When did man become civilized?

Post Reply New Topic

When did humankind (men and women) become (somewhat) civilized?

It was before Jesus Christ.

In your view, when did humans become somewhat civilized? It was before Jesus Christ since the pyramids were built before he arrived.

Civilization existed well before Moses parted the Reed Sea.

So was it about 8,000 years B.C./BCE? Or what?

What breakthough would you assign for being (somewhat) civilized?

Controlling fire for a campfire/cooking?

Painting pictures on the cave of animals and people?

Being able to create a house using stones?

Using numbers to count people and animals?

Creating a dam to hold back water for irrigation?

Or what?

About ten thousand years ago when agriculture began to replace the hunter-gatherer way of life.

ruveyn

The question is not "when did?" but "when will?".

ha ha, you beat me too it.

Yeah, Sand wrapped it up with that.

But my anthropological opinion is the great leap forward for step 1. This was about 50,000 years ago. At this point we start to see the beginnings of innovation, especially in tool creation. We see art and culture also begin about this point.

This is ... an inflection point I guess you could say if you look at progress mathematically. It's when the rate of progress starts to dramatically increase.

I'll echo Ruveyn for step 2. 10,000 years ago agriculture changed the face of humanity, allowed for the growth of communities that were not nomadic. Without this innovation cities could not have formed, and empires could not have been built. This was another inflection point where progress sped up all of a sudden once again.

Step 3 would be yet to come... or more likely is currently underway.
This would involve "globalization" and defining when it "occurs" will require looking at it historically, which we cannot yet do. Looking at it graphically/mathematically, when did progress begin to speed up again? 1950 +/- 20 years? It's still speeding up....

interesting graph here from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTCo ... ityLog.jpg

Me too. We are far from civil. I am a proud savage.

Wait, didn't agriculture started after the expulsion of paradise?

According to the bible Agriculture started with or before Cain I believe.

Yes, Adam and Eve were hunter gatherers, then their children were farmers. Humanity lost it's civility when they ate the bad apple. Or to look at it at more eastern way, we were born peaceful and civilised, but started thinking too much and brooding on bad thoughts, so we got full of negativity and war. Just need to get back to the good state.

Can we dispense with Bible fairy tales? Puhleeeze. I am talking about real history for which we have some genuine empirical evidence. In the Bible the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago (or so). In reality the cosmos is billions of years old and on this planet our species emerged from other hominids somewhere between 250,000 ybp and 500,000 ypb.

Please do not use the Bible as a source for real events. It is a book that asserts the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it. It is a collections of myths and just-so stories, not a serious book of facts.

ruveyn

Exclavius wrote (in part): ...I'll echo Ruveyn for step 2. 10,000 years ago agriculture changed the face of humanity, allowed for the growth of communities that were not nomadic. Without this innovation cities could not have formed, and empires could not have been built. This was another inflection point where progress sped up all of a sudden once again.

---

So humankind became (somewhat) civilized when humans began to plant (10,000 years ago) perhaps wheat to grow for food perhaps in Iraq or Egypt perhaps along the land near rivers such as the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile.

A garden of wheat became an acre of wheat which became a square mile of wheat and then the whole food idea was purchased by the breakfast cereal corporations in the middle east - perhaps - and TV and the Internet/www jumped on the breakfast cereal bandwagon too with food banners promoting the virtues of eating grains; at some point the plant scientists promoted genetically modified wheat as being superior and that began to be found in food supplies around the world.

Then discount supermarkets found that China offered lower prices on all of the above and began to tap the China market as a resource.

(The above summary may mirror a slight bending of facts and actual events in what might be called an attempt at humor to explain how humans became somewhat civilized)

Walk on.

In general most living things spend most of their effort and energy and time in supplying themselves with the basics for survival. Humans. through the creation of a stable food supply with agriculture, created an almost unique situation wherein free energy and time was created to develop religion and philosophy and science and art, all of which, in one way or another, laid the foundation for a uniquely creative cultural development characteristic of civilization. That brutality and ignorance is still so widespread is an indication that civilization still has a long way to go.

In the mid 20th century - man becomes civilized, finally.

Through the development of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust, I assume.

+2

We're still working on it. I think we'll get there in a few hundred years.