The surplus of resources promoted growth and economic exchange, leading to the development of trade.Administrative apparatus and legal doctrines were created as a support for these structures. A centralized religious-political power grew in the cities, achieving control over vast areas and thus creating the first state structures.Population was divided into small rural villages and large settlements which eventually became cities.This new breakthrough, the so called “Urban Revolution”, was characterized by several milestones: Some centuries later, civilization emerged strongly in other parts of the world: the Indus Valley, China and finally the New World. And, between 40 BC, after a few millennia of Neolithic communities which had been developing in several areas of the world, the first known civilizations appeared, first in Mesopotamia and soon after in Egypt. Childe called this process the “Neolithic Revolution”. However, at the end of the last Ice Age (circa 10,000 BC) a radical change occurred and the human population entered a stage of progressive settlement that altered their strategy for survival: in addition to hunting and gathering, men began to domesticate plants and animals, thus becoming farmers and shepherds. Thus, the most remote human past began to be explained not in religious or mythical terms, but under a scientific pattern: from the origin of man until the outbreak of civilization which took place more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt.Īrchaeological record demonstrates that early humans practiced nomadism for many thousands of years and had a simple -though not easy- life as hunter-gatherers. However, with the triumph of evolutionism as a scientific theory, this definition was cemented evolutionism not only impacted the natural sciences, but also greatly affected the social sciences such as history, archeology and anthropology. The idea that civilization equates to the summit of human development is long established in our history and relates directly to the rise of cities and states. Nevertheless, we must take into account that the word civilization can be also used in a broader sense: to denote the set of ideas, knowledge, values, institutions and achievements of a society at a certain time. If we focus primarily on the social sciences, the term civilization is used to indicate a high state of progress – a certain level of social, cultural, political, economic and technological evolution that differentiates us from early cultures as well as current primitive communities that stay more or less isolated from what we call the modern world. We all have an idea about the meaning of the word “civilization”: a concept that we use to relate to a complex, advanced society like the current one on Earth, but also ancient cultures which flourished centuries ago, leaving us with a splendid legacy.
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