My Energy Journey – Part 10

Civilization

What became very clear in my studies is that without the energetic breakthroughs, the Epochs of the human journey would not have happened. Without the development of sophisticated tools, which included the control of fire, the fueling of brain growth, from australopiths to behaviorally modern humans, would not have happened. Long before Homo sapiens arrived on the evolutionary scene, the human line became an obligate tool user, perhaps over two million years ago. Without their tools, those early humans would not have survived, and it is far more so that way today. Set any of us loose into the wild, naked, without any tools and forbid us to make any, none of us would last very long. Those energy breakthroughs were critical to the First Epoch of the human journey.

Similarly, without the world’s easy meat, the Second Epoch’s human conquest of Earth would have taken far longer, if it would have happened at all. The Third Epoch would not have happened if not for the domestication of plants and animals, particularly plants. Farming allowed the Third Epoch to transpire. It is called a precondition, because without it, the event would not have happened.

Similarly, the rise of civilization was dependent on energy breakthroughs, especially farming. No hunter-gatherers could have built cities. The “pristine” civilizations arose in regions in which farming had existed for several thousand years. There was another precondition for the rise of civilization: low-energy transportation lanes to transfer resources to cities from their hinterlands. All early civilizations were built on shorelines. In fact, clear to the Industrial Revolution, precious few cities were not built on the shores of rivers, lakes, or the ocean. Transportation on waterways is only about 1% as energetically expensive as overland transportation. Without those low-energy transportation lanes, civilizations could not have existed.

Just why civilizations formed is an enduring question. The two primary camps are conflict theory, as exemplified by Karl Marx, in which elites could exploit the masses, and integrationist theory, as the benefits of civilization attracted people. The primary upshot of cities was the appearance of professions. Freed from subsistence duties, professionals could repurpose their big brains for new uses, such as inventing new tools and ways to use them. Sumer was the world’s first civilization, and the professionals there invented writing, the first professional medicine, and many other features of civilization were invented in those days, including metallurgy, the wheel, and Sumer invented the sailboat, which was the first time that non-muscle power was produced. Sumer influenced the rise of the Egyptian and Harappan civilizations. Along with agriculture and low-energy transportation lanes, living in a city was more energy efficient, per capita, than living elsewhere, which was another reason why civilization became feasible.

Many blessings and evils attended the rise of civilization. Some of it was just that existing trends became more pronounced. Stealing women was common practice in the Second Epoch, and is arguably the root of slavery. When people became sedentary and could amass possessions, people quickly became possessions, as the Pacific Northwest culture made clear. Sumer began relatively democratically, but it was soon conquered by a new kind of people called elites. Hunter-gatherer bands could not afford alpha males who tried to become potentates, but early in the Domestication Revolution, there appeared “big men” with many wives, which led to that genetic bottleneck among men, and in civilization, it was not long before male potentates had harems. All pristine civilizations arose peacefully, but they were soon conquered by elites, who claimed divine status or sanction, and the new professional priesthood entered into a Faustian deal to abet that fiction, to help confer legitimacy to mass-murdering thieves. To one degree or another, that dynamic survives to this day, and the masses alternately revered or despised elites.

In the Old World, new diseases from domestic animals arose, and epidemic diseases accompanied early civilizations. Cities could be hellholes, and urban life expectancy did not exceed rural life expectancy until the 20^th century. Half of the children still died, in a trend that went back to gorillas and would not end until industrialization. It was the filth, more than the microbes, which killed people, as the Industrial Revolution demonstrated, as infectious diseases were conquered by improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene, not medical interventions, medical-racket propaganda notwithstanding.

Slavery rose with a new kind of warfare, with professional militaries, mercenaries, and conscripts. Enjoying war’s spoils, of rape and plunder, was a regular enticement for military service, and mass slavery attended the rise in mass warfare, as early slaves were often war captives.

The brutality of early civilization is attested to by the first written laws that have survived, and that was after millennia of Sumerian civilization. Those first laws prominently dealt with slave treatment, and a host of crimes were punishable by death.

The first civilizations soon led to the first empires, as city-states conquered each other. For thousands of years, the Fertile Crescent saw the constant rise and fall of empires, as civilizations conquered each other, often accompanied by great slaughters, as cities were sacked and often destroyed. To a great degree, it was only the behaviors of chimps and hunter-gatherers writ large, as everybody tried to carve out their path to riches, fame, and security.

In all early civilizations, between 80-90% of the population was engaged in raising food, with a small professional and elite class that taxed them, often ruthlessly. Enslaved men worked the fields and mines of early civilizations. Enslaved women worked in households and were often sex slaves. The daily barbarities, privations, and other sufferings of the denizens of early civilizations are hard for comfortable Westerners to even imagine. When Westerners visit agrarian nations today, they go through an initial shock. There were no good old days of the human journey. TV shows such as Game of Thrones provide somewhat realistic depictions (minus dragons and zombies) of what life was like in agrarian civilizations, but there is nothing like being there.

But the benefits of civilization outweighed the downsides, at least for the fortunate, which is why they kept forming. But no civilization has ever been sustainable, as they all plundered their energy sources to exhaustion, in a trend that lasts to this day. All early civilizations collapsed. The agricultural surplus was thin and subjected to the vagaries of the climate. Droughts collapsed many early civilizations, and civilizations often contributed to their own demises with their energy practices. Sumer’s agriculture eventually collapsed because its fields became salinated through unsustainable practices. Preindustrial civilizations all relied on wood, mainly for fuel, and as they deforested their hinterlands, they made the local climate more arid. That deforestation also eroded the soils (as well as plowing), and the forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic is very clear in that part of the world. When the Spanish conquered Mesoamerica, they turned forests and fertile farmland to semi-desert within a century.

In recent years, I have studied the rise and fall of dozens of civilizations and empires, and the story is the same, everywhere, in the Third Epoch. Sons slaughtered fathers, brothers slaughtered brothers, as they vied for the coveted thrones, harems, and other benefits of monarchy. Civilizations attacked and conquered each other, trying to expand their resource bases, which was always primarily energy, usually food, and they pillaged each other’s embodied energy, such as their precious metals and people.

In the past generation, scholars have termed warfare as productive and unproductive. Productive warfare is when an empire is established that conquered formerly warring polities, and there is a “peace dividend” as those polities stop spending resources on fighting each other, which also means that the imperial overlords have more to tax. Unproductive war is when the victories are ultimately Pyrrhic, as they destroy more than could be gained from plunder and taxation.

Because the West conquered the world and I am a Westerner, and the West has been better studied, I have long studied the West more than other cultures, but the basics have been the same for all of them. We are all behaviorally modern humans, and all pristine civilizations resembled each other, in a kind of convergent evolution. Muscle-based farming could provide only so much agricultural surplus, so there were always relatively thin elite and professional classes that taxed the farmers. That constraint shaped all early civilizations. Eurasia had draft animals, while North America, for instance, did not (as their ancestors drove the candidates to extinction). So, the Western Hemisphere was not as “advanced” as Eurasia was, and when Europe began invading, the experience provided some windows into the Eurasian past that were long gone, such as the matrilocal horticultural societies that dominated North America’s Eastern Woodlands. The invading English often found those societies far preferable to Europe’s, and an epidemic problem among the early invaders was running off and “going native,” which the English authorities considered a capital crime.

The Fertile Crescent and vicinity, as well as the Mediterranean’s periphery, was the scene of endless rising and falling civilizations and empires, for several thousand years, and the dynamics were always the same. After the Bronze Age Collapse of many civilizations, Greece had a “dark age” for centuries. But by about 500 BCE, Greece had its short-lived Classic phase. Greek city-states battled their neighbors and the Persian Empire, but there was a rise in what could be called scientific thought that eventually helped the Scientific Revolution come to pass millennia later. Alexander the Great tried to conquer the entire known world, but Rome reached the apex of ancient empires, along with the Han dynasty in China. Two millennia ago, they jointly ruled over more than half of humanity.

Watching people being forced to murder each other for “entertainment” epitomizes the brutality of Rome’s reign. Once Rome turned the entire Mediterranean into a low-energy transportation lane, its days were numbered, as conquering and plundering new lands became much more energetically expensive. And like the rest of the ancient agrarian empires, Rome collapsed in its turn, and it denuded everything that it could. Citizens of the Roman Empire were astonished that Rome once had thick forests nearby.

Europe had long been a Eurasian backwater, but that began to change a few centuries after Rome’s collapse, which comes in the next post.