Trade is built into our human nature. We all want stuff we can’t have, and no one can produce everything. Even if all the raw materials and all the skills and all the knowledge was possessed, there isn’t enough time for a single (person, city, country) to produce enough to fill all desires.
So we trade to get what we want. This has been the case for all of human civilization and I am confident if you could peer into the earliest time periods the rocks sharpened during the Stone Age traveled far and wide as well. Trying to ban or artificially limit trade is like trying to limit the tides - you are battling against a decentralized force of human desire.
This is the same reason you can’t ban drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling - and on the positive side love, children, religion - both categories of which have been attempted by various governments in recent and distant times.
I like history because it shows us how stable we are as humans. The context changes but our desires and motivations do not.
I'd go deeper than that, I'd say trade is built into nature.
Forests have economies, sharing resources. Deciduous trees over-produce "food" in the summer, when their big leaves pay off, which they share with the conifers. In return, the conifers (which have food year-round because they don't drop their needles) give food to the deciduous trees in early spring, before the new leaves form.
Yet, no H. neanderthal. site has yielded any scrap of unambiguous evidence of long-distance trade. It might be their defining quality, vs H. sap. But they were undeniably human, otherwise.
I don't know if Denisovans traded, but they seem to have had a rotary drill tens of millennia ahead of us. Apparently there was at least one other human species in southern Asia, not resolved yet, who left a genetic trace.
You skirt dangerously close to "markets are a law of nature". Make no mistake, every last detail of our markets had to be invented. Millions of variations were tried, and are still being tried. It has not converged yet.
North Korea wishes they could keep their population in a vacuum divorced from history, but wishing has been ineffective. Of course their upper echelon is passionately involved in international commerce.
This is a tangent, but about your last point, I wonder how humans will handle this once we’ve had many decamillennia of extremely well documented history, so that the human patterns have repeated over and over and over so much that there’s no illusion of progress in human nature anymore.
(Of course, it’s possible that we’ll end up modifying ourselves by e.g. genetic means so that this won’t really be happening.)
The recent rise in mercantilism / trade wars / tariffs / America (or insert country) First / China one child policies / China and Soviet state official atheism / Russia and China banning gays
It is questionable if it's universally innate, there being many atheists, but now you've explained it I can see your point.
Have to say you used some ill-focussed or ill-expressed arguments which is why I have been repeatedly chasing you for an explanation. Take that as you will. But thanks for clarifying.
As is increasingly speculated, humanity has had sophisticated societies for far longer than a few thousand years. Zero chance we just sprung up out of the dirt one day. Guaranteed the ice age destroyed huge swaths of technically primitive but socially advanced civilizations. Two issues with this hypothesis:
1. Over 10,000 years few artifacts can survive degradation
2. There are political motivations for controlling the narrative around evolution and the birth of civilization
For those unaware, OP is referring to a crackpot theory most recently advanced by the journalist Graham Hancock. The idea of sophisticated pre-ice age civilizations is universally regarded by the archaeologists and experts to be roughly on par with the "ancient aliens" hypothesis.
Ah yes, gatekeeping and name calling. The cornerstone of "established" science everywhere. There is no need to denigrate Graham Hancock's hypothesis as "crackpot" and it certainly isn't a proper theory. Science welcomes all ideas only to discard them with proof to the contrary. Unfortunately, much of archeology is inference not proven fact. The farther back we go the more inference and less fact we have. There is certainly a possibility that an advanced Pleistocene civilization existed and was destroyed by a cosmic impact. To dismiss these ideas as "crackpot" is one of the most unscientific claims I regularly encounter.
We know there are human built megalithic structures that are dated at the end of the Pleistocene. We know that the Pleistocene ended abruptly with all North American megafauna perishing and immense amounts of meltwater entering the oceans. We don't know if there were a bunch of distributed civilizations with similar technology levels or if there was a global civilization that shared knowledge before or after cataclysm. We also don't know what caused the end of the Pleistocene. This is the realm of hypothesis on all sides.
It's worth noting that falsificationism really only applies to experimental sciences like physics and chemistry. The "historical sciences" like geology, paleontology, and archaeology don't work that way because of the arrow of time. I'd recommend Cleland's original [1] or most recent paper [2] on this topic.
The upside is that we can differentiate between the quality of various competing hypotheses in a reasoned way. That's how we can say that the traditional academic narratives are epistemologically better than e.g. Tolkien's Silmarillion.
Falsification has happened plenty of times in historical and archaeological research. You could posit that Mohenjo Daro and Ur had no contact right up until trade goods showed up.
In recent memory just about everyone was dead certain that monumental architecture happened only where there was agriculture. And, that once a people took up agriculture, they kept at it. And, that humans got to the Americas no more than 15,000 years ago.
There’s certainly no harm in indulging in wild, unfounded recreational speculation, as long as one is clear that’s what’s happening. Usually that’s not what going on with people who allude darkly to “[unspecified] political motivations for controlling the narrative around evolution and the birth of civilization”
Science only welcomes new ideas when they offer a possible solution to a problem with the existing paradigms. For this type of theory, if you had data showing the earliest known societies were unusually advanced, or if you had artifacts that suggest more wide spread early societies, these would be facts wanting an explanation.
You can't just say something like "maybe all language was singing until 20,000 years ago" and claim it's scientific until proven false.
Occam's razor is also a thing. If you can explain the exact same facts with a theory that involves fewer or more general assumptions, that also counts.
There is a very recent analysis of Hancock's "Ancient Apocalypse" series. Well worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=341Lv8JLLV4 by Stefan Milo.
Case in point: Hancock presents _zero_ evidence.
I haven't seen the new documentary, but I read one of Hancock's books years ago. His book Underworld, which is about how evidence of ancient civilizations is underwater as the coastline has changed dramatically over the last few thousands of years. I think he draws way too many conclusions from way too little evidence, but that premise itself has always struck me as incredibly plausible. The issue is that a lot of the evidence is underwater now, and therefore hard to get to. But that doesn't really mean we shouldn't be looking for it though, right? Otherwise we're like the drunk looking for his keys under the street light because its easier, not because he dropped them there.
As for the academy, Thomas Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", where he argues that most paradigm shifts happen in revolutionary leaps instead of incremental improvements. We've been pushing back the timelines of human expansion for a long time. It was impossible and just fables that Vikings were on North America, until it wasn't for example.
Hancock is very questionable in motives and methods (talks a lot about how he is suppressed rather than what he thinks is true)
But it’s true that narratives around past civilizations are controlled for political reasons
Eg in China the winners want to paint the picture that the way they govern is inevitable and mandated, when really there was a lot of diversity, experimentation, and violence
Including matriarchal societies!!
I recommend reading Dawn of Everything by graeber and wengrow for peer reviewed info on past, ignored, alternative civilizations
It does have an axe to grind but it’s a welcome contrast and asks good questions
You don’t need to invoke hypothetical pre ice age societies for any of this
However the book does give a good perspective on how much of history we simply don’t know, which leaves room for speculators like Hancock
You're completely right, but I also want to caution (you mention this too) readers that Graeber himself has a strong perspective. When evaluating historical narratives, it's essential to dig into sources closer to primary sources when possible. There's too much at stake for most modern states for there not to be controversy.
This sort of tension exists for foundational histories in many, many cultures. South Asia's existing religious tension motivates people to evaluate and reevaluate historical events trying to show one or another religiously-aligned power as good or bad. Western history probably has it the least because it's well-preserved, well-studied, and has many copies of primary sources lying around which allows lots of people to cast critical eyes upon an analysis.
FWIW, I wasn't that impressed with "Dawn of Everything", I wish it had more data and less polemic. (I think the polemical argument would have been stronger if, paradoxically, it had been weaker.)
Yeah my recommendation isn't because I think it's a fair and balanced viewpoint, but that it provides a much-needed perspective. It shouldn't be the ONLY book you read about such issues. I also like Guns, Germs, and Steel, which the authors have criticized (mostly respectfully).
There are many things about human history that we simply don't know, and triangulating between experts with very different viewpoints is a good way to get closer to the truth, or at least make you think.
A key point is that human history is hundreds of thousands of years long, and for many periods of hundreds/thousands of years, we only have 1 or 2 artifacts. And the world is very big. Entire civilizations with complex social structures have come and gone with little trace, and many of them lasted longer than the United States or the modern governments of Russia or China. (Obviously 20th century growth rates make that comparison hard, but it's still worth thinking about)
Also, I would say that DoE is better at criticism than at making claims, or providing a concrete path toward more egalitarian societies. It's responding somewhat to "big history" books, so it's probably better to read those first.
I'm sympathetic to the arguments presented in the book, my complaint is that it's "preaching to the choir" too much. I think it would be a stronger book if it was less polemical.
I think it's fascinating and important that Native lifestyles were preferable to European/American lifestyles. That extended quote from Franklin raises some very salient questions, IMO.
That's kind of my point: there's so much fascinating and important work going on right now that the book just sort of gestures at in the rush to make their political points. FWIW, I'm sympathetic to their arguments, but I'd like to see them more well-supported (than they were in that book, IMO.)
FWIW, I want to make it clear that I'm not criticizing David Graeber. I'm not an anarchist myself, but I very much value and respect his work.
Also, when I used "their" above I meant David Graeber and the co-author of the book David Wengrow.
While I'm at it, I should mention that when I called GH a "kook" in the other thread, I also meant it in a "takes one to know one" kind of a way. To wit: I'm a kook (by many measures, not my own) too. E.g. I believe Bigfoot is real, that they are hominids, and that they may well be as intelligent as H. sapiens or more so.
On alternate Tuesdays I believe the Earth is hollow, just to keep my brain in shape.
Humans appeared 160-250,000 years ago. We spread to Australia 45,000 years ago and to the Americas 15,000 years ago. We have evidence of agriculture in Turkey from about 9,000 years ago.
Given the ability to travel for and wide, it seems weird that humans wouldn’t have sophisticated societies. Evidence is no doubt wiped out by time and prime land was flooded as the ice age ended.
The global population was much lower in those days. I doubt there were large cities or magical technology. But I’m sure you had tribal societies with broad reach and social structures.
We have a bias to assume that people in the distant past were quaint or unable to handle basic concepts. We benefit from standing on the shoulders of giants, but our forebearers were just as smart as we are. We have better tools.
Crackpot theory? It's a straightforward inference from human behavioral modernity, and the fact that some places have always been resource-rich enough to allow for at least some effort to be spent on things other than brute survival. Those who suppose the contrary as a default are merely transporting our naïve, self-serving stereotypes about "savage" societies to the very far past.
There's two different ways to interpret the GP post. Using the term "civilization" instead of "sophisticated societies", the first is that civilization == the traditional childe definition. The academic timelines around that sort of stuff are well-established and people like graham Hancock do push ideas best described as crackpot about these sorts of societies existing before the LGM.
But there's also the redefinitional arguments that the Childe definition of civilization is wrong. That's the vein you're working in and where books like Dawn of Everything are arguing from. They're much more agreeable to modern archaeologists and most wouldn't disagree too strongly (if at all).
Wengrow has a good opinion piece on this dichotomy in [1].
AIUI, Childe proposed a number of criteria for civilization, all of them correlating one way or another with 'increasingly complex society'. Some of those we'll never know if the very ancient past had them (and I think even Graham Hancock would acknowledge this), the others are pretty much in line with the article you link to. So I'm not sure how much genuine disagreement is involved, as opposed to scholars holding on to untenable viewpoints and neglecting to put two and two together.
It's a bit fuzzier. The popular model prior to Childe was Lewis Morgan's three stage Savagery->Barbarism->Civilization model. When Childe published his famous paper [1] laying out the criteria, he acknowledged Morgan (though I'm not sure it's cited in the paper itself) and was intentionally providing standardized criteria to recognize the last stage. Childe himself preferred the terminology of "city" and later archaeologists adopted the phrase "state", but really these are all the same broad concept with slightly different connotations.
But aside from a few exceptions (people at USYD, Michael Smith), Childe's definitions are increasingly disagreeable to archaeologists. Most of the newer generations, myself included, find anti-evolutionist arguments significantly more persuasive and even those that don't aren't big fans of the original formulation of Childe's ideas.
So your point is that the disagreeable connotations and 'evolutionist' viewpoint is something Childe might have picked up from Morgan, and that what scholarship is finding out now is that complex societies might not necessarily have been all that state-like, or highly unequal/hierarchical?
I am not some "ancient aliens" kook, but many comments above seem to overlook the fact that until relatively recently we thought that people 10k years ago, world wide, were fresh out of caves/hunter-gathers and some of the more brighter ones were starting to farm and do animal husbandry. Then, Göbekli Tepe is unearthed and it is obvious that, as you say, that shit did not happen one day with just some super talented hunter-gatherer having an artistic streak. I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. Add to that that most things (wood, iron, basically anything other than hard rock) disappear pretty quickly in large timescales and it gets really murky to think about and archaeologists in particular seem to become outraged at anything that isn't currently in vogue.
Complex society -- legislatures, economics, the works, even writing -- could easily have occurred hundreds of times over the millennia, without building with stone and so leaving no trace after they collapsed or were wiped out by invaders. We know about a precious few that did build with stone, that could have been as socially sophisticated as you like, but left no trace of that.
We know extremely little about people in the Amazon basin, beyond that they had already domesticated orchard trees by 10,000 years ago, built over wide areas, and had no access to stone. They had ceramics, but did not favor bricks. They left us a few enigmatic inventions including curare and terra preta.
Assuming primitive social relations is very close to racism. Sophistication seems to need nothing more than population.
Population demographics are one of the things archaeologists are most interested in. There's lots of independent methodologies that we've developed to tell us when people were present and in what numbers. Many don't even rely on finding artifacts. Things like genetic work directly tell us effective population sizes at various points in human history (low), charcoal analysis tells us how many fires were burning, hearth counts (indicated by rock or soil discoloration) tell us how many people were cooking, pollen analysis tells us what the plant landscape looked like in areas, etc. There's even an incredible technique based on eDNA analysis that can directly measure how many people were in the area when a soil sample was deposited by measuring the DNA from their shed cells. I've only seen that one used for results back to 30-40kya, but it's still pretty cool.
As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa.
Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.
Those tests are run only in places we already knew people were.
Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf off China, now under water, where people lived for at least 70,000 years. We know they invented oceangoing navigation pretty early, because they got to Australia.
People did that another 100,000 years earlier and got to Crete.
The null hypothesis has to be that people in places with sufficient population have complex society, because that is baseline human behavior. You need good evidence of someplace they didn't, and an explanation why not.
So any population wiped out by genocide, famine, or plague is unsampled. The Amazon basin hosted many millions of people for millennia until smallpox, diphtheria, and measles were delivered to them.
No? Even genocides leave descendants. Moreover, who was doing this hypothetical genocide that didn't have kids?
As I said before, it's not logically impossible that a highly populous society existed in the pleistocene. But the constraints it would have to fit grow increasingly contorted as the state of knowledge improves. At some point it starts to resemble a small colony of advanced alien settlers who landed one day and disappeared a short while later. That explanation might honestly be easier to account for than what some people propose, since they don't have to develop their tech from scratch here on Earth.
Ignoring the gaslighting, how much do we know about the Chatham Islanders' pre-contact culture? And, how many of those descendants have non-Maori Y chromosomes? Any?
I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time.
They don't. Archaeologists are well aware that terms like "Hunter-Gatherer" and "lithics" subsume huge amounts of diversity covering hundreds of thousands of years, but they've stuck around for legacy reasons. Quoting the intro from my old textbook (The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum):
[...] in the models developed in the twentieth century to describe hunter-gatherers, variation was something to be explained away to uncover the essential hunter-gatherer.
There are thousands upon thousands of recognized "industries" of distinct toolmaking traditions and that's only a minuscule proportion of what must have existed.
Ye well they were probably not less intelligent than we are. And we can more or less only estimate their sofistication by their tools we find at burial sites etc.
Obviously complex societies could have existed on a social level.
> Ye well they were probably not less intelligent than we are
It's important to emphasise that they were definitely not less intelligent, nor did they have different behaviour. You can take a child from 50,000 years ago and they would perform the same as the average child today. The modern homo sapien sapien reached its point as early as 160,000 years ago.
The idea here is that we're expected to believe that modern humans -- like me and you -- sat idle for at least 80,000 to as much as 150,000 years before reaching a point in the last 10k years and suddenly forming civilizations (of which there are about six known, independent origin points around the globe). We lack evidence to the contrary -- sure -- but if we find evidence it will just be construed as a black swan event that would, in hindsight, be obvious.
Do you have any evidence for what you are saying? It sounds like the rabbit hole I went down after watching the recent Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse and discovering pretty much all of his assertions can be refuted by just reading the Wikipedia for each “ancient” site such as this.
I've seen him speak. (It was, IIRC, at a Fortean Times Unconvention, an event that -- in part -- intentionally gives nutcases a chance to speak publicly, for the audience's amusement.)
He is a 100% total fraud, a laughing stock among genuine historians and archaeologists.
A substantial portion of the indicated area in the map later became the Median empire. Above link discusses the "power vacuum" in that area before the establishment of centralized power, which would explain the lack of state involvement as there was no sovereign counter party to the trade treaty for the consuming power. This also may explain why the first Iranian dynasty were the Medes in that specific part of today's Iran (and not in the southern zone like the Persians who came to power later) - looks like it was most likely an outgrowth of economic activity.
Also note that there was a significant Israelite community in that center dot in Iran (which was called Rhages and is now called Ray, now a suburb of Tehran). The Book of Tobit mentions the community of Israelites in Rhages and how Tobin sent his son Tobit to Rhages to get a proper wife. The book is ~2300 years old so 1000 years after the subject of the article, so not entirely conclusive but possible that a 'trade network' that spanned that zone in fact existed and had some cohesion (it was Israelite) and that is what facilitated this entire affair.
We can actually see evidence of trade in that area dating back even earlier -- to the neolithic times. Specifically Mehragh[0] which has its neolithic agricultural tools completely matching the Mesopotamian ones. They also traded with Badakhshan[1] in neolithic times.
This article leads to some interesting reading about Oxhide Ingots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxhide_ingot), and how this shipwreck was the biggest find (?) of these so far.
And you, probably like me, had a hard time not reading "Copper Oxide"
Amazing find. This was the first era of 'globalisation', where trade networks connected geographically dispersed and culturally diverse peoples in a mutually beneficial exchange. Whatever the initial event which triggered the Late Bronze Age collapse, it was consequent collapse of these networks which led long periods of cultural regression
I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure there were wide exchanges of peoples happened thousands of years earlier (eg. stonehenge burials came from a wide range of europe - this from memory).
At one point Scientific American had an article which reported that the pigments used in the cave paintings in Spain, circa 25,000 BC, had come from Italy, suggesting goods were traveling long distances as early as 25,000 BC. Either one tribe was moving back and forth from Italy to Spain, on a regular basis, or there was a trade network. So to learn that there was an extensive trade network at the end of the Bronze Age is not nearly so exciting, even if the scale of distance is a bit greater. I mean, we already knew there was extensive trade at the end of the Bronze Age, I was taught that when I was in school.
What seems surprising is transporting big, heavy, valuable, militarily important ingots on routes through multiple cultural areas controlled by mutual enemies.
>the mines in ancient Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age were under the control of the Hittites, an imperial global power of great threat to Ramses the Great of Egypt
What's the reason to call the Hittites a great threat to Ramses? They had the first known peace treaty [1] with Egypt which should lead to the opposite reputation.
So we trade to get what we want. This has been the case for all of human civilization and I am confident if you could peer into the earliest time periods the rocks sharpened during the Stone Age traveled far and wide as well. Trying to ban or artificially limit trade is like trying to limit the tides - you are battling against a decentralized force of human desire.
This is the same reason you can’t ban drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling - and on the positive side love, children, religion - both categories of which have been attempted by various governments in recent and distant times.
I like history because it shows us how stable we are as humans. The context changes but our desires and motivations do not.