Coming forward from the more ancient memories and patterns to begin to retrace the arc of our development, we find that everything changed when humanity began to domesticate plants, animals, and itself.
10,000 years ago, the earth, and humanity, were still wild, and the presence and impact of humanity aboard earth was entirely insignificant.
Today, wild animals account for only 4% of the mammals on earth, whereas humans account for 34% of mammals, and our domesticated animals account for 62% of mammals. Their pasture and feed crops use up approximately 80% of total agricultural land.
Sadly, today even humans are often known and domesticated by function.
This level of domestication and stratification of society took a long time.
After humans experimented with the domestication of plants and dogs, by about 8,000 BC they had domesticated large animals such as goats, pigs, sheep, and cattle.
The ability of families to possess livestock naturally began to result in inherited inequalities of wealth, and the ability to create food surpluses allowed for denser populations.
The new cultural and settlement patterns allowing for denser populations and distributed responsibility and specialization gave rise to early proto-cities around perhaps 6,000 BC, followed by more established settlements in the 5th and 4th millennia BC.
After thousands of years of development, it is estimated that by around 5,000 BC, there were still less than 20 million human beings on the entire planet.
Beginning in the 5th millennium BC, and into the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, humanity transitioned from the Stone Age, through the copper age, and into the discovery that tin could be added to copper to create bronze, a harder metal that opened new possibilities.
This heralded the start of the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age was entered into in Africa in approximately 3300 BC, India 3300 BC, Europe 3200 BC, and Eurasia 2700 BC.
It was around this same time that the earliest forms of writing emerged in Sumer and Egypt.
The rise of cities heralded the rise of modern civilization as we know it. With the exception of the mysteries that don’t seem to fit the commonly accepted timeline, the earliest known civilizations sprouted up along fertile valleys in Mesopotamia (along the Tigris and Euphrates) and Egypt (along the Nile) around 3,000 BC, in Crete around 2,700, in the Indus River Valley around 2500 BC, and in China (along the Yangtze and Yellow) around 2200 BC.
At meeting places of waterways and continents such as the Mediterranean Sea, the exchange of ideas and goods began to cross-pollinate patterns and knowledge.
With increasing exchange, wealth, power, and bases of permanent settlement came the offensive and defensive projections of power, greed, and fear at ever larger scale.
As civilizations arose, transformed, and hierarchies expanded around the world, the peoples of the Americas evidently retained relatively simple patterns of culture and settlement until the formative period beginning around 1500 BC.
For still unknown reasons, throughout much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, North African, and the Mediterranean, it appears that a violent and sudden societal collapse occurred around the 13th and 12th centuries BC. Kingdoms and empires crumbled, great cities were destroyed and abandoned, writing systems vanished, trade was severed, and there was death and destruction on an unprecedented scale, leaving behind only fragments and cultural memories of a lost golden age followed by disaster and a dark age.
Around the the first millennium, as many civilizations were reordering themselves from the first major interconnected boom and collapse, humanity entered the age of carbon steel iron working, recorded history, and the rise of the philosophers, religious figures, and empires that would lay the grounds for modern civilization and culture as we know it today.
Forward to 8.13 The Great Liminal Dissolution, Transformation, and Rise
Back to 8.11 A Few Ancient Patterns
Back to table of contents The Book of Lionsberg