Humanity's Epoch 3.1

The Rise of Civilization

The concept of embodied energy is important for understanding our universe.  Earth is almost entirely comprised of the energy from fusion processes.  Life is the embodiment of a prodigious amount of energy.  Human possessions represent the energy that went into making them (embodied energy), which could reach astounding levels.  When people became sedentary and began acquiring possessions beyond what they could carry, embodied energy took great leaps in human societies.  The necropolis at Giza embodied a century’s worth of Egyptian civilization’s surplus energy.  Stealing the embodied energy of neighbors became one of humanity’s favorite pastimes.

Several thousand years after farming appeared, in several places on Earth, civilizations arose.  What they had in common included grain crops that could serve as tax bases for feeding cities. 

When civilization arose, it was fueled by food and wood, just as early farming was.  I have called the rise of civilization Epoch 3.1, as it had the same energy sources as early domestication, with one significant difference: all early civilizations were situated on low-energy transportation lanes, on the shores of rivers, lakes, and seas, as water-travel was only 1% as energy-consuming as overland transportation.  Without those low-energy transportation lanes, civilization could not have existed.  Also, on a per-capita basis, cities were more energy efficient.  Many of humanity’s greatest blessings and evils came with the rise of civilization. 

Why did civilization arise?  First and foremost, it could not have existed before the rise of farming, which provided the food for it.  The largest human benefit from civilization was the rise of professions.  For the first time in the human journey, classes of people whose primary occupation was not providing food arose, and humanity expanded its collective toolset, skillset, and intelligence with the rise of professions.  Babylonian astronomy has been called the first instance of science.  The rise of civilization led to all manner of invention by those professionals, such as advanced metallurgy, the wheel, and writing.

The earliest civilizations in the Old World were all situated in river valleys, which not only served to easily import water and food, but also wood.  Those civilized river valleys were all deforested to provide the fuel for civilization, which caused problems that largely doomed those civilizations.  One problem was that the topsoil washed away from deforested regions, which eventually buried the downstream cities in silt.  Also, deforestation turned the upland river valleys into deserts, and the land no longer absorbed precipitation in the sponge of forest ecosystems.  The loss of the forests aridified the local climates, so upriver deforestation led to floods and droughts.  This contributed to the collapse of all early civilizations. 

Also, the first civilizations led to epidemic diseases, from the proximity of domestic animals, the ease of transmission between crowded humans, and the filth of civilization.  Another downside was warfare on a new scale, with professional soldiers and conscripts.  The first civilizations soon led to the first empires, as civilizations conquered their neighbors.  Plundering neighboring societies was the noblest of professions, lauded by historians such as Plutarch. 

Chimps seem to have the predisposition for religion, and the new professional priesthoods not only conferred divine status or sanction to elites (which also came with cities), but they stamped out the hunter-gatherer religions, with their singing-and-dancing rituals, although that propensity often reappeared over the millennia with “ecstatic” sects.  Pews kept the flock on its knees and off the dance floor.  Elites everywhere were essentially thieves who violently established their rule. 

Civilizations, including today’s, have never been sustainable, as they all relied on quickly depleted energy sources.  The Old World was the scene of continually rising and falling civilizations, and the brutality of agrarian civilizations shocks modern sensibilities.  But all grim practices of the past made sense to those peoples, particularly economic sense, as people sought to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity.  For instance, the practices of “cultures of honor” are hard to comprehend for today’s Westerners. 

Historians often extol the diversity of civilizations, but there really is very little.  All agrarian civilizations looked and operated similarly, as they all had low-energy transportation lanes that expanded their effective hinterlands and they all had the constraints of muscle-based farming.  All industrial societies also look similar, as their economic underpinnings, primarily fossil fuels, are the same for all of them.  The similarities are far more important than the differences.

There was very little real freedom in early civilizations, as the thin energy surplus could not fund freedom.  Over 80% of the workforce was involved with farming, and peasants had few opportunities.  Slavery accompanied sedentism, as making people into possessions made economic sense and was a continuation of stealing women from hunter-gatherer societies.  Slavery and warfare were connected, as war captives comprised the initial slave populations.  The oldest surviving written laws were significantly concerned with slave treatment.

Old World civilizations were continually scourged by horse-borne raiders from the steppes.  It usually became a kind of protection racket, but those raiders also conquered civilizations, and the hordes of Genghis Khan contend for the title of inflicting history’s greatest genocide. 

The population history of Europe has been illuminated by DNA studies.  The descendants of those who drove Neanderthals to extinction were the first on the post-glacial scene, but were displaced by the first European farmers, who were in their turn displaced by invading herder societies from the Eurasian steppes. 

Over 3,000 years ago, all of the Bronze Age civilizations around the Mediterranean’s periphery collapsed, and the Iron Age soon began.  Greece had its brief day in sunshine, followed by Rome.  The Roman and Chinese empires of two millennia ago ruled over more than half of humanity.  The environmental devastation that Rome inflicted reached new levels.  The entire Mediterranean’s periphery was devastated by Rome’s rule, as peoples and species were driven to extinction. 

While evolution has had a modest impact on the human journey since the arrival of behaviorally modern humans (we are likely no more intelligent, individually), what happens in a lifetime can greatly impact our biology.  For instance, childhood adversity damages brains for life, and childhood trauma was normal for nearly all children until recent generations.  It is difficult for comfortable Westerners to comprehend the daily adversity of only a few centuries ago, when people continually lived on the brink of survival and half of the children died. 

It was little different in the civilizations of the Americas.  In fact, the complete isolation of the Americas from Eurasia during domestication and the rise of civilization did not matter, as domestication and civilization in the Americas eerily resembled their Old World equivalents, which says a lot about how the human animal in the Holocene converged on the same basic inventions, no matter where they were.