“Civilization” Does Not Equal “More Civilized”
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Land Shapes People & People Shape Land
This week’s focus: Racial Literacy 101, or facts we should know about race or culture, but likely weren’t taught.
This edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1400 words, an estimated 5½-minute read.
How Geography Can Be an Antiracist Lens
Across time and place, human beings have developed countless technological and cultural innovations. We’ve mapped the nighttime skies, navigated the oceans, built intricate trade networks, and crafted rock art and imagery.
However, all too often, a slim canon of stories and facts are highlighted, dominating what we may teach and learn in school.
This limited perspective can reinforce the idea that ancient civilizations emerged specifically because of a unique greatness of certain groups of people — falsely implying that some cultural, racial, or ethnic groups are superior to others.
If we’re not intentional, we can repeat a limited, even dehumanizing, point of view for world history: one that relies on imbalance and erasure — but, we can learn how to expand it.
In today’s edition of Humanizing History™, we’re building a foundation to examine how “civilization” does not equal more “civilized.”
To do this, we’ll review how geography was an important factor for the development and timeline of civilizations.
What’s Geographically Unique about the “Web” of North Afro-Eurasia?
For the majority of our collective history, humans lived a nomadic lifestyle. Many were foragers or hunter-gatherers (and some still are today).
Around 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended and the climate began to warm and become more stable. Some people began to live a more sedentary, or settled lifestyle.
As historian J.R. McNeill notes in his text, The Webs of Humankind: “As the Ice Age gave way to warmer and damper climate…plant life flourished. Forests overgrew steppe and scrubland, deserts retreated, and rivers rose. In many locations, these were favorable trends for people, enabling some groups to settle down and live off newly abundant local plants and animals.”
The earth had changed, and for some people, where they lived became more conducive to farming.
In the area of the “Fertile Crescent” — or Ancient Mesopotamia, or what many people refer to today as the Middle East or Western Asia — the climate was warm, melted snowfall from the mountains fed nearby rivers, fertile soil was ample and within reach.
Across this region, or geographical “web,” the native plants and animals — such as wheat and aurochs (the wild ancestor of cattle) — were suitable for domestication.
At this point, it’s important to note that not all of the plants and animals of the world could be domesticated.
As described by scholars, like David Christian of Big History, some animals, like zebras and bison, cannot even be tamed. Other animals can be tamed, but take years to develop, such as elephants who need about 15 years to reach adulthood. Some animals, like gazelles, can easily escape a pen.
According to Jared Diamond, only 14 large mammals have been identified across the world that are suitable for domestication, and 13 out of 14 of these large animals are native to the surrounding web of the Middle East. Many of them would be recognized as the more common farm animals of today: cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses. (The one domesticated large mammal not from the Fertile Crescent is the llama, which is native to South America.) Large, domesticated animals could provide food, textiles, fertilizer, and sometimes draft power. With equipment attached to them, a yak (native to South Asia) and other cattle, for example, could plow the land much faster than a human being.
Wheat was also native to this region. A self-pollinator, wheat can grow in abundance without much human intervention, and can be harvested with basic tools like a sickle. A surplus of wheat could feed a larger, sedentary population.
People in this region would become the world’s first known large-scale farmers, spurring an event that many historians call the “Agricultural Revolution.”
Geographically, the region of the Middle East is part of a larger “web,” that spills into Northern Africa, as the Saharan Desert made traveling south more complicated, and into Europe — forming a “North Afro-Eurasian web.”
This web — which happens to be one connected landmass, despite appearing and being categorized as separate continents — is home to many of the world’s known first “civilizations,” such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ancient China, Indus Valley, and later on Greece and Rome.
The center of this web is often referred to as a “goldilocks” situation, as it was ideal for large-scale farming and human interaction.
As McNeill writes in The Webs of Humankind: “No other region on Earth matched the corridor between the Indus and Mesopotamia for the combination of easy river and seaborn transport, and suitable animals [donkey caravans with wheeled carts] and forage for land transport. This helps explain why people here were among the first to develop the systematic social and economic interactions of complex society, cities, and states, and the first to create regional webs.”
How Did Geography Pave the Way for “Civilization”?
For many societies, large-scale farming and increased human interaction paved the way for developing early civilizations.
The successful domestication of native plants and animals, in combination with human innovation — irrigation systems, charting seasons for planting — could multiply energy, or food, resources. This could lead to a population boom and job specialization, as villages evolved into cities and city-states.
City-states there were in close proximity to others were more apt to promote “collective learning.”
To stay organized, governments may have emerged, as well as writing, mathematics, and militaries. A society that developed an organized military thousands of years before other regions would have a militaristic advantage, and could expand into an empire.
Tight webs of human interaction could also proliferate the spread of (zoonotic) disease. The impact of military technology and disease is something we’ll woefully see play out throughout history — and in upcoming newsletters.
Geography Can Impact the Timeline
In the case of North Afro-Eurasia, trade helped to accelerate the development of civilizations and empires.
For example, societies in Europe could inherit technology from societies in Asia, and vice versa. Technologies such as gunpowder and the moldboard plow, developed in China, and improved horse riding technology like saddles and stirrups, most likely developed in East Asia, could be inherited by various people who lived across the web, including in Europe. Disease could also spread, as famously happened across the “Silk Road,” during the era of the Bubonic Plague in the mid-1300s.
A society with gunpowder, militaristic use of horses, and inherited resistance to disease could make a big impact on a society in a different “web” — as we’ll unfortunately see during the era of colonization, when some Europeans entered the Americas.
At the same time, it should be noted that elsewhere in the world, including in the midst of environments that lacked these “goldilocks” conditions, technological and cultural innovations still emerged.
Even in geographical contexts that had an absence, or near complete absence, of domesticable animals, certain metals, and different plants, we can note that there was not an absence of human innovation.
In such places, humans found ways to persevere. Some developed enhanced sailing technology to traverse large bodies of water, as people from Papua New Guinea did, and across Oceania and the larger Pacific Ocean. Some built citadels or fortresses without the use of cattle or animal draft power, as people did in South America, as part of the Inca Empire. Some developed marvels of engineering in more remote locations, as people did in sub-Saharan Africa, such as when building Great Zimbabwe.
In fact, in some challenging contexts, human innovation may be considered extremely remarkable — as we’ll see next week, when we examine the Americas.
A Humanizing, Land-Centered Shift
Rather than viewing history as a story of one group being more capable or “advanced” than another, a more expansive, antiracist lens could examine history through the lens of geography.
With such a lens, we may note that “civilization” does not mean “more civilized,” as human beings across time and space are capable of immense cultural and technological innovation and sophistication. It may happen in different ways, on different timelines.
Examining how “land shaped people and how people shaped land” can encourage us to avoid the human hierarchy that otherwise dominates world history.
Differences in what human beings develop is not an inherent difference in ability — as intelligence and bravery and creativity are not owned by a single racial, ethnic, or cultural group — but may largely be a difference connected to geography.
Next week, we’ll take a look at the webs of the Americas, to examine how land shaped people and how people shaped land — through the fascinating lens of corn.
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