12-24-07

Stone to Copper to Bronze
At some point, between 500,000 and 50,000 years ago, all those protohumans either died out or became something vaguely resembling what we are, now.  Or God set up a medieval villa with fruit trees and carefully monitored pets and then created some gardeners to care for the whole thing.  Your pick.  I don't really care; it was a long time ago, and it has very little influence on the discussion as is.

However, I do feel I should make a minor digression here to talk about time.  As individuals and as a species, our relationship with time is one that is simultaneously immediate and associative.  It's easy to remember what you did an hour ago.  Last night may be more difficult, but—assuming you're in college or single—it might come back with the help of still-available artifacts:  twelve empty beer cans and a mostly-eaten pizza, for instance (oh, right, I got plastered with whatsername...did we..?  I think so...did I..?  hmm...)  Last week, may be a little more difficult unless you're a bit of a slob.  Last year...well, if you keep a journal, it's covered, but otherwise it comes down to "Did mom buy me that candle or did I get it during the strange weekend in Portstown?"  And on and on until you get to a point where you're relying on someone else's memory. 

At that point, it all starts to run together.  It becomes less an accounting of our lives and more a bunch of interesting stories.  The past loses its intrinsic emotional attachment and starts to accept whatever new emotions we choose to apply to it.  baby Boomers started calling authoritarian figures Nazis not because we were the first ones to think of the word, but because we were the first generation without a deep emotional connection to the actual term.  To us, the Nazis were just these wacky people from our parents' lives who pushed everyone around (much like we perceived our parents as doing).  Eventually, you run out of people who remember the occurrence and start relying on things.  Everything we know about anything before...say World War One is based on recorded accounts.

But the farther back you go, the fewer of these things remain.  Wood, paper, and cloth rot, metals and stones are recycled, words and stories are altered or given new meanings.  We become less and less sure of exactly what happened at any given time the farther back we look.  As a result, we deal with larger and larger blocks of time, so we can be more or less reasonably sure that these events and standards were in place.

Which brings us to the Stone Age.  The Stone Age spans nearly half a million years, not because humans made no advances in that period, to the contrary, it can reasonably be stated that every advancement that mattered was made during the Stone Age, but because so little of it has survived the millennia to give us a picture of the events.  We know that at some point humans stopped living on their bellies and began collecting food and keeping it for later.  Then the started collecting food animals and keeping them close.  Then they made the connection between seeds and edible plants, and started farming.

We also know that they made the jump from poking anthills with sticks to poking animals with sharpened sticks to hardening points with fire to simple stone and bone tools.  At some point, flint, alabaster, and obsidian were discovered.  This was a leap forward.  The flake method of producing blade edges an points from these stones made for harder, longer-lasting spears, arrows, and knives.  They held a sharper and more durable edge than bone, and they were more predictable in the shaping than random rocks.  Near the end of the Stone Age, humans made a quantum leap in technology with the discovery of copper and gold. 

Gold's charms are obvious:  it doesn't oxidize, it shines a warm yellow, and it can be easily worked even without heat.  Copper, on the other hand, has less obvious, but more important attributes, especially to developing cultures.  Copper is reasonably common, and—at least in the Old World—can be found in several near-surface veins, making it easy to mine.  But there's more.  Copper can be cold-hammered like gold and blades made of copper can be sharpened to an edge, which it will keep for at least a little while.  Unlike flint and other stone edges, however, a copper tool can be resharpened.  Copper led quickly to bronze, because copper and tin have one thing in common besides being relatively soft metals:  they  have relatively low melting points.  A funny thing happens when you blend them together in a smelting pot, however, they form a new metal, an alloy of its parents, which is harder than wrought iron but still workable in many of the ways that copper is.

Expanding technology led to language, or maybe language enabled expanding technology.  Enh, they probably grew up together.  You see, the thing is, certain methods, like the flake method of creating points and tools, cannot be taught by simple observation; the ability to express abstractions is necessary for proper teaching.  At the same time, language is merely a means of description, and with nothing to describe, language is meaningless.  It led to other things as well, particularly trade.  As better weapons and tools made surpluses more likely, different cultures and societies found themselves trading their extras for things that they lacked: flint for northern firs, copper for arboreal fruits.  Cultures appeared that existed primarily as a means of trade between other cultures. 

It's important not to think of these people as primitives.  Stone Age cultures were and are very human, and their bodies and brains were as developed and specialized as our own.  They were a little hardier than most modern humans, especially in the West, but that had more to do with a generous daily exercise regimen.  There was a general division of labor, largely along gender lines, and even a few non-functional specialists.  At least on some level, they understood the need for genetic diversity:  every tribal culture recorded has some means of intermarriage with other tribes and cultures. 

And they were capable of great destruction.  By the time the first recognized civilizations appeared, Stone Age cultures had driven the American and Asian mastodons and mammoths, the smilodon, the American horse and camel, and several species of antelope and deer to extinction.  It has been hypothesized that our immediate ancestor, homo sapiens Cro-Magnon drove Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis—a sort of uncle subspecies to modern man) to extinction as well.

Their lives were so remarkably different than ours that its hard to think of them simply as people who lived in a different time and neither romanticize them nor vilify them as savages.  But everything we are and have has its origins in that period.  They were human beings, and their human brains made some remarkable leaps in thinking and achievement while still being capable of some amazing brutality and destruction.

By about six to seven thousand years ago, the various human cultures stood on a brink, and at about that time, in four different places across the globe, cultures stepped across that brink and became civilizations.  There is a permanence to the word "civilization", and a complexity.  It's notable that here are varying standards as to what differentiates a civilization from a mere culture, and that's a debate that can span lifetimes.  For our purposes, we can call civilization a place of permanent cities bearing multiple specializations and at least some class distinctions.  The main thing you need for a civilization is the means for long term storage and distribution of food, because you have to stay in one place for a long time to develop a tribal village into a specialize city, and to do that, you have to be able to save food in case of emergencies.

This is why the big four, the first recognized civilizations, all occur at alluvial plains in otherwise arid areas.  Without refrigeration, only vegetable foods, particularly grains and tubers, can be stored for a long time, and to do that, you need a dry place to do it.  Wet grains and tubers rot or try to sprout, and become useless as food, either for humans or animals.  That is why the earliest civilizations, and the beginnings of real history, can be found at the Nile Delta, the Indus Valley, the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Norte Chico region of Peru.

The development of civilization is important, not because they were more advanced than their contemporaries, but because now time gets smaller.  Civilizations wrote things down and built them up.  They left things behind, like unmarked photographs in your grandmother's attic.  History from that point on could be measured in centuries and millennia, rather than tens of millennia (maybe).