Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.
> Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration
This seems like a very impactful simplification. Especially given the relative limited mobility of peoples up until very recently.
What is your evidence to support that? there is no 1:1 comparison here. The groups that likely survived these collapses were largely nomadic or at the fringes of society, used to sustaining themselves without the support of the existing power structures.
I'm reading Proto which is about the Proto-Indo-European language family and it discusses exactly this, where the hunter gatherer nomads of PIE moved from the Caucuses to more farming oriented areas like plains they settled down and also interbred with the local farmers. But, when droughts happened and food got more scarce from farming, many of the farmers in turn became nomads again. The DNA shows this change apparently.
Excellent! That's been on my TBR list for a while. There's a bit about PIE in Lost Worlds, mostly as supporting evidence for movements and connections between ancient (pardon the pun) lost worlds.
> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
I think the same, we are headed for the tech version of the Dark Ages, all with feudalism. The corporations will be the feudal lords, because they have more capital than most of the countries in the world.
I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?
Are you familiar with the term techo-feudalism coined by economist and former minister of finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis?
The dark ages were fine. Feudalism replaced a violent slavery based empire and evolved towards greater human rights and democracy. We now risk a real step backwards.
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."