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The ascending wheel

41ezBQHrx7LSpencer Wells, along with many others, such as Jared Diamond, argued that agriculture was a disaster in terms of what it wrought for the quality of life for the average human in his book Pandora’s Seed. This is broadly plausible to me. On the other hand, I also think it is highly likely that agriculture and civilization were basically inevitable.

The “great leap forward” in cultural complexity and explosion of symbolic expression ~50,000 years ago, give or take, seems likely to have been only the culmination of a process of encephalization and increased sophistication which had proceeded over millions of years. The precursors to the agricultural life were likely already there before the Holocene.

To a great extent the hypothesis of inevitability has been tested: in the Americas much of the dynamics which characterize the Old World were recapitulated. Agriculture, civilizations with writing and class stratification, and monumental architecture, all with analogs in the Old World, are there. In fact, this National Geographic piece, In Search of the Lost Empire of the Maya, is fascinating to read, because it seems to me that it likely parallels developments in the Old World two thousand years before. The Snake Kings were warlords in a manner which would have been familiar to the “Great Kings” of the ancient Near East.

There are two great schools of history from the pre-modern era. Those which are cyclical, and those which exhibit some intuition that there is an endpoint or progress. The “independent” experiments of human history suggest that both are true, with an arc of history on the macroscale scaffolded by innumerable cycles of rise and fall.

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