Skip to main content

From Archeology to History: Part II

I'll take us up to about 4K BC today. As a general reflection: I read somewhere that a major civilization-enabling discovery was that animal husbandry and agriculture can be combined. You don't HAVE to have one family leading sheep around and slaughtering them, while another family raises corn. The same family can do both.

I forget where I heard the theory of the synergy within family farms with animals, but I did think of it a lot while putting this together. What we know about this era seems to be largely about who was doing what with cultivated plants on the one hand and domesticated animals on the other.


But let's get to the timeline.

8500 BC Pigs first domesticated in the Near East.

7600 BC By this time the domestication of pigs has reached China. 

7000 BC, a specialized group of hunters in what is now known as Jordan created "desert kites" as traps for gazelles, and created a shrine for themselves near there. Fascinating thing: the shrine includes a small-scale model of the gazelle trap.  This vividly makes the point that hunting gazelles wasn't just 'a living' for them. It had a spiritual side. Photos from the rediscovered shrine above.

6500 BC. Permanent dwellings near Abu Dhabi are known from this time. This is on the Shore of the Persian Gulf, where the shore is itself an east-west line so someone standing on the shore is looking north along the axis of the Gulf. Despite its forbidding climate, the Arabian peninsula seems to have been occupied pretty early.

6100 BC, rising sea water separates the British isles from the continent of Europe.

6000 BC. Systematic study of the study of the positions of the stars and planets over the course of a year is said to have begun in Sumeria about this time.  

5000 BC, the first farming villages on the Nile date from here. 

4500 BC, the domestication of pigs (remember them?)  has by this time reached northern Europe. 

4400 BC, distinctive earthworks begin to be built in Britain. These were the "long barrows" used for communal burials. 

4000 BC, first known farming settlements in the Indus River Valley. Also, writing on clay tablets first appears in Sumeria. 

I was under the impression, until I started working on this post, that I would at the end of it have hooked up my thoughts with another timeline I've posted in this blog, Mention that I have a post titled "Civilization and History in 40 Snapshots" the went up in October 2019. But that picks the story up at 2025. Civilization and History in 40 Snapshots (jamesian58.blogspot.com) So I still need to write.  something about the period 4K BC to 2K BC. 

Once I've done that, I can then put it ALL together -- a Magnificent Single Timeline from the speciation of the first primates to the creation of the Internet. My own idiosyncratic take on All Of It.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more