History pt 8: Social, political, and environmental characteristics of early civilizations

 Roughly 12,000 years ago they stopped relying on hunting and gathering and focused more on agriculture. By 10,000 BCE they began to establish agricultural villages.

As they started growing crops and having surpluses of food, instead of giving it only to the farmer's family, it was distributed through members of society. 

Agriculture was not fully adopted by every settlement, but it greatly revolutionised human advancement. 

Since most of the dense populations did not have to worry about foraging for food, the villages focused more on it.
Textiles, pottery, tools, metalwork, painting and sculptures. 

Because of the mass amount of farming, more people could live in a dense area with a sustainable food source, since more food could be gathered than previously. And 10,000 to 1000 BCE the world population went from, 6 million to nearly 120 million.
There is some debate on why certain civilizations were more advanced than others, due to wars, trade, the geography of the settlement, and completion from other societies, many civilizations became more advanced because of their own environmental, social and political reasons.

For the larger groups like the Valleys of Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus rivers, and Huang rivers. 
These concentrated civilizations met the criteria of a dance population, a social hierarchy, division of labour, a centralized government, record keeping, monuments, and writing or their native language.
But these criteria do not mean it is directly mean it is a civilization, as it is a baseline of what "defines" a civilization.

The first city-states were important compelling regions. But keeping up to the demands of the increasing population was not easy, as to keep up with the rapid expansion of humans, they used the trees around to make firewood, the rocks and stones for building supplies and food and water.
In doing so they had to do irreversible damage to the environment around them.
And used most of the surrounding resources to fuel their rising city populations, but this came with the very drastic side effect that they were extremely sensitive to all changes in weather and temperature. As a sudden flood could spell disaster for their crops. 

But since these places were so densely populated, when the disease was caught by one person, it spread wildly.
And often, along with conflict and shortages of food were heavily dangerous.

They soon learnt to anticipate these changes in the environment and used ways to store food and water, if the crop yield wasn't high that season.

When you hear the word "civilization" you most likely think about large stone walls, monumental statues and long-distance roads. But that would not be possible without any governing body.