The Paranormal, UFO's, and Mysteries of the Unknown

Falxy-US said:

So, learning about the Sumerians. Very interesting. So they had fucking beer, “money” religion, careers, etc from the get go. What is known about pre-Sumerian human culture?

I guess they already had something similar, but Sumeria is where they finally started farming and staying in one place?

It’s very hard to not think of early Homo sapiens as having primitive intellect, but it really seems their only disadvantage was not having our 7500 more years of technology.

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That's mostly cultural/technogical advantage, yes. Farmers were already sedentary all over Europe by then. The era of the nomadic hunter-gatherer was ending 15k years ago.

But primitive cities only started as soon as farmers had enough tools and practice (correctly interpreting climate, etc) to generate a moderate surplus. The density of people for a small city basically requires "minimally efficient" farming and food transportation, which in turn allows the rise of non-farmers (artisans, leisure classes) that don't require fields nearby for their living.

Once you have that, and fertile land around, then explosion population occurs, and you have Uruk - pop 40,000 inhabitants.

Falxy-US said:

Thank you, that's fucking amazing. Some places I work are about an hour away, so I have been watching YouTube videos on all of this. I guess I always thought a lot of these old world places were like isolated, like Egypt was all of humanity at the time, never thinking how the whole world was being inhabited, etc. I know that's completely idiotic, but I literally really never learned about any of this - not really in high school, and college I was natural sciences. Like literally I could say my knowledge was limited to the following words: "Mesopotamia, Tigris, Euphrates river. Fertile crescent." And that's it.

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For a long time, we had very simple models of history based on a handful of documents and archeological excavations. Then basic genetics.

The original model of mankind's history was a basic narrative: 50k years ago, a handful of upright apes started to colonize all of Earth, and here we are.

Then, someone looked at Africa, and said "wait a mom', all those people in Africa, did they vanish?" and we went "oh noes. They stayed, and all of Africa is much, much older than 50k years!"

Then, someone dug out old bones in asia and europe, and said "wait a mom', were there people before?" and we went "well, maybe there was some kind of smart apes. But they were extinct because they were too primitive, and the true humans spread out over the world."

Then, someone sequenced DNA, and said, "wait a mom', it looks like 3-5% of people's DNA in Asia and Europe is ONLY found in those old bones, and nowhere else? Did we really..." and we went "well, if it has a hole, we will fuck it. Sue me. Oh, that means those cavemen were almost human. So... they came out of Africa long before the real humans did? Uh. Neat."

And if you want a more modern look, get Reich's book "Who We Are and How We Got there". It's almost dated - findings have kept on popping. But you can learn how modern european arose: from the combination of steppe nomad herders out of siberia, farmers from middle east (the precursors of Sumer and the rest), displacing and assimilating a few remnants of a hunter-gatherer population that had been around for 30k years (and never amount to much - Europe is a bad place to inhabit as non-farmers because of Ice Ages)