'm also going to quickly do a bit of selfish advertising because me, a tech dinosaur that I am, has just got Instagram. Ancients Tristan. And if you want

to follow that Instagram to get behind the scenes shots, images, little hints at what the upcoming ancient episodes will be, as well as behind the scenes footage of History Hits, Ancient History Department, shall we say, what future documentaries we've got in store, then why not give me a little bit of a follow? It will be worth it. It will be entertaining. I can guarantee you that. But without further ado, let's go back to the origins of civilization. Here's Nam. Nam, always a pleasure. It's great to get you back on the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be back, especially having done this now a couple of times. And on to a new question, a new topic. Yes, you're an ancient veteran now. And yes,

this topic, it always seems to be with you, Nam, we always seem to get the big topics. The origins of warfare last time, and this time, the origins of civilization. I mean, Nam, the question of when, what are the origins of civilization and all the other questions that surround it. These must be some of the most major questions for archaeologists and anthropologists since the start of the modern discipline. That's right. My interest in the origins, as you know, it started with the origins of warfare.

That got me into anthropology and archaeology in the first place. What I found in that kind of research was the further back I went and the more I wanted to ask about warfare, the more I realized it was tied up to all these other kinds of cultural changes, how it was tied up to cultural evolution and even human biological evolution, going back further and further into time periods and realms where it's really the material record that will help us to sort of answer these kinds of questions. And so this is a question that many archaeologists have been asking since the beginnings of the modern discipline.

And keeping on yourself and the backgrounds for the moment, we did something similar with your backstory for the origins of warfare, which was very interesting. But Nam, what really got you interested into, as you said, from the origins of warfare for looking at then the origins of civilization? So with the warfare research, one of the things I realized was a very important relationship between warfare and cultural change. Some would argue, and some have argued, that only

states make war or that war creates states. So we're talking about if we look at civilizations, urbanized state-like systems, warfare is somehow tied to those processes. And then it becomes a question of when and how. This got me looking at various case studies to those processes. And then it becomes a question of when and how. This got me looking at various case studies around the world. And of course, as you know, we talked about the Colois case study in northern Vietnam. And that got me interested in the kinds of social changes that occurred and how warfare may have been tied to them. That got me interested in early cities of Southeast Asia, into early forms of urbanism and

complex societies in that part of the world. And then eventually getting into how that case study in that region fit into a wider global perspective about the origins of global urbanized or civilizations of the human past. And so that set me down this road and I've been on it and fascinated ever since. Right, you've been on it and fascinated ever since. And if you are on this road, you are always inevitably, first of all, going to be asked perhaps the biggest question of all, which is, Nam, how do archaeologists, how do they define civilization? That's a very good question. I need to preface by saying there is still ongoing and very healthy, robust debates about what constitutes a civilization. There is some consensus, and

there's also a lot of different opinions about this, because it really depends on how you want to define and how you want to cut up the various attributes. So some would say that we should define it by size, that we should define it by scale, maybe the number of people that live in these organizations or societies, the kinds of buildings and so forth. Some would say it's a matter of function. So what happens in these places? Why do they exist? What do people do? I would argue that a functional kind of approach is more inclusive and it helps us to see the kinds of variations that exist. For me, a civilization is something that is highly complex. It's a society with lots and lots of people. So when we talk about

complexity, we're talking about lots of parts, relationships between these parts. So lots of people, lots of interactions. And then there are novel ways, innovative ways that people have to organize themselves, whether it's politically or economically. And so this kind of civilization perspective, we see practice in elements that link a large population of people, oftentimes in cities or what we might consider to be cities or urbanized environments. But we have institutions that begin to emerge in these complex ways. And some of the beginnings of what we might identify as government, religious systems and so forth. Those kinds of perspectives, I think, are important when we talk about the origins of civilization. So some of the earliest examples of them.

It is quite interesting because sometimes you do think of these key things and we'll be coming back to these words again and again during this podcast as we delve deeper and deeper into this but you think agrarian society or you say you think cities but exactly from what you're saying there it seems like and as you say the debate is still ongoing and it's great that we still have that healthy debate. But it's not as if you have to focus on one specific society type, one specific settlement economy type. It's a bit more fluid of a term, shall we say? Right. For me, that's the more productive way to approach it. Because if we think about subsistence practices or how people survive and thrive in environments, there are many ways in

which people can do this farming lifestyles maybe one way but there are other kinds of i'm sure i'll talk about some of these examples today but there are other kinds of societies where farming is not really a major part of their practices so for me it is a matter of a lot of people in the same place so we're talking about scale and complexity in relationships. And that functional perspective, I think, is important, especially when we think about how much the world has changed. So archaeologists estimate, and these are estimates only, that before the Holocene, human group sizes were extremely low, that the global population, which today is something like just under eight

billion people right maybe in the middle of pleistocene we're looking at a few maybe a million people from about 300 000 years ago to maybe 6 million at the start of the holocene so if we consider that starting point from the beginning of the holocene through today the exponential growth in human population and the estimates show us that maybe we're going to double by the end of this century, depending on who you talk to, that tells you something significant has been happening. And so this big question of the origins of civilization, what is it tied to? A lot of people point to food production as a big part of that. Food production in its various manifestations

likely provided a very important foundation for these innovations in human societies. And then of course, our footprint on our ecological surroundings. We'll definitely get into that in due course. And I think it is really striking when you do think those population numbers, that time in the Holocene, you say 6 million, that's basically one-tenth

of the population of the united kingdom of the uk today it's absolutely mind-blowing when you think of it in those huge global terms non-timely terms but nam going on then you mentioned how of course the world is changing and if we focus then on more recent history but how the world has been changing in the last 100 and 150 years in the modern discipline of archaeology with the ideas about the earliest human civilizations. Because at the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century, the early archaeologists, they had a very different perception of the idea of civilization. Yeah, you know, it's fascinating to me to kind of track the changes in our thinking with changes in society that were happening concurrently. So generally speaking, most of us in archaeology, when we talk about civilizations, we're talking about generally urban kinds of traditions, right? Societies that are populous, that's the point of departure.

And oftentimes, those are the kinds of sites that leave us the most data, the most material remains for us to study. With that kind of in mind, in the 19th century, we can talk about evolutionary theories beginning to emerge and how they affected our perspectives on biological changes in the natural world. But a lot of those kinds of ideas crossed over, and they influenced and shaped some of the thinking about how societies have evolved as well. And of course, we can talk about some of the other kinds of historical trends that were happening, colonization that was happening in different parts of the world. There was a kind of perspective

within anthropology and in the beginnings of archaeology of sort of evolutionary view of societies and one kind of important argument was this unilinear track that all societies go through a series of changes along a single track that every different society goes through these stages eventually reaching some end point some pinnacle and at at the time, maybe you could argue that Victorian England was viewed as that pinnacle of civilization, that eventually, if you allow every society to thrive, they would get to that point. That was the goal. That kind of notion of states and civilizations and urbanism dominated much of the thinking. And so people argue that everyone else who hadn't reached or

attained that level yet, they were savages or barbarians. There were these various stages that people argued about. The problem with that perspective was a lot of it was based on colonial administrator reports, on traveler anecdotes, on the kinds of observations people had, mainly European people had about people living outside of the continent and that was a lot of armchair theorizing soon thereafter you have archaeologists coming into the picture uncovering the remains of different settlements and sites some of the early theories saw or subscribed to these kinds of evolutionary ideas but a lot of the later ideas began to give us more and more clues about the high amount of variability, the kinds of societies that existed through time and space that didn't subscribe to

that view, that unilinear view. And I think our discipline has advanced so much further since that time. And so when, with all this archaeology being uncovered in the 20th century, when do we really start seeing people challenging this one-track view, as it were? I would argue there were people that were challenging it in the early 20th century, but that really began to gain traction with more and more archaeology that was done in different global regions. And one of the principal voices that I would point to would be Vigore de Childe, who was doing archaeology and teaching in the UK. But some of his work on early civilizations has really set the foundation for many archaeological theories that have resulted since. And in particular, some of his articles had a lot of crossover appeal.

So his work was being read not just by archaeologists, but by people outside of the discipline. So people interested in the origins of early cities, geographers, and other kinds of disciplines. And one big argument that he put forward was that the urban revolution, as he called it, came about because of what he referred to as the Neolithic revolution. And in a nutshell, that essentially is saying that farming, which is the Neolithic Revolution in his argument, led to the rise of these urban traditions. So sedentism and farming led to cities and big civilizations of the world.

That was the general argument. And I think that in the mid-20th century, that's when a lot of these ideas really started to take hold. And as child's legacy, can we still see it today? Do people still follow that mindset at all, that theory that farming is very much linked to these early civilizations? More or less, those ideas have not gone away. And for good reason. There's a lot of supporting evidence to demonstrate that farming lifestyles definitely had an impact on not just the kinds of societies that we live in, the size and scale and complexity, but also in the ways in which we live, the ways in which we organize ourselves and the environments around us, the kinds of modifications we made to surrounding ecological niches. All of that was connected.

So his ideas have persisted. And in fact, what's interesting is one of his early papers talked about a list of traits that we can associate with the so-called early civilizations. He highlighted a handful of cases, and he talked about the patterns or the commonalities between them. This trait list had to do with recording systems, with power and governance, with artistic expression, with predictive sciences, surpluses that were being generated as taxation or tribute, and so forth. There was a list of 10. Those kinds of traits have persisted in various strands of research. So we can see them today. People talk about craft production or specialization or long distance trade and exchange globalization in its beginnings. All kinds of research lines have continued

using those kinds of traits. And so the traits haven't gone away. We just have different ways of recognizing the commonalities, but also recognizing the differences between cases. And these similarities, these traits, are these the major attributes, the patterns that, as you say, nowadays, these archaeologists are identifying if they're looking at an archaeological site, if they're looking at archaeological data, and they're saying, does it have X or does it have Y or does it have Z? And then defining whether it could be from an early civilization, as it were. In many ways, those attributes do still provide a sort of background or litmus test when people talk about early civilizations. If we're looking at so-called states or city centres, regional centres or urban societies, one question might be, well, is there evidence of monumentality? That's a sort of perspective or attribute. What kinds of monumentality do we see in that particular settlement? Because that monumentality might indicate something else. It might reflect lots of labor that potentially is there in the area.

You would have to feed all that labor. You would have to organize the labor. If you have to organize the labor and feed the labor, you have to have intensive systems of food production. You also have to have ways to manage the labor. So are we talking about forms of social organization or maybe governance? How is power distributed or how is it consolidated how is authority then formed what kinds of ideology might be connected to that you could keep going on and on and on and talk about well just based on that one question about monumentality if we see pyramids for instance in the nile delta what does that tell us about that society so these kinds of indicators are very important when we talk about early civilizations well you mentioned the words litmus test there. So according to

these conventional views, shall we say, these patterns that people are looking for, that the questions that people are asking, I mean, if we're looking at this conventional view, when do we start seeing, shall we say, the earliest urban societies? Well, today, if you were to ask people what were the earliest examples from different parts of the world, there is a sort of what I would call the usual suspects list, right? There's maybe a handful of places, Mesopotamia, the Nile River Valley, the Indus River Valley in South Asia, in East Asia, the Central Plains or the Yellow River Valley, Mesoamerica, and in the Andes. Those are areas that are held up as the homelands

of independent, pristine, what people call pristine or primary civilizations. In other words, there was nothing like them in that place before they emerged. They represented radical departures from the kinds of societies that existed before they emerged. They represented radical departures from the kinds of societies that existed before they appeared. And so these are independent areas of this kind of emergence. In terms of litmus test, the earliest to answer that question, people most often point to the mid-Holocene, something like

5,000 years ago, maybe 6,000, places like Mesopotamia. And one of the reasons we attribute to the rise of this kind of urbanized tradition or civilization in parts of Mesopotamia has to do with that larger story that Child was talking about. So the Neolithic revolution leading to the urban revolution. That particular part of the world, Mesopotopotamia has been studied intensively for decades many decades maybe a century or so including archaeological investigations it has sort of influenced and shaped the thinking for other parts of the world but at around five six thousand years ago the aftermath of a domestication process can be seen, where we have people coming together,

populations growing, we have different plants and animal species being domesticated. Experiments that had started with hunter-gatherer fisher societies thousands of years before that in the Fertile Crescent beginning to become more systematized. And so this set off a lot of changes in that area of Mesopotamia, leading to some of the early classic cases of city-states that people point to. And keeping on that Mesopotamia, a litmus test, within a litmus test, as it were, the city-state which everyone or many people think of, which is this extraordinary ancient city of Ur. That's right. So Ur is this large ancient city of Ur. That's right.

So Ur is this large settlement in Mesopotamia. This is in southern Iraq. This would be the Fertile Crescent. This is the homeland of some of the earliest signs of domestication that we see anywhere in the world. And where we see Natufian cultures and other societies within that region experimenting with cultivation going back maybe 15 to 20,000 years ago. By the start of the Holocene, we start to see domestication

transitioning into forms of domestication. We can see it in the species of plants and animals that go from more wild versions to more domesticated versions. And then within a few millennia, the mixed patterns of subsistence have led to very different kinds of lifestyles. With Ur, we see a model of a city beginning to emerge that has all the trappings of the hallmarks that we consider to be early civilizations. So we see monumentality, city walls,

these massive temple constructions called ziggurats. We see systematic forms of irrigation for intensive agricultural production to support a high population. We see forms of writing in Qune'ya form to record information for various purposes. information for various purposes. We also see administration in a political sense and how that organizes life ways, but also is connected to some of these other aspects of ideology and religious practice as well. All these trappings that Childe was talking about in that trait list, we see in a case like war. And that dates to, you know, we're talking about the Mid-Holocene, so about 5, 000 years ago onward we see that kind of example mid-holocene i'll remember that word because we're going to be

coming back to it very soon no doubt and also just keeping on a bit longer because another thing which really struck out from researching for this your work on this are the tombs are the grave goods because when you look at those grave goods, they're incredible. It's a huge amassing of wealth on display in these royal tombs. Yeah. So that to me is fascinating. And it's not just for when there are other examples that we can also mention later. But this connection between politics and religion, beliefs in the afterlife and how power is symbolized and represented.

With some of those early royal tombs at Ur, for instance, part of the Sumerian civilization. We know Ur was the capital for the Sumerian kings and their dynasties. And some of the royal tombs have astonishing amounts of wealth buried within them in the form of gold, silver, bronze, semi-precious stones. Kings were buried along with these materials as well as with people. So retinues, sacrifice, retainers, presumably to accompany the royal figures into the afterlife. All that wealth, all of the aid and assistance, all the servants and court officials accompanying that royal figure into the afterlife. This was something that was repeated, not just here in this particular part of the world, but we see it elsewhere. We can see it in parts of circulation, and no longer able to

be accessed, but only by the people that presumably are going into the next world. Well, Nam, you mentioned East Asia, and that's where we're going to go now. We're going to go to China and the Central Plains, because when looking at the conventional view of the earliest civilizations, this urban revolution, a Neolithic revolution in that sense, another contender where we do see, let's say, the earliest urban societies is in East Asia, is in the central plains of China. That's right. So with this purview of the Neolithic revolution leading to the urban one, I have to footnote by saying these revolutions did not happen really in that fashion.

They didn't happen overnight. These are long transitions. But that long transition that we saw in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, we can see the same thing happening in the Central Plains and East Asia. There's evidence of hunter-gatherer communities experimenting with various strains of wild rice, of millet, and so forth. We can see it in the evidence going back 20,000 years ago. But by the time domestication really begins to take off, by the time people start to plop down and live in more sedentary lifestyles, we can see these villages beginning to emerge in the early Holocene. And similar to what we saw with Mesopotamia,

by the middle part of the Holocene, we begin to see what we might call proto cities in parts of the central plains of china sedentism landscape modification on a massive scale food production and various elements of political and religious and economic life that become much more complex begin to emerge and there seems to be continuities. In fact, there are some interesting cases where we can see forms of symbols from graves at sites like Jiahu in that area dating to about 8,500 years ago. These markings engraved on tortoise or turtle shell engraves. Some of those markings seem to be precursors to some of the Chinese characters

that we see later on in the Bronze Age. It's speculative that it's connected, and we're talking about a separation of thousands of years, but some people suspect that perhaps some of the underpinnings date to those earlier kinds of settlements and lifeways, but it's fascinating to think about. And these proto-cities in the East, which cities are we talking about? If we're looking at the late Neolithic, so during the third millennium BC or so, right on the cusp of the Bronze Age in that part of the world, there are sites like Erlitau, like Inshu at the modern day city of Anyang, where we see royal capital cities beginning to emerge that have the hallmarks of what we call civilization so monumentality palatial districts workshops that appear to be

amassing lots of precious resources and raw materials for very specialized kinds of craft production jade and other kinds of materials being manipulated, and bronzes beginning to emerge as well. All of this becoming part of the political economy. And those are the kinds of examples that we can point to. And similar to the examples we saw with Ur, with a place like Inchou that I mentioned, this is about 1600 BC onward. We have a massive city related to what's known as the Shang Dynasty. Incidentally, the Shang Dynasty is considered to be potentially the first historically documented dynasty for Chinese civilization. But at some of these places, like in Shu, we have royal cemeteries where you can see a clear hierarchy. So we talk about maybe

social inequality beginning to emerge, social stratification. There see a clear hierarchy. So we talk about maybe social inequality beginning to emerge, social stratification. There's a clear hierarchy in the kinds of graves that people have. Some massive, massive tombs to smaller graves. And the amount of wealth that's buried in these graves is astonishing. We have whole chariots with oxen or horses. In some cases, the chariot drivers themselves also sacrificed to accompany the individual into the afterlife. So similar to what we saw at Ur, this same kind of material wealth that's being buried, and also human sacrifice that's being buried as well, it's astonishing to see this kind of pattern repeating. Well, you mentioned pattern there, and I was going to say to wrap up this section of the conventional litmus test case studies for the conventional view of civilization. These patterns,

as you say, so social inequality, social complexity, what are the patterns that people identify between these two cases that we've just looked at? I would point to those that we just mentioned. I would also point to complex forms of communication and recording. You know, there are arguments about whether writing is a hallmark of civilization. I think it's more accurate to say complex forms of recording. It's not necessarily writing, it could be other ways of passing information back and forth, maybe oral traditions or other kinds of communication systems. But the other thing that I think is interesting is this connection between ideology and power.

So with the Shang, for instance, there is this divination practice, oracle bones. They were called dragon bones when they were first uncovered by modern people. But these oracle bones are essentially the scapula and other kinds of materials of animals that are heat treated and once they are treated in that fashion they begin to form cracks in the fire and people then looked at the patterns of the cracks and said that there's a way that messages are being passed to us from our ancestors or from the gods and those that were practicing the divination rituals then had power because they could say, well, this is what the ancestors are telling us. This is what the gods want us to

do. What's interesting about this is this divination ritual is pervasive in the Neolithic throughout that area of modern day China. When the Shang come along, it becomes a state practice, china when the shang come along it becomes a state practice this state apparatus the highest form of that ritual then is owned by the state so the prescriptions that come to a population come from the state and i see this very important marriage between religion and political power where the state has essentially appropriated or co-opted some existing practice. That's one commonality I think that we can probably see in many examples of early civilizations, is how those in power, those that have political authority, find ways to legitimize their political authority, find ways to legitimize the kinds of social inequality that result from having so many people living in the same society, but not everybody having the same access to standards of living.

Imagine a millennium that laid the foundations for the modern world as we know it today, when kingdoms were forged, languages shaped, cultures created. I'm Dr Kat Jarman, and on Gone Medieval, my co-host Matt Lewis and I will tell you just why the so-called Dark Ages really weren't that dark after all. Subscribe to Gone Medieval by History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. so those are the patterns now let's throw a spanner in the works because archaeological research archaeological data has revealed counterpoints variation as you

say the debate is still very much alive to this day and kicking there are counterpoints and variation to the conventional understanding the conventional view of civilization so the more and more i read and teach and talk about this particular question on the origin of civilization the more i realize the amount of variability that exists. And we can point to the mid-holocene as a very important transitional and pivotal time period. There's no question about that. But the underpinnings, what happens before that time period, what happens before the holocene, that's also fascinating to think about. And there are some cases that we can see in the archaeological record that illustrate this. We have places before the so-called Neolithic and Urban Revolutions that challenge our conventional

understanding about early civilizations. A site like Çatalhuyuk, for instance, in Turkey. This is a city, or according to some, a village, depends on who you talk to. This is a settlement, according to some a village depends on who you talk to this is a settlement let's say that begins to emerge right at the beginning of the holocene so right around 9 000 years ago we see places like shatau huyuk where there's a sort of transitional period between hunting and gathering kinds of subsistence practices and farming lifestyles but there's nucleation there's population aggregation lots of people coming together to live in one place. And they build this settlement to kind of suit their needs in this area. The suspicion is we're looking at its peak, maybe a few thousand people. But this could be a very important case, because we start to see signs of social inequality hierarchy beginning to emerge.

We see maybe what some consider to be experimental ways of living so innovations and how people are living in a more densely packed environment and how some of the material record shows us domestication is a very big part of this area and we have artifacts something like 2 000 artifacts have been recovered in recent studies that show a mix of what we might consider egalitarian kinds of life ways, but also forms of complexity, inequality that are beginning to emerge. This particular case exists at 9,000 years ago, well before the mid-holocene, and we can see a link between domestication, intensification of farming practices and competition and maybe forms of inequality as well. And that is a very different picture than what we see at the mid-Holocene in the conventional arguments.

So Nam, to clarify, so as you said, long before the conventional view of the 5000 BC, that area, the mid-Holholocene we do seem to see at this site it seems to be the date seems to be key this possible evidence of social complexity which definitely does seem to suggest this site and I'm sure there will be others that we go into in a second but does seem to counter that conventional view that social complexity only seemed to emerge, as you say, in the mid-Holocene around 5000 BC, not some 4000 years earlier than that. Right. They challenge, but they sort of complement and call into question these conventional views. That's how I would characterize it. I don't think they negate the arguments, but at the same time, they suggest that we're looking at variation that we're looking at the

possibility that there's a lot more evidence out there that will continue to complicate our perspective so that's one there are others around the world well let's go to one other and it's one that i'm very much looking forward to talking about because it featured on the podcast not too long ago and this is we're going to Japan, we're going to the Jomon culture. And it's a huge period in ancient Japan's history. What do we know about societies in the Jomon period of ancient Japan? Yeah, the Jomon case is fascinating to consider. The first thing we have to say is, you know, it's a time period that is very long that people ascribe to the Jomon culture. So about 16,500 years ago to something like 2,000 plus years ago.

Obviously, that's a huge chunk of time. There's a lot of change that likely happens. These communities are not all the same. But generally speaking, we can say a few things about the Jomon culture. These are hunting, gathering, and fishing communities. we can say a few things about the Javan culture. These are hunting, gathering, and fishing communities. They represent some of the earliest makers and users of pottery in that part of the world, and indeed in many parts of the world. So we also have evidence that at some point in time, in the middle part especially, we begin to see population levels of growing.

These communities were thriving in the areas in which they lived without full-scale farming. So we start to see organized permanent villages beginning to emerge by around 6,000 years ago. There's evidence of cemeteries, of sedentism, of large populations. We also have storage pits. So it's not farming in the sense that we see elsewhere, just in parts of China, for instance, right across the water. We know that the Jomon people at that point in time were in contact with farming agricultural societies, and yet they did not adopt those kinds of practices, which many would argue flies in the face of the conventional perspective. practices, which many would argue flies in the face of the conventional perspective. Once farming emerges, everybody becomes a farmer because it's such a novel, innovative way of living that allows

us to accomplish so much. But here's a case where we have communities that thrive without farming, that become very in tune with the environment around them. There was no need to become full scale farmers to invest that kind of time and energy. And so one thing that we might say is their cultural practices didn't need to change, and maybe there was no desire to change them. So they persist in their ways of life. And we have high population levels, we have elements of monumentality, we can see signs of ideology and religious systems emerging, forms of what we would call social complexity associated with the Jomon. And yet this is a very different kind of case than what we see in parts of China or elsewhere in some of these other classic cases of pristine civilizations. when you think that this culture, these people seem to show this social complexity and to have at the same time voluntarily maybe even decided not to become an agrarian society at the same time.

Yeah, I find it fascinating and it makes one speculate, right? If your family, if your ancestors have always lived in a certain way you might have ideas about the kinds of cultural practices you have the kinds of things that are acceptable to eat for instance or to cultivate or to exploit in the environment the ways in which you might conserve certain things if your family and other families around you your communities have always lived a certain way and you have belief systems that are tied to that way of life. Maybe you don't want to change. Maybe there are traditions you want to keep intact. And so you might know about food practices that exist elsewhere, but that might not be consistent with your views. And so why adopt them? Why change your way of life

if they're completely foreign to you? I don't know if that's exactly what was happening, but one can speculate that perhaps there is this kind of cultural view of how one should live. And cultural preferences then dictate the kinds of choices that people make, right? What should be done to your surrounding environment? What should be done to the kinds of plants or animals that are around you? How should you use them? Absolutely. Absolutely. Speculate away. That seems to be key for this when we are delving so far back into ancient history, into prehistory even. I mean, so those cases are examples where it seems that there is social complexity before the mid-Holocene. And if we now focus on another pattern that we've highlighted,

social inequality, because Nam, we also seem to find these cases across the world which do seem to indicate social inequality in certain societies also predating the mid-Holocene. Yes, the key word here is indicate. So we have examples of social inequality that may be happening prior to the Holocene. So a lot of people talk about civilizations as sort of the origins of social inequality or extreme forms of it. And we can see it in the world around us today, obviously. But what's fascinating would be some of the cases that come to us from, say, the Pleistocene. There are a couple of sites in Russia, for instance. There's a site called Sunghir, which has a few burials that have been uncovered.

There's one particular burial known as Sunghir I, where there's an individual suspected to be a male. His head and chest were decorated with ivory beads. They were suspected to have been originally sewn onto his clothing. And there were also mammoth ivory bracelets on his arms, the remains of a beaded cap on his head. But what's interesting about this is the amount of time and wealth that would be represented by that resource, that material. Not everybody is treated in that same way. Not everybody has access to that material. Not everybody's treated in that same way. Not everybody has access to that material. And for this person, one person to have all of it suggests something important about the person, about his status, and potentially maybe a sort of juxtaposition

between his status and those of others. So an early sign of social stratification or inequality, potentially. And also, if we then go slightly further west, I've got another example on my list, going from Russia, going to Western Europe. I'm not going to try my French pronunciation of this place, but it's a place in France, which is the other example of possible social inequality before the mid-Holocene. That's right. And actually, I forgot to mention something else about the Sunghir. There are two other burials besides the Sunghir I. to mention something else about the Sunghir. There were two other burials besides the Sunghir I. The other two individuals seemed to be adolescents. They were buried in this very unusual fashion,

head to head, both lying in one sort of cardinal direction. But these two individuals were very young and also appeared to have vast amounts of wealth. Beads associated with them, it probably would have taken hundreds of hours to manufacture and produce these beads. But something like 3,000 mammoth ivory beads with some of the string intact, they probably were wearing them. But if you imagine how many animals might have been involved, how difficult and challenging it would have been to procure all this material and then to bury this wealth, wealth. So we talked about some of the wealth that was being buried in these later societies. This was happening here as well. It's something like 15,000 years ago.

It's fascinating to think about. And some would argue, did the ornament symbolize wealth? Did they symbolize power? Did they symbolize some kind of status? Was there a religious significance? Were these individuals revered in some way? That's all obviously a matter of debate and speculation, but it points to the possibility that that kind of thinking, that kind of ideology was very important for these communities at that point in time. Just before we go on to the French example now, just something which has come

to my mind is when we're talking about social inequality and how we can use it as a possible identifier of civilization of the first civilizations as it were just to clarify for myself because i'm thinking now of hunter-gatherer groups and thinking that there must have been leaders even in these small groups right to tell them where they're going to go next people who maybe know the area more or have more prestige in one way or another in the Mesolithic period or something like that. So how can we distinguish between something like that, between a leader of a small society in a hunter-gatherer group and let's say social inequality and that is going to be civilization? Right. That's a very important question. And it's one that I struggle with, and I think a lot of people struggle with. We can say that maybe the way to look at it is complexity, right? There is no reason to deny complexity for various kinds of

societies. So, you know, maybe 100 years ago, people would have thought, okay, at the pinnacle of civilization, you have a certain way of life, you have a ruler, you have, maybe a hundred years ago, people would have thought, okay, at the pinnacle of civilization, you have a certain way of life. You have a ruler, you have a king or queen, you have agrarian societies and big urban cities that are sedentary, etc. Right. Those attributes. But what we should think about is complex forms of social organization that can exist in any kind of society. It doesn't matter if you are a farming society or a hunting and gathering and fishing society. It doesn't matter if you're a mobile pastoralist society. The ways in which people organize themselves, whether they're living in a mobile way across the landscape or they're plopped down in the middle of a city, they can

be just as complex. It depends on scale and size. And so if you have a lot of people that live together whether it's in one environment or another one kind of settlement or another way of life you can have forms of inequality you can have forms of social stratification you can have leaders the difference might come in in nuanced ways how these offices of leadership begin to emerge, how they persist over time, how they become institutionalized, how do people decide who become leaders? Is it a matter of one person and their skills and their charisma?

Or is it someone who then is elected or chosen? You know, there are different ways you can cut this up. But to me, it goes back to what we said at the beginning of the conversation, that we have to have a more inclusive, universal perspective, a functional kind of definition that allows us to recognize the importance

of different ways in which these societies organize themselves. And so when we think about that perspective, when we go now to a case like the Sumihir case, we obviously don't know what the rest of the society looked like. But we can imagine that there were very complex ways in which people were relating to each other. And then we can see similar things if we go west to that site, which I hinted at earlier in France, Saint-Germain-le-Rivière. Nam, what is this site?

So this is a site burial that was discovered in the 1930s. And there was a series of materials, teeth, shells, weapons that lay above the stomach of this individual. Ochre, red ochre was present on the skeleton, on the grave goods. And we have lots of bones, animal remains found with this individual. What's interesting is the red deer teeth. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era,

make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Canines only. So not all the teeth, but just the canines and they probably come from 60 plus different individual deer 55 stags eight hinds that's the estimate and the preference is from very young deer specimens so when you take that evidence and then you piece together some of the background research where we know that red deer was not very common in the region at that time, these teeth must have been procured from very far away. They must have been sourced from distant places over a vast amount of time. So this is a lot of wealth.

This is a lot of effort to bring all this material together and to place it in the burial of one single person. And we're looking at something like 15,000 years ago, again, in the late Pleistocene. But we don't see this kind of burial as common practice elsewhere within the region. This tells us something that's very specific to this individual, these precious items being saved for this particular person. And to me, it signals a potential that there is some kind of hierarchy this person is accorded some kind of status and it's very different than what we see in the rest of the region so again another signal however faint

of potential social inequality moving on then to the next pattern, the idea of monumentality. Because once again, there are some interesting examples which seem to suggest certain societies possessed monuments, monumental buildings or religious systems prior to the mid-Holocene too. There are a couple of cases that I think are interesting to think about. One is from central Ukraine, also around 15,000 years ago, the site of Mesurik. This was discovered in the 1960s by a local farmer. And essentially, you have circular huts that were constructed. They're in surface area, maybe 12 to 24 square meters. But they're made out of mammoth bones. And these bones, it's estimated that maybe 150 different individual mammoths might be represented at the site.

150 different mammoths. It's staggering to consider how you would harvest that material. How many people would have to be involved and so forth. We have these kind of popular conventional views about hunter-gatherer societies, the cave person, right, in the ice ages, and how they're mobile, less complex in temporary camps. They're sort of ephemeral in the landscape. And yet we have this case that shows us this enormous investment of effort and labor and energy, and this resource that's all brought together, constructed in this way, this, to me, we could argue is a form of monumentality. Maybe not on the order of

the Great Pyramid, but it is a form of monumentality for a group of people. And so some hunter-gatherer societies obviously lived in very complex fashions, and maybe they didn't leave the same kinds of material records, but they left something for us to ponder in any case. And also, if we go back to Turkey, we started with these examples with Çatalhöyük, and it feels like we're going back to that area as well. I believe Göbekli Tepe, that's in the same kind of area, isn't it? That's right. It's in the same area, but it's far earlier than Ur. So places like Ur in Mesopotamia, we have this other site in southeast Turkey. This is pre-pottery, Neolithic. This is well before full-scale domestication in these massive cities that we see the city-states.

But we have at Gobekli Tepe at around 11,000 years ago, 9,000 BC. So this is the beginning of the holocene we have a series of megaliths that are standing at this site that predates stonehenge by some 6 000 years so these are not farming societies as we know them as we see later. There's no sign of domesticated animals or plants, but we have these massive stone features and carvings on them. There's also recent research that shows feasting that's happening at the sites. Perhaps it's a cultic center of some kind, a religious ceremonial place, a place of gathering. The debates are still out there, but there's evidence for beer that may be brewing. This comes to us from

residue analysis so the suspicion is that there is something significant about this location people are gathering here people organize themselves to build these monuments and they continue to come back and hold feasting kinds of activities here it's likely bringing in people from very far away maybe it's a pilgrimage site of some kind but But the staggering thing is the time period, 11,000 years ago. This is pre-agricultural complexity, ritual systems and monumentality that we see. Maybe the beginnings of religion and so forth. However, you might want to define that term. But it's here in this part of the world and it predates those classic cases.

And it's astonishing to think about and i guess one other example which has just come to mind here and it's because we talked about it on our previous podcast and it might be me completely wrong i might have got the dates completely mixed up but i have to think of the walls of jericho i've got to think of jericho is that also that time as well now or is that closer to the time of awe and the more conventional ones? My recollection is it's somewhere in the middle between these, but it also is quite early. And the walls show us some form of monumentality. And of course, as we talked about in that podcast on warfare, it's debatable about the functions of those walls. But you do see the same kind of

aggregation and the emergence of something I call a city or a proto-city. But I think all of this illustrates the potential that these kinds of ways of life have existed for a very long time. It's not just in the mid-Holocene. It's not just with domestication and farming. But people have been tinkering for as long as they've been around. and farming. But people have been tinkering for as long as they've been around. And some experiments work and last and leave durable signatures for archaeologists to find. Some experiments don't last, and perhaps we don't find the evidence of those life ways. But there's no reason to doubt the potential existence of these complex forms of societies. And one other thing before we wrap up, one other thing,

one other pattern that we also seem to see before the mid-Holocene is possible writing, possible literacy. That's right. So there are examples, the traditional conventional views, something like cuneiform would be some of the earliest representations of writing systems of literacy. But this is only one form, one case study of recorded information system of communication. We can point to different examples outside of that classic case from the Mid-Holocene in Mesopotamia. I mentioned earlier that in the Central Plains, for instance, the Yellow River Valley of china we have shang writing that's very systematized but we have before that bronze age period well back into the neolithic going back

millennia signs of symbols that are being recorded on various media whether it's pottery or turtle shell or so forth but these symbols can go as far back as 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. So it tells us that recording systems can be varied culturally. We can point to one of the massive empires of the Common Era, the Inca, for instance. This is obviously many people know about the quipu and the recording system used by the Inca Empire. the khipu and the recording system used by the inca empire you know we have this massive infrastructure of 25 000 miles or so of roadway that connected all parts of the inca empire and we have evidence that the khipu system little knots on pieces of cord and rope were encoding pieces of information that could then be transferred across territories and then read and deciphered

by others, transmitting information. We could also point to some of the kinds of quote-unquote cave art that existed in the Pleistocene. Were these depictions being recorded for artistic reasons, or was there something else that's also at play here? Was there a different kind of function? Perhaps they were recording information. Perhaps they were transmitting information from generation to generation or from person

to person. We could also talk about oral traditions. I remember reading recently some very interesting research in Australia with some of the oral tradition of Aboriginal populations and how they can track changes that were happening in the environment going back thousands of years just by looking at what's in the contents of these oral traditions they were able to compare that with some of the geological studies showing the environments did match some of the descriptions in the oral tradition so i think it's sort of a misnomer to say that literacy or writing is the trapping of civilization

where we can see communication systems that are just as complex that come to us in different case studies around the world. Absolutely. Those oral traditions, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, are fascinating when you delve into the detail of them. So it's really good that you were able to mention those right now. Let's fast forward then to the present day and lessons that we can learn. Because, Nam, what do these lessons from archaeology, these complex lessons, but important

lessons, what can they tell us about our world today? I think they can tell us a lot. I think they tell us a lot about how we got to where we are now, but maybe even more importantly, where we're going, the kinds of possible futures we might have. If we consider, I think I mentioned at the beginning, those estimates of world population. The other thing that we talk about would be how we live in the world. So cities, for instance, 10,000 years ago, arguably there were no cities whatsoever, nothing like that. Today, we can point to all of these examples of cities, but not only just cities, but what we might consider megacities, where we have populations of in excess of 10 million people. There are something like 30 different megacities that we could point to around the world today.

54% of our population living in urban areas today. 54% of our population living in urban areas today. And maybe the estimate was something like 33% in 1950. So we can see the massive kinds of changes. The forecast is something like two-thirds of us will be living in cities by the middle of this century. Where are we going? Not only that, but how does that affect the forms of social organization that exist? If we talk about the little signals of social inequality that existed in the Pleistocene, imagine the massive amounts of social inequality that will exist in the world that we live in

50 years from now or 100 years from now. There is a profound set of changes that has been happening that will continue to happen. We could also point to the lessons we might learn about how we affect the environments around us, our footprints. There is all this talk right now, in fact, about global warming and climate change. We have very good evidence that the ways in which we live have an impact on the environments around us. And so the transformation of these ecologies, the so-called Anthropocene, for instance, that's important to think about.

But that also brings us into closer proximity with various species of animals. And what we're living through right now with COVID-19 could be attributable to these changes in the environment where our habitats, species mixing together that traditionally had not been for long periods of time all of a sudden being in closer proximity perhaps that has an effect we didn't talk about this but many many millennia ago there was this idea of the neolithic decline where we have settlements in parts of europe maybe around 6, 5 400 years ago these mega settlements experienced a rapid

abandonment all of a sudden for many of these sites some people argue that that Neolithic decline came about because of all the connections between people overcrowding and diseases with animals all living in close proximity that these crowd diseases and poor sanitation allowed for pathogens to evolve and spread very quickly. This is something that has happened repeatedly throughout human history. We're living through it right now, and we probably will continue to experience episodes like this. So the lessons of the past, I think, are very telling and can be revealing for what we know about how we got to our world today and where we're likely to be moving forward. Nam, very good way to finish the podcast with these links to the present day

and the present situation. Last but certainly not least, you've written a book, we're talking all about the origins. You haven't written a book on the origins of civilization. That's going to come in the years ahead, I'm sure. Huge project in waiting. But you have done another monumental book on the origins of civilization that's going to come in the years ahead i'm sure a huge project in waiting but you have done another monumental book on the origins of warfare which is called emergent warfare in our evolutionary past that's co-authored with my colleague mark kissel yes and

that was the subject of one of our earlier podcasts it absolutely was absolutely was the origins of warfare as you said the book by yourself and Mark Kissel. Nam, it's always great to see you on the podcast. This was a great chat and it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Thank you. It was delightful and I'm honored to have been invited back. Thank you.