Origin Of Civilization

We now know where civilization began and how it developed, once it began. The unanswered question is: Why - why did civilization come about at all? For, as most scholars now admit in frustration, by all data Man should still be without civilization. There is no obvious reason that we should be any more civilized than the primitive tribes of the Amazon jungles or the inaccessible parts of New Guinea,

But, we are told, these tribesmen still live as if in the Stone Age because they have been isolated. But isolated from what? If they have been living on the same Earth as we, why have they not acquired the same knowledge of sciences and technologies on their own as we supposedly have?

The real puzzle, however, is not the backwardness of the Bushmen, but our advancement; for it is now recognized that in the normal course of evolution Man should still be typified by the Bushmen and not by us. It took Man some 2,000,000 years to advance in his "tool industries" from the use of stones as he found them to the realization that he could chip and shape stones to better suit his purposes. Why not another 2,000,000 years to learn the use of other materials, and another 10,000,000 years to master mathematics and engineering and astronomy? Yet here we are, less than 50,000 years from Neanderthal Man, landing astronauts on the Moon.

The obvious question, then, is this: Did we and our Mediterranean ancestors really acquire this advanced civilization on our own?

Though Cro-Magnon Man did not build skyscrapers nor use metals, there is no doubt that his was a sudden and revolutionary civilization. His mobility, ability to build shelters, his desire to clothe himself, his manufactured tools, his art - all were a sudden high civilization breaking an endless beginning of Man's culture that stretched over millions of years and advanced at a painfully slow pace.

Though our scholars cannot explain the appearance of Homo sapiens and the civilization of Cro-Magnon Man,

there is by now no doubt regarding this civilization's place of origin: the Near East. The uplands and mountain ranges that extend in a semiarc from the Zagros Mountains in the east (where present-day Iran and Iraq border on each other), through the Ararat and Taurus ranges in the north, then down, westward and southward, to the hill lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, are replete with caves where the evidence of prehistoric but modern Man has been preserved.

slow pace.

Though our scholars cannot explain the appearance of Homo sapiens and the civilization of Cro-Magnon Man,

there is by now no doubt regarding this civilization's place of origin: the Near East. The uplands and mountain ranges that extend in a semiarc from the Zagros Mountains in the east (where present-day Iran and Iraq border on each other), through the Ararat and Taurus ranges in the north, then down, westward and southward, to the hill lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, are replete with caves where the evidence of prehistoric but modern Man has been preserved.Nowadays, fierce Kurdish tribesmen seek shelter in the area's caves for themselves and their flocks during the cold winter months. So it was, one wintry night 44,000 years ago, when a family of seven (one of whom was a baby) sought shelter in the cave of Shanidar.

Their remains - they were evidently crushed to death by a rockfall - were discovered in 1957 by a startled Ralph Solecki, who went to the area in search of evidence of early Man (that nine skeletons were found, of which only four were crushed by rockfall.) What he found was more than he expected. As layer upon layer of debris was removed, it became apparent that the cave preserved a clear record of Man's habitation in the area from about 100,000 to some 13,000 years ago.

What this record showed was as surprising as the find itself. Man's culture has shown not a progression but a regression. Starting from a certain standard, the following generations showed not more advanced but less advanced standards of civilized life. And from about 27,000 B.C. to 11,000 B.C., the regressing and dwindling population reached the point of an almost complete absence of habitation. For reasons that are assumed to have been climatic, Man was almost completely gone from the whole area for some 16,000 years.

And then, circa 11,000 B.C., "thinking Man" reappeared with new vigor and on an inexplicably higher cultural level.

It was as if an unseen coach, watching the faltering human game, dispatched to the field a fresh and better-trained team to take over from the exhausted one.

Throughout the many millions of years of his endless beginning, Man was nature's child; he subsisted by gathering the foods that grew wild, by hunting the wild animals, by catching wild birds and fishes. But just as Man's settlements were thinning out, just as he was abandoning his abodes, when his material and artistic achievements were disappearing - just then, suddenly, with no apparent reason and without any prior known period of gradual preparation - Man became a farmer.

Employing sophisticated methods of radiocarbon dating and plant genetics, many scholars from various fields of science concur in the conclusion that Man's first farming venture was the cultivation of wheat and barley, probably through the domestication of a wild variety of emmer. Assuming that, somehow, Man did undergo a gradual process of teaching himself how to domesticate, grow, and farm a wild plant, the scholars remain baffled by the profusion of other plants and cereals basic to human survival and advancement that kept coming out of the Near East. These included, in rapid succession, millet, rye, and spelt, among the edible cereals; flax, which provided fibers and edible oil; and a variety of fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. In every instance, the plant was undoubtedly domesticated in the Near East for millennia before it reached Europe. It was as though the Near East were some kind of genetic-botanical laboratory, guided by an unseen hand, producing every so often a newly domesticated plant.

The abrupt change in the course of human events that occurred circa 11,000 B.C. in the Near East (and some 2,000 years later in Europe) has led scholars to describe that time as the clear end of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) and the beginning of a new cultural era, the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic).

The name is appropriate ,only if one considers Man's principal raw material - which continued to be stone. His dwellings in the mountainous areas were still built of stone; his communities were protected by stone walls; his first agricultural implement - the sickle - was made of stone. He honored or protected his dead by covering and adorning their graves with stones; and he used stone to make images of the supreme beings, or "gods," whose benign intervention he sought. One such image, found in northern Israel and dated to the ninth millennium B.C., shows the carved head of a "god" shielded by a striped helmet and wearing some kind of "goggles."

From an overall point of view, however, it would be more appropriate to call the age that began circa 11,000 B.C. not the Middle Stone Age but the Age of Domestication.- Within the span of a mere 3,600 years - overnight in terms of the endless beginning - Man became a fanner, and wild plants and animals were domesticated. Then, a new age clearly followed. Our scholars call it the New Stone Age (Neolithic); but the term is totally inadequate, for the main change that had taken place circa 7500 B.C. was the appearance of pottery.

For reasons that still elude our scholars - -but which will become clear as we unfold our tale of prehistoric events - Man's march toward civilization was confined, for the first several millennia after 11,000 B.C., to the highlands of the Near East. The discovery of the many uses to which clay could be put was contemporary with Man's descent from his mountain abodes toward the lower, mud-filled valleys.

By the seventh millennium B.C., the Near Eastern arc of civilization was teeming with clay or pottery cultures, which produced great numbers of utensils, ornaments, and statuettes. By 5000 B.C., the Near East was producing clay and pottery objects of superb quality and fantastic design.

But once again progress slowed, and by 4500 B.C., archaeological evidence indicates, regression was all around. Pottery became simpler. Stone utensils - a relic of the Stone Age - again became predominant. Inhabited sites reveal fewer remains. Some sites that had been centers of pottery and clay industries began to be abandoned, and distinct clay manufacturing disappeared. "There was a general impoverishment of culture," according to James Melaart (Earliest Civilizations of the Near East); some sites clearly bear the marks of "the new poverty-stricken phase."

Man and his culture were clearly on the decline.

Then - suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably - the Near East witnessed the blossoming of the greatest civilization imaginable, a civilization in which our own is firmly rooted.

A mysterious hand once more picked Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of culture, knowledge, and civilization.