We don’t know for certain what it was about the culture surrounding the dawn of cities that made that particular combination of trade, writing, specialisation, hierarchy and religion communicable, when similar cultures from previous false dawns failed to spread. We can trace each of those elements to earlier sources, none of them were original to Ur, so perhaps it was a case of a critical mass achieving a self-sustaining reaction.
I suggest that the decisive ingredient was an explicit, somewhat accurate understanding of how children are conceived, and following from this, a concept of fatherhood.
Many hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have that when we contacted them. They all had figured out it had something to do with childbearing age and menstruation. Some had narrowed it down to the pregnant woman having recently had sex with a man. But you don’t need to know ejaculation inside the vagina is what counts, and that it matters who ejaculates there, unless you’re trying to domesticate mammals.
From my superficial understanding of anthropology, it appears that in hunter-gatherer societies, the men have very little responsibility for the kids. Of course they contribute food and protection, which is commonly shared among the whole group including the kids. They’ll teach the boys the essential skills, but any man will teach any boy the same set of skills; there’s no personal connection and no specialization of labor. As a man in a hunter-gatherer society, you essentially need not worry about the next generation. And we do find that in these societies, the men (as well as the kids) tend to have a lot of spare time between hunts.
I imagine a hunter-gatherer, experimenting with domestication, first realizing he could be a father. That gives him one hell of an evolutionary advantage, and he’s probably not the dumbest member of his group, so he may have good intelligence-related traits that he can now spread more effectively. But I think what’s far more important is that this realization creates a lot of new priorities for him, and for everone he tells about this. Because he’d naturally start to measure his own success by the well-being of his children, much like the success of mothers was measured before. So he starts to invest much more time (both his own and the kid’s) into teaching them skills that mothers can’t teach because they’re busy mothering. He could pass on more knowledge than a hunter-gatherer would, he’d prefer to teach his own kids over others, and boom he invents trades, family businesses, distribution of labor. Now knowledge can accumulate, inventions can be copied and spread, memetic/cultural evolution kicks in. Both the technologies that allow cities, and the refined fighting skills of the nomadic raiders, follow from intensified education.
Education increases expressed IQ. However, it also increases the value of expressed IQ in sexual selection. So I don’t think we’re quite as dumb as we were when civilization began. But I do think you won’t find significant division of labor in any society that doesn’t know about domestication of animals.
So when you ask why people accept the comparatively bad living conditions of early civilization, the answer is simple: they do it for the kids. You don’t do that when you think that being a man, you can’t have any.
I suggest that the decisive ingredient was an explicit, somewhat accurate understanding of how children are conceived, and following from this, a concept of fatherhood.
Many hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have that when we contacted them. They all had figured out it had something to do with childbearing age and menstruation. Some had narrowed it down to the pregnant woman having recently had sex with a man. But you don’t need to know ejaculation inside the vagina is what counts, and that it matters who ejaculates there, unless you’re trying to domesticate mammals.
From my superficial understanding of anthropology, it appears that in hunter-gatherer societies, the men have very little responsibility for the kids. Of course they contribute food and protection, which is commonly shared among the whole group including the kids. They’ll teach the boys the essential skills, but any man will teach any boy the same set of skills; there’s no personal connection and no specialization of labor. As a man in a hunter-gatherer society, you essentially need not worry about the next generation. And we do find that in these societies, the men (as well as the kids) tend to have a lot of spare time between hunts.
I imagine a hunter-gatherer, experimenting with domestication, first realizing he could be a father. That gives him one hell of an evolutionary advantage, and he’s probably not the dumbest member of his group, so he may have good intelligence-related traits that he can now spread more effectively. But I think what’s far more important is that this realization creates a lot of new priorities for him, and for everone he tells about this. Because he’d naturally start to measure his own success by the well-being of his children, much like the success of mothers was measured before. So he starts to invest much more time (both his own and the kid’s) into teaching them skills that mothers can’t teach because they’re busy mothering. He could pass on more knowledge than a hunter-gatherer would, he’d prefer to teach his own kids over others, and boom he invents trades, family businesses, distribution of labor. Now knowledge can accumulate, inventions can be copied and spread, memetic/cultural evolution kicks in. Both the technologies that allow cities, and the refined fighting skills of the nomadic raiders, follow from intensified education.
Education increases expressed IQ. However, it also increases the value of expressed IQ in sexual selection. So I don’t think we’re quite as dumb as we were when civilization began. But I do think you won’t find significant division of labor in any society that doesn’t know about domestication of animals.
So when you ask why people accept the comparatively bad living conditions of early civilization, the answer is simple: they do it for the kids. You don’t do that when you think that being a man, you can’t have any.