Yours portly is teaching World History for the second consecutive year (before last school year, the last time I’d taught the course was way back in the 2011-2012 school year, although I also taught the close cousin of World History, Western Civilization, at the local technical college more recently), and I love these early weeks of the course, as we talk about early civilizations and how they arose. The short answer is “agriculture.”
That always gets me thinking about this post from 2021 about how remote hunter-gatherer tribes would survive the collapse of civilization—because they lack it entirely.
It occurred to me that these remote peoples likely would not be the ones “rebuilding civilization.” Having not developed it in the first place, and seemingly unlikely to do so within any reasonable timeframe (because over the course of 6000 years of human civilization, they have never developed it), it seems like the best hope for civilization would, ironically, be the very peoples that destroyed it in the first place.
We see this pattern play out throughout history. The people living in the remnants of the Roman Empire rebuilt—however slowly—a distinctly European civilization. That’s not even mentioning the Eastern European or “Byzantine” Empire, which endured until 1453. We often forget that only half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the first place.
But I digress. I am a big believer in civilization, warts and all.
With that, here is 29 August 2024’s “TBT^4: Rebuilding Civilization: The Hunter-Gatherer“:
The Portly Politico 