The development of purposeful agriculture is a product of the Neolithic, or new stone age, a period in human development marked by the advanced use of tools. Undoubtedly early humans used many materials from their world, among them teeth, bone, hide, leather, sinew, wood, and woven plant fibers. Mines beneath the downs of England were dug through the chalk using antlers as picks, for instance. Organic tools such as antlers simply don't survive for tens of thousands of years for archaeologists to discover, but the tribesmen of the Neolithic who carved those cramped tunnels in the chalk were after a substance that would: flint.
It is tools of stone, advanced technology for the era, that help give the Stone Age its name. Flint axes, stone spear points, carved arrowheads, primitive pots, and other mineral-based tools can survive for millennia buried in strata of compressed mud and gravel, and we can track the development of a culture over the centuries by its peculiar use of tools. The carved face on this marker stone, we might say, is definitely of Olmec design; or this arrowhead is definitely a Clovis. It isn't that we know that the people called themselves Clovis, but we of the modern day must call them something.*
We can then judge by the depth of the soils in which the objects were found, and compare the layers in the soil to known events — an eruption which leaves a layer of ash across half a continent, for example — to roughly calculate the movement of peoples. Below this layer of pumice, perhaps, the arrowheads were of one design; above that pumice, a new design. It's possible to guess that around the time of that ancient volcanic eruption, the old tribes in the area were killed or driven away, to be replaced by new tribes. These are far from certainties, even with radiocarbon dating, a technique which can be subject to contaminants and poor sampling techniques, and with a margin of error that gets geometrically larger for more recent events. Did the first tribe die in the eruption? Were their hunting grounds devastated by the blast and ash? Did the second tribe take advantage of the chaos of the eruption and make war on the first, or were they squabbling over territory? There is simply no way to know with confidence.
In the real world, agriculture was developed in multiple locations independently and simultaneously. In the Far East, the early Indochinese domesticated rice, geese, pigs, tea, cattle, millet, and silk. In Mesopotamia, the so-called Fertile Crescent between Asia Minor and the Persian Gulf, the Sumerians and Babylonians worked with wheat, barley, rye, grapes, sheep, goats, and cattle. In Mesoamerica, those peoples who had migrated across the land bridge to the Americas discovered maize, squash, guinea pigs, the potato, the tomato, and the llama. Arguments could be made for as many as five separate locations where agriculture arose, depending on whether one assumes the discovery was truly independent.
Writing has similarly narrow origins. The original cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing of Mesopotamia was adapted for writing in wet clay, using a reed as a stylus. The letters, as in Chinese, were pictographic at first, each representing a picture of the thing it meant. A picture of a bull's head meant bull, naturally enough, but there were hundreds or even thousands of other signs that a scribe had to learn. It was a specialized occupation, requiring a decade of education and training. Scribes were the lifeblood of any organized civilization, for it was they who tracked the tribute collected by the kings, who noted the debts and payments and trade transactions by the merchants. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that the original characters represented material goods.
As writing became adapted for other surfaces, silk and parchment instead of clay, the characters became simplified. Rather than draw the entire head of a bull, with its eyes and curved horns, a stylized abstract was substituted — the Phoenician character that looks like a sideways A, as you can see in the backdrop of my blog, was adapted from the bull's head hieroglyphic. That character itself became simpler and simpler over the years until we finally ended up with the recognizable pre-Roman letter we now use. It is by virtue of the Phoenicians' dedicated effort to widespread trade that made their alphabet the most widely used of the various alternatives. Indeed, most western languages can track their alphabets back, figuratively at least, to the Tower of Babel in Babylon, via Egypt, via the Hebrews, via Phoenicia.
The wheel was used by every civilization but one, but it seems to have been invented only in one place and at one time. Most cultures appear to have borrowed it from a neighbor, or refined that existing invention for their local use. One region stands out as lacking: Mesoamerica, which inexplicably never developed anything like a stone wheel and axle for us to discover. Was it because they lacked domesticated draft animals like water buffalo, oxen, or horses? Was it because the most recognizable cultures of the New World — the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans — lived in the hills and jungles? Was it because they had a surplus of manpower? Did they not discover the wheel, or did they simply not see a need for it?
That, as they say, is history: a story we tell of the past to fill in the gaps between the points we do know, or the points we think we know, that are consistent with the behavior of our species. In order to create this round, I would have to perform the conjuration in the opposite direction. I would not be allowed vagueness or inspecifics. I would have to establish what really happened, or at least a few plausible explanations for the mass migration of peoples, and give the Players the reins.
I had to have a new process for sorting out events. For 100,000 years of history, and through four previous rounds, the Players had shown a remarkable instinct for not playing favorites. However, the next step in the development of civilization was, by its very nature, unfair: someone was going to have invent agriculture first. Someone was going to have to develop writing, bronze, and the wheel. Who would that be?
The Players had to get the benefit of the doubt. It was their decision to bring the Sivon tribe to the surface with their stone-shaping magic and their agriculture. The Sivon should therefore be the first surface tribes to master the basics of farming, thousands of years before anybody else.
I am working on adding Round 5 to the blog. Watch this space!
Players
It is tools of stone, advanced technology for the era, that help give the Stone Age its name. Flint axes, stone spear points, carved arrowheads, primitive pots, and other mineral-based tools can survive for millennia buried in strata of compressed mud and gravel, and we can track the development of a culture over the centuries by its peculiar use of tools. The carved face on this marker stone, we might say, is definitely of Olmec design; or this arrowhead is definitely a Clovis. It isn't that we know that the people called themselves Clovis, but we of the modern day must call them something.*
We can then judge by the depth of the soils in which the objects were found, and compare the layers in the soil to known events — an eruption which leaves a layer of ash across half a continent, for example — to roughly calculate the movement of peoples. Below this layer of pumice, perhaps, the arrowheads were of one design; above that pumice, a new design. It's possible to guess that around the time of that ancient volcanic eruption, the old tribes in the area were killed or driven away, to be replaced by new tribes. These are far from certainties, even with radiocarbon dating, a technique which can be subject to contaminants and poor sampling techniques, and with a margin of error that gets geometrically larger for more recent events. Did the first tribe die in the eruption? Were their hunting grounds devastated by the blast and ash? Did the second tribe take advantage of the chaos of the eruption and make war on the first, or were they squabbling over territory? There is simply no way to know with confidence.
In the real world, agriculture was developed in multiple locations independently and simultaneously. In the Far East, the early Indochinese domesticated rice, geese, pigs, tea, cattle, millet, and silk. In Mesopotamia, the so-called Fertile Crescent between Asia Minor and the Persian Gulf, the Sumerians and Babylonians worked with wheat, barley, rye, grapes, sheep, goats, and cattle. In Mesoamerica, those peoples who had migrated across the land bridge to the Americas discovered maize, squash, guinea pigs, the potato, the tomato, and the llama. Arguments could be made for as many as five separate locations where agriculture arose, depending on whether one assumes the discovery was truly independent.
Writing has similarly narrow origins. The original cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing of Mesopotamia was adapted for writing in wet clay, using a reed as a stylus. The letters, as in Chinese, were pictographic at first, each representing a picture of the thing it meant. A picture of a bull's head meant bull, naturally enough, but there were hundreds or even thousands of other signs that a scribe had to learn. It was a specialized occupation, requiring a decade of education and training. Scribes were the lifeblood of any organized civilization, for it was they who tracked the tribute collected by the kings, who noted the debts and payments and trade transactions by the merchants. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that the original characters represented material goods.
As writing became adapted for other surfaces, silk and parchment instead of clay, the characters became simplified. Rather than draw the entire head of a bull, with its eyes and curved horns, a stylized abstract was substituted — the Phoenician character that looks like a sideways A, as you can see in the backdrop of my blog, was adapted from the bull's head hieroglyphic. That character itself became simpler and simpler over the years until we finally ended up with the recognizable pre-Roman letter we now use. It is by virtue of the Phoenicians' dedicated effort to widespread trade that made their alphabet the most widely used of the various alternatives. Indeed, most western languages can track their alphabets back, figuratively at least, to the Tower of Babel in Babylon, via Egypt, via the Hebrews, via Phoenicia.
The wheel was used by every civilization but one, but it seems to have been invented only in one place and at one time. Most cultures appear to have borrowed it from a neighbor, or refined that existing invention for their local use. One region stands out as lacking: Mesoamerica, which inexplicably never developed anything like a stone wheel and axle for us to discover. Was it because they lacked domesticated draft animals like water buffalo, oxen, or horses? Was it because the most recognizable cultures of the New World — the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans — lived in the hills and jungles? Was it because they had a surplus of manpower? Did they not discover the wheel, or did they simply not see a need for it?
That, as they say, is history: a story we tell of the past to fill in the gaps between the points we do know, or the points we think we know, that are consistent with the behavior of our species. In order to create this round, I would have to perform the conjuration in the opposite direction. I would not be allowed vagueness or inspecifics. I would have to establish what really happened, or at least a few plausible explanations for the mass migration of peoples, and give the Players the reins.
I had to have a new process for sorting out events. For 100,000 years of history, and through four previous rounds, the Players had shown a remarkable instinct for not playing favorites. However, the next step in the development of civilization was, by its very nature, unfair: someone was going to have invent agriculture first. Someone was going to have to develop writing, bronze, and the wheel. Who would that be?
The Players had to get the benefit of the doubt. It was their decision to bring the Sivon tribe to the surface with their stone-shaping magic and their agriculture. The Sivon should therefore be the first surface tribes to master the basics of farming, thousands of years before anybody else.
I am working on adding Round 5 to the blog. Watch this space!
Players
Joe the Leader
Dave the Artisan
Connor the Mystic
*The Clovis culture was named for the town of Clovis, New Mexico, near to where the first artifacts were found. The town itself was named for the first king of the Franks who lived in the 5th century AD. It is not the first time a culture became known by the name that it was given by later peoples. The Minoans, for example, were a culture that flourished on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean around 2000-1450 BCE. We know of them only because they were named by the Greeks to honor Minos, the legendary king whose daughter gave birth to a bull-headed man, the minotaur, who was later slain by the equally legendary Iason (of Argonauts fame). In actuality, the Minoan culture was probably destroyed by the pre-Greek culture known as the Mycenaeans. We suspect this because the Minoan script, Linear A, is absolutely indecipherable, but around that time it switches to Linear B — and the words are surprisingly close to ancient Greek.
*The Clovis culture was named for the town of Clovis, New Mexico, near to where the first artifacts were found. The town itself was named for the first king of the Franks who lived in the 5th century AD. It is not the first time a culture became known by the name that it was given by later peoples. The Minoans, for example, were a culture that flourished on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean around 2000-1450 BCE. We know of them only because they were named by the Greeks to honor Minos, the legendary king whose daughter gave birth to a bull-headed man, the minotaur, who was later slain by the equally legendary Iason (of Argonauts fame). In actuality, the Minoan culture was probably destroyed by the pre-Greek culture known as the Mycenaeans. We suspect this because the Minoan script, Linear A, is absolutely indecipherable, but around that time it switches to Linear B — and the words are surprisingly close to ancient Greek.
