A poster with simplified outlines of several city designs (including city beautiful itself) would be nicely on-brand, or maybe some physical tools of city design (present or past).
I imagine the early proto-cities, despite having worse living outcomes, were probably still attractive because they offered 2 things the hunter-gatherer life didn't offer as well: A sure food supply and Security. Those were probably viewed as the two chief concerns of early humans, all other factors being less important. A life spent hunting and gathering may have surely been more nutritious IF one was able to hunt and gather a sufficient amount. And considering a small group of 100 people needed 500 square miles, cities probably also offered a way forward for cooperation and safety for multiple groups. An acre of land, if growing barley, could feed about 6 people per year with a mediocre harvest. 500 square miles has 320,000 acres on it. It was just a better deal on the whole.
Protection from the elements maybe, but definitely not a secure food supply. Bad harvests would come and go all the time and often cause famine. The reason agriculture took over is quite simply because it created large population surplus despite the worse food supply, which led to large settlements, and large armies to conquer and expand agriculture.
I doubt they actually had worse living outcomes. Yes farming can be tougher then hunting but it’s way more reliable and less dangerous it’s also much more efficient resource wise
Thats why i think it makes no no sense humans existed 300.000 years ago. The first cities existed 10.000 years ago. Makes more sense that humans existed a little earlier than that and they discovered early on that staying together is safer.
@@luisfilipe2023 Have you ever actually farmed? Hunting is way easier than farming. Although I probably can't do neither, so I'd have to gather if an apocalypse came.
...because, even 11000 years ago they know someone would invent cars someday, and so they needed to invent cities so there would be a place to build massive parking lots 😛
I can kind of understand why early houses would be built so close together that you need to climb over your neighbour's house to get home - harder for wolves to follow you home
Pastoralism was the first step to farming animals and allowed nomadic people to have a fixed place while their peoples would herd the animals of distence to grazing and back again, often to highlands and back down to the lowlands as the grass grew. Garden planting was then able to be established, before field farming.
Shared defence. If there was conflict between hunter/gatherer groups then the one with the best fortifications is going to win. Also division of labour and specialization that could include weapons makers and semi-professional soldiers.
I never found "cities for religious reasons" to be a compelling point for why an ancient city may have existed. I like to think that neolithic humans could be just as rational as modern humans, just didn't have the knowledge base built that we do today. Of course, urban legends form, and perhaps those legends become the foundations for religions of those places. As such, I also think that there are many sites that archaeologists go "This was for religion." because they can't seem to find a better explanation. For example, Stonehenge and its relatives have been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. They fit some great criteria for what people of the time period may need in a town, and there's a precedent for self contained towns in round structures, from the Yanomami tribal houses to the Chinese tulou. However the henges and the like tend to be very near or even in floodplains, and have trenches and walls, which in a time before horsecarts and proper roads, would make them excellent refuge for an agricultural society.
It's interesting that these early cities formed so close to the Sahara during the African Humid Period, when the Sahara was largely savannah, and inhabited by humans. Did these early cities represent trading crossroads?
In Turkey they have place called Gobekli tepe and Karahan tepe over 12,000 years old, i know around that area they going to found older ones too, search it it's Amazing
Very interesting video's It's interesting that the first 'cities' would not by that close to the first settlements. Seems the Mesopotamia area was able to have the conditions for much larger population.
I think you should have emphasized the cities that pop up around structures like Gobelki Tepe. With modern archeology and research we may be starting to see that cities popped up around places of worship rather than vice versa. Especially seeing as Humans likely had knowledge of basic farming practices in the Neolithic.
Before watching this video, I knew the answer was because of agriculture. Being able to cultivate and grow your own food meant that you could feed a lot more people in an area, whilst hunting and foraging only allowed for limited food that was enough to feed a small group of people. Because of this the population began to steadily increase and there were more people being born with more food, and all these people had to have places to stay and shelter so houses started to be built for them to live in. There was one person in the group who was the leader and made the rules, and eventually this structure would make its way into the future hierarchy of the government and citizens, and it eventually made the laws. Many people living in a certain area also became a community to interact and influence one another, and eventually these small areas would become what are called cities.
I get that CityBeautiful has to pay the bills somehow, but his videos have basically become giant ads for Nebula. No doubt that the exclusive videos must be pretty good, but the promotion has become too annoying.
yeah, i really liked this channel. used to look forward for nem videos. now, every time i watch, i get disappointed. literally half the time is advertising and the other half seems more like setting up for the ad than an actual script with intro, development and conclusion. its getting frustrating. i still have some hope and interest, but i'm not gonna lie, i've been considering unsubscribing
Well, he's a professor at Cal Poly so it's not even a matter of putting food on the table as TH-cam is his side gig. I think it's better to see his current videos as preamble to the larger version on Nebula.
People built towns/cities to have a central place to Trade their surpluses in a marketplace... Once they figured out that outsiders would attempt to physically take their Trade Surpluses at market, they built structured defenses... It's as simple as that!
Nomad tribes have hierarchy and child mortality rate decreased with agriculture that's why they chose the luxury trap, sacrifice diversity and movement for nutrient deficiency and back breaking labour but year round food!
Groups are cooperative within the group. Separate groups do not always cooperate with each other. And even within groups there can be victims, such as the Mennonite group rapes Women Talking was based on.
@@westrim If we can talk generally about the so called 'competitive', we can also talk generally about the 'cooperative'. The main take away here is humans are not lone hunters who compete when they run into another lone hunter. Humans are social. Society requires cooperation - not competition.
I imagine it's more of a balance of the two and not getting too comfortable with either extreme. Too cooperative and people would probably become complacent with making progress, too competitive could lead to destruction. I think people focus too much on being one or the other of anything (right wrong, male female, smart strong, emotional physical etc) but i think the beauty of our consciousness is to allow us to weight decisions and find balance and harmony ☯️
@@TomUlcak the groups were generally small though, we only breached the dunbar number recently. How our group sizes were able to grow so big is not something that is so obvious that the question can be dismissed like the original comment did
@@westrimin light of unresolvable scarcity, the available options are direct competition, authoritarian hierarchy determine who is unworthy, or a subset of the population voluntarily sacrificing themselves and the easiest one for a government to sell to the people is direct competition, up to and including war annual global agricultural production is currently about 160% of the global human caloric need and we easily have the manufacturing capacity to ensure all other basic needs are consistently met - in such a context, competition serves no purpose but to waste resources and extreme forms, like war, literally destroy industrial and agricultural capacity, risking a return to the economics of scarcity in the current world, there is little reason to in any sort of competitive resource denial between groups because there literally is enough of everything to go around already (or in the case if, say, housing, we could easily build enough new housing worldwide to house everyone and stabilize real estate markets in less than a decade, but it'll pop the big bubble and the rich will lose big on their financial investments if we do that)
Just us Bc/Ad, the calendar we’ve used almost 2000 years. No need to try and exclude religious references when it was the Catholic Church that invented our calendar.
Amen! Or should I even say that? As a "pagan", I 1000% agree with you. Use a Christian calendar, accept Christian terminology, or use your own! Tired of the Christianization of my land without the good that Christianity can bring.
I think there is too much reliance on using religion as why they did things. I suspect they were more like kids and had things because they just thought they were cool.
To take some things, such as a history of the earliest civilizations and endow, that I deal with accumulation of wealth in any quality is absurd. If you would much rather, we could all hunt and gather and starve and die, or we can just except the way things are. I’m not a wealthy man, I’m just a carpenter. But I know enough to, except that these histories of forged what we know today to be true, and have allowed for this very means of communication. It’s too easy to just complain.
Humans didn't invent cities, cities evolved from a family structure to a family complex to a collection of families bunched together and these behaviours are influenced by external factors such as Strife and Nature. Without strife, people would prefer to live far away from others. I can call a city, refugee camp. So I can hypothesize that the first city was a refugee camp or a military barrack or camp.
Like integrated circuits, distance is key to innovation and culture spread, That's why cities are usually the incubator of new ideas, up rises and breakthroughs
That's so interesting. It's such a shame that so much was lost to time. 12,000 years of human civilization, and there is very limited good data until the 19th and 20th centuries. If we're still around in another 12,000 years, what will it be like to have the internet and millions of exabytes of raw historical data from 2000 CE to 14000 CE? Imagine if we knew everything about the history of our ancestors. The scale of what we currently know is incredible and it's going to exponentially increase.
@@ajs1998 I think in a thousand years most of the data of today will have neen deleted or lost access to it. As it takes resources to store the data, which at some point needs to be purged to some extent to make room for newer more important data. So ultimately a similar fate will fall upon us as has on the men of thousands of years ago
@Alex Sweeney @Jin Jun Liu They did not have internet, but they had something else, called oral tradition, which was not about piling up ever more data, but about densely packed meaning in a story form that could be understood at different levels. As long as generations kept the stories alive, the important information would not run out of storage. When writing started in Sumer and Akkad, people did not stop telling the old stories. But when the Jewish elite of scribes was in exile in Babylon, they feared there lineage and stories may end so they decided to write down some old stories that no one ever bothered to write probably because everyone knew them. There you have it: Adam and Eve, pars pro toto: meaning humanity. Garden of Eden: The good conditions that made the people settle down, created by God, today we would say something like: the way the universe goes, but in a personalised form so that even the kids could hear the story. Cain and Abel: Also pars pro toto, where this one farmer, Cain,stands for agriculture, and Abel for livestock breeding. Something happened,like drought, anyways crops failed, but cattle could still find something to eat, so the farmer(s) went after the shepherd(s)...there was killing, Climate got worse, so no more paradise, "God", or: "that what happens that is beyond our human power" condemned Cain to a life of wandering... Far fetched? They analyzed living aboriginal stories in Australia and found details related to geological events over 10.000 years ago. Today people think God is an old man with a long beard in a white dress sitting on a cloud, who does not exist. And we have an exponentially growing pile of data sucking up ever more resources, but all meaning is lost. It's called progress I guess.
The thought occurs that humans were developing beer around the same time as cities, social hierarchy, and inequality, and beer is great at dumbing people down and keeping them in line. In Mesopotamia, the government gave people beer rations. Intriguing...
@@pongop ancient beer was quite weak compared to modern beer and water was typically unsafe in cities so the ration was probably because it was safer to drink than water from a cistern. Also a dog walks into a tavern and says "I can't see a thing, I guess I'll open this one"
A BIG (probably the most important) reason you missed here is because of climate. For most of human history, the climate changed so drastically (and was on average much colder) for people to maintain farms for multiple generations. We can see that people figured out how to farm thousands of years prior to the neolithic age, but when the climate stabilized, it suddenly (or rather slowly) became possible to maintain one's crops for longer spans of time, thus kickstarting the ability to stockpile resources (which itself came with its own pros and cons, being resource abundance and large-scale war). Once you realize this, it also becomes way easier to see why/how various cities/civilizations collapsed due to over-farming/fishing/mining/tree cutting. The vast majority of famines were a result of over exploitation of the environment. This is also why many hunter-gatherer societies still exist today even though they could switch to agriculture, because they learned the lessons of over-centralization/over-exploitation. We need to learn those lessons as well now more than ever since our cities our over-exploiting more land than ever before. All that said, I do think we could figure out how to create more sustainable cities now that we have the ability to measure things better, but that's going to take the realization that cities don't come without a cost, and that nature isn't some endless resource we can continuously exploit.
Human civilizations didn't collapse in their totality. They only collapsed to the point that they became sustainable once more. Nature took care of the over-population. Famine, disease, etc., reduced the populations to sustainable levels. Cities can only be made sustainable up to a point. The real way to protect cities is to reduce human population to prevent the resources from being over-exploited. Putting efforts on city resource sustainability alone isn't enough when you have a large resource hungry population that is constantly growing at an exponential rate. Cities will just keep growing along with the population consuming more resources until there is a collapse. Population Control is the elephant in the room that folks don't want to talk about.
@@laurie7689 Population control doesn't solve the problem. It's just a symptom, if that. If you have a small population that exploits the hell out of the environment, it will still collapse. Cities def can't just keep growing though. They should naturally fission. And they would if they maintain sustainability as a core principle and part of the culture. Humans naturally will create their own family planning/birth control so long as they are aware of their environmental impact and available resources.
@@elijahclaude3413 Humans don't naturally plan birth control in relation to environmental impact, unless it is a famine or disease. Rather, they turn to crime to obtain the resources they need/desire, or war if it is a country and not a city that is running low on resources.
The grid plan seems to work really well. The Greeks used three main east-west boulevards to define their colonial city of Neapolis. (New City. Really creative name, there.) The three main roads are still there and still define the central city, the most famous being the Spaccanapoli, the Naples splitter. A well aligned road system can last for millenia.
One day the roads were icy and a sugar truck spilt some sugar on the road People came to eat it and a eager entrepreneur shoveled some and sold it to a market as neopolitan However unlike the stuff he sold our modern day equivalent is artificially flavoured and not the strawberry he put in, the vanilla bean and the mud because he was cutting corners and just had slushy mud
I was so excited at the title and the video delivered! This is one of your best videos of all time! I appreciate it as a history/social science teacher. This is a great, brief overview! I may actually use it in class. It fits in perfectly with my World History units at the start of year. I love the Simpsons reference! I wasn't aware of ancient cities in Malaysia and Myanmar, so that's awesome to know. Great points about the problems with cities, civilization, hierarchy, private property, and inequality. The thought occurs that humans were developing beer around the same time as cities, social hierarchy, and inequality, and beer is great at dumbing people down and keeping them in line. In Mesopotamia, the government gave people beer rations. Intriguing... The timing and content--about humans' shift from villages to cities and the accompanying change from circular cities to rectilineal cities--is especially interesting to me right now. I just watched an amazing video about how to turn a standard neighborhood into a village (rectilineal to circular). Folks are seeing the disadvantages of cities and wanting to benefit from the advantages of villages. Anyway, amazing stuff!
Could you please use AD and BC to define time periods please? It really breaks the flow of learning and understanding of the content to slip in “CE”. It’s not even settled or clear what the common era even is.
Okay, the Nebula plugs in this video were quite annoying, Almost as if the video was made just to advertise Nebula. Tell you what, tell them to add comments on Nebula and I will join, honestly that's the only thing preventing me from joining it. These videos lose something when you can't have discussions about the topics they cover with other people.
A lot of ideas regarding the birth of cities, property, human rights, and agriculture are challenged by the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Definitely worth the read.
Yes, definitely lots of problems with cities, civilization, hierarchy, private property, and inequality. The video mentioned it briefly, but more on this topic would have been great.
Wow i came to comment the same thing, awesome to see Graeber's work getting more recognition, even posthumously. Dawn of Everything is an ambitious and well-researched work whose impact may not be fully realized for some time.
I really appreciate this video. I'm a professional technologist (and someone fascinated with urban planning), and this concept is a core to learning what a technology is, what makes it successful, and how to plan for future technologies. Thanks for connecting two of my passions together for everyone to enjoy.
Planning is fine, but cities where not innovated. First Cities were either Military Baracks, Slave Encampment or Refugee camps. I don't think free humans would naturaly cluster together like that if the world is open and free.
1:04 beer and sedentary lifestyles actually make perfect sense together. Municipal-level water purification is a very recent development in human history. Before that, drinking water from an unknown source carried a serious risk of diseases like dysentery. It's one thing to be a nomad and drink from water sources that don't get a lot of use/pollution. It's another thing entirely to try and drink water that came from the ground just a few dozen paces from the hole where someone else put their sewage. The alcohol in beer makes that second option much safer.
Also, beer is an easy way to get calories from grain, especially barley. My ancient history professor taught me that barley was an important crop early on because it's one of the easiest to grow, but its grain tends to be tough and can grind a person's teeth down to stubs if they eat it every day. Drinking barley beer was actually better for a person's teeth than eating barley bread!
I think it is less about sfae water to drink, but making water last longer. Depending on the water, it can spoil in just weeks or less, so it wasn't suited for droughts and travels. Ferment it and it quickly lasts months since acid and alcohol kicks out MOST (not all) harmful bacteria and leaves Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces behind, which are the same genus of microbes that take the most part of the gut flora. Controlled spoilage is key to preservation. And also human's love for booze. Eating rotten fruits and grains made us feel funny, and we quickly learned "yo, i can do this on purpose!"
@@angela_merkeI nobody would make beer from water that is visibly contaminated. But if your fresh water is near my latrine and both go into the ground, then microscopic pathogens from my latrine might seep their way into your drinking water without you noticing it. That's where the alcohol in beer really becomes useful.
@@NothingXemnas entertainment value definitely was a bonus, but the controlled spoilage you're describing basically reinforces my point about contamination.
The problem wasn't that they didn't understand how streets work-- they hadn't figured out pavement yet. Walkways would become mud rivers when it rained. Walking above the streets on rooftops would make more sense. These people weren't stupid, dude. They just thought differently than we do.
Safety was probably an issue as well, especially at night. Who knows what critters could wander into the town at night. Walking on the roofs kept them safe from predators.
The Qadan culture (13,000-9,000 BC) was a Mesolithic industry that, archaeological evidence suggests, originated in Upper Egypt (present-day south Egypt) approximately 15,000 years ago. The Qadan subsistence mode is estimated to have persisted for approximately 4,000 years. It was characterized by hunting, as well as a unique approach to food gathering that incorporated the preparation and consumption of wild grasses and grains . Qadan peoples were the first to develop sickles and they also developed grinding stones independently to aid in the collecting and processing of these plant foods prior to consumption.
This presents theory as fact. I am not saying the theory is wrong but l hate the way TH-camrs like this refer to “scholars” without naming anyone or discussing the various strands of thought. Ultimately our ideas about how cities originated are derived from Marx’s concept of Modes of Production. This basic idea was adopted by Thomsen in the late nineteenth century and has been with us more or less ever since. This guy has more to say about his sponsor than he does about the possible reasons why cities were created.
A factor not mentioned: mate selection. A small nomadic tribe would have few potential mates as opposed to a city. We still do this with colleges and hot spot cities. Move to the big city for a few years, get your career started, meet someone then move out to the burbs because it's too damn expensive to buy a house in the city.
@@mikekolokowsky that's really only if you live on a car dependent city like American ones. If your country has good public transit this isn't an issue and the suburbs are actually really nice
@@lq3552 For a while, I was commuting by train, which was much easier than driving. But it was still 45 minutes in each direction and the hassle of ticketing and being on time for the train or you're half an hour late. A suburb to a city takes time no matter how you go. Bus, train, Uber or private car.
@@hogenmogen8545 the main issue here is city design. Car centric cities are much more stretched out and massive, they have to build a ton of parking spaces, roads, infrastructure, making the city a nightmare, not only for drivers, or city people but also literally everyone else, including the people taking the bus stuck in the traffic caused by this design, the trains that have to cross much bigger areas due to this design, the bikers who have to practically risk death on every commute becsuse of this This is not only an American issue, but America does it the absolute worst
We may be finding OLD settlements, but we will never find the first ones. We will only find defeated settlements, and then someone else moved in nextdoor. People are good at reusing what they have to make life easier. They would've dismantled their cities to improve them.
Have you heard of pyramid like temple structures being built in separate regions with no knowledge of the others existence? They also had strange "sky gods" who came to visit Creepy
7:10 Pakistan? There's nothing called Ancient Pakistan. If it's about the present day location of civilization, then India has more sites than Pakistan, along the most important dried up river Saraswati of the civilization.
There was basically thousands of years of experimentation from the upper paleolithic settlements until we finally got to Uruk, which (at least when I was in school around 20 years ago) was considered the first true city.
6:14 - Yeah, priesthood is the oldest grift around. Tell people your imaginary friend needs animal sacrifices so he’ll keep the river flowing, and what do you know, free barbecue.
![[TH] FS vs BME - VCT Ascension Pacific - Lower Bracket Final](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wnygqsR2Fig/mqdefault.jpg)
I moved to a new studio! It’s still a work in progress. What should I add to the background?
Anything that will make it feel like home and like specifically YOUR studio imho
A poster with simplified outlines of several city designs (including city beautiful itself) would be nicely on-brand, or maybe some physical tools of city design (present or past).
A copy of The dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Rengrow
A board of what you consider to be the best city plans ever!
Easter eggs ;)
Why did humans invent cities? Because they realised that SimVillage 2000 and Villages Skylines would only have limited gameplay...
It's true 😂😂
I love cities skylines
😂😂😂😂😂
I would LOVE to play Neolithic Village: Skylines! 🥰
😂
I imagine the early proto-cities, despite having worse living outcomes, were probably still attractive because they offered 2 things the hunter-gatherer life didn't offer as well: A sure food supply and Security.
Those were probably viewed as the two chief concerns of early humans, all other factors being less important. A life spent hunting and gathering may have surely been more nutritious IF one was able to hunt and gather a sufficient amount.
And considering a small group of 100 people needed 500 square miles, cities probably also offered a way forward for cooperation and safety for multiple groups. An acre of land, if growing barley, could feed about 6 people per year with a mediocre harvest. 500 square miles has 320,000 acres on it. It was just a better deal on the whole.
Protection from the elements maybe, but definitely not a secure food supply. Bad harvests would come and go all the time and often cause famine. The reason agriculture took over is quite simply because it created large population surplus despite the worse food supply, which led to large settlements, and large armies to conquer and expand agriculture.
I doubt they actually had worse living outcomes. Yes farming can be tougher then hunting but it’s way more reliable and less dangerous it’s also much more efficient resource wise
@@moosesandmeese969 bad harvests are still less likely then being killed by a mammoth
Thats why i think it makes no no sense humans existed 300.000 years ago. The first cities existed 10.000 years ago. Makes more sense that humans existed a little earlier than that and they discovered early on that staying together is safer.
@@luisfilipe2023 Have you ever actually farmed? Hunting is way easier than farming. Although I probably can't do neither, so I'd have to gather if an apocalypse came.
...because, even 11000 years ago they know someone would invent cars someday, and so they needed to invent cities so there would be a place to build massive parking lots 😛
You mean car tanning slots *
You're talking about America.
But it's much easier to find a place to park your car in a village than in a city! 😬
I can kind of understand why early houses would be built so close together that you need to climb over your neighbour's house to get home - harder for wolves to follow you home
More because people could save money in not building a wall just by leaning on another house
But ok. That works too
or that these were basically extended family compounds that simply added on to one another over time.
@@jdsiv3 like big modules
Pastoralism was the first step to farming animals and allowed nomadic people to have a fixed place while their peoples would herd the animals of distence to grazing and back again, often to highlands and back down to the lowlands as the grass grew. Garden planting was then able to be established, before field farming.
I liked the detail about the artificial city name “Sehir Guzel” at 4:57, which literally translates to ‘City Beautiful’ in Turkish :)
I was wondering what what was and whether it was real or not. Thanks for clarifying that!
Shared defence. If there was conflict between hunter/gatherer groups then the one with the best fortifications is going to win. Also division of labour and specialization that could include weapons makers and semi-professional soldiers.
I wish you would have mentioned Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site but great video
Really interesting video keep up the good work 👍
I never found "cities for religious reasons" to be a compelling point for why an ancient city may have existed. I like to think that neolithic humans could be just as rational as modern humans, just didn't have the knowledge base built that we do today. Of course, urban legends form, and perhaps those legends become the foundations for religions of those places. As such, I also think that there are many sites that archaeologists go "This was for religion." because they can't seem to find a better explanation. For example, Stonehenge and its relatives have been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. They fit some great criteria for what people of the time period may need in a town, and there's a precedent for self contained towns in round structures, from the Yanomami tribal houses to the Chinese tulou. However the henges and the like tend to be very near or even in floodplains, and have trenches and walls, which in a time before horsecarts and proper roads, would make them excellent refuge for an agricultural society.
"let's drink beer"
"Hmm we better find a place to make and drink beer"
It's interesting that these early cities formed so close to the Sahara during the African Humid Period, when the Sahara was largely savannah, and inhabited by humans. Did these early cities represent trading crossroads?
In Turkey they have place called Gobekli tepe and Karahan tepe over 12,000 years old, i know around that area they going to found older ones too, search it it's Amazing
Very interesting video's It's interesting that the first 'cities' would not by that close to the first settlements. Seems the Mesopotamia area was able to have the conditions for much larger population.
I think you should have emphasized the cities that pop up around structures like Gobelki Tepe. With modern archeology and research we may be starting to see that cities popped up around places of worship rather than vice versa. Especially seeing as Humans likely had knowledge of basic farming practices in the Neolithic.
Yes, I was hoping to hear more about this. It's such an absolutely fascinating development in our ideas about the formation of cities.
Before watching this video, I knew the answer was because of agriculture. Being able to cultivate and grow your own food meant that you could feed a lot more people in an area, whilst hunting and foraging only allowed for limited food that was enough to feed a small group of people. Because of this the population began to steadily increase and there were more people being born with more food, and all these people had to have places to stay and shelter so houses started to be built for them to live in. There was one person in the group who was the leader and made the rules, and eventually this structure would make its way into the future hierarchy of the government and citizens, and it eventually made the laws. Many people living in a certain area also became a community to interact and influence one another, and eventually these small areas would become what are called cities.
Please give us more opportunities to talk to you, to ask you questions and make video suggestions
Like scheduled livestreams
Great Content..
I get that CityBeautiful has to pay the bills somehow, but his videos have basically become giant ads for Nebula. No doubt that the exclusive videos must be pretty good, but the promotion has become too annoying.
yeah, i really liked this channel. used to look forward for nem videos. now, every time i watch, i get disappointed. literally half the time is advertising and the other half seems more like setting up for the ad than an actual script with intro, development and conclusion. its getting frustrating. i still have some hope and interest, but i'm not gonna lie, i've been considering unsubscribing
Well, he's a professor at Cal Poly so it's not even a matter of putting food on the table as TH-cam is his side gig. I think it's better to see his current videos as preamble to the larger version on Nebula.
To brew beer.
Actually might be one of the main reasons
Beer was weak at that point, it's won't result """"""""inequality""""""""
People built towns/cities to have a central place to Trade their surpluses in a marketplace...
Once they figured out that outsiders would attempt to physically take their Trade Surpluses at market, they built structured defenses...
It's as simple as that!
By accident. Small villages became big villages, then became cities
This is like discovering what the history lessons were actually meant to teach us
No mention about Talianky, Maidanetske and Nebelivka
Explore Golgumbaz with Guide Jahangir, Bijapur,South India 🇮🇳
Nomad tribes have hierarchy and child mortality rate decreased with agriculture that's why they chose the luxury trap, sacrifice diversity and movement for nutrient deficiency and back breaking labour but year round food!
I wonder if the first pub was created in the first city. Probably was, who are we kidding?
Probably started out as a market to trade goods.
Simple answer: Humans have ALWAYS been cooperative. Not competitive. In fact, all of nature is cooperative. There should be no mystery here.
Groups are cooperative within the group. Separate groups do not always cooperate with each other. And even within groups there can be victims, such as the Mennonite group rapes Women Talking was based on.
@@westrim If we can talk generally about the so called 'competitive', we can also talk generally about the 'cooperative'. The main take away here is humans are not lone hunters who compete when they run into another lone hunter. Humans are social. Society requires cooperation - not competition.
I imagine it's more of a balance of the two and not getting too comfortable with either extreme. Too cooperative and people would probably become complacent with making progress, too competitive could lead to destruction. I think people focus too much on being one or the other of anything (right wrong, male female, smart strong, emotional physical etc) but i think the beauty of our consciousness is to allow us to weight decisions and find balance and harmony ☯️
@@TomUlcak the groups were generally small though, we only breached the dunbar number recently. How our group sizes were able to grow so big is not something that is so obvious that the question can be dismissed like the original comment did
@@westrimin light of unresolvable scarcity, the available options are direct competition, authoritarian hierarchy determine who is unworthy, or a subset of the population voluntarily sacrificing themselves and the easiest one for a government to sell to the people is direct competition, up to and including war
annual global agricultural production is currently about 160% of the global human caloric need and we easily have the manufacturing capacity to ensure all other basic needs are consistently met - in such a context, competition serves no purpose but to waste resources and extreme forms, like war, literally destroy industrial and agricultural capacity, risking a return to the economics of scarcity
in the current world, there is little reason to in any sort of competitive resource denial between groups because there literally is enough of everything to go around already (or in the case if, say, housing, we could easily build enough new housing worldwide to house everyone and stabilize real estate markets in less than a decade, but it'll pop the big bubble and the rich will lose big on their financial investments if we do that)
Other animals have cities. Prairie dogs, termites, ants…
Perhaps those fortifications were to keep hostile animals away
Just us Bc/Ad, the calendar we’ve used almost 2000 years. No need to try and exclude religious references when it was the Catholic Church that invented our calendar.
Amen! Or should I even say that? As a "pagan", I 1000% agree with you. Use a Christian calendar, accept Christian terminology, or use your own! Tired of the Christianization of my land without the good that Christianity can bring.
No shoutout to Matera?!
Not talking about the city of Caral in Peru is kind of a big miss in my opinion!
Carla is old, and dates to perhaps 3000BC. But we are discussing settlements that go back two, sometimes three times older.
Memphis is right here bruh
Because for some damned reason, we like being around other peoples, that we then go out of way to ignore & treat badly 😂
Really could have gone without the leftwing bs by the end. People really go hard on Lenon lmao
Lol.....thats like asking ....
Why does the bear shit in the woods
I think there is too much reliance on using religion as why they did things. I suspect they were more like kids and had things because they just thought they were cool.
For company and security.
becaUSE babes go brrrrr
To make beer.
To take some things, such as a history of the earliest civilizations and endow, that I deal with accumulation of wealth in any quality is absurd. If you would much rather, we could all hunt and gather and starve and die, or we can just except the way things are. I’m not a wealthy man, I’m just a carpenter. But I know enough to, except that these histories of forged what we know today to be true, and have allowed for this very means of communication. It’s too easy to just complain.
happy ramadhan fasting
the first mention of cities in about 4000 years ago... after someone invented writing...
Humans always were smart. Just like us. But more healthy, because of the food they used to eat.
This is word salad but sentence salad
Because they want to get a Cultural Victory.
Find Jericho
Humans didn't invent cities, cities evolved from a family structure to a family complex to a collection of families bunched together and these behaviours are influenced by external factors such as Strife and Nature. Without strife, people would prefer to live far away from others. I can call a city, refugee camp. So I can hypothesize that the first city was a refugee camp or a military barrack or camp.
For people to make stuff for other people
Because remote work wasn't possible
😮
Because of trade.
But when was wanting to get the hell out of this city invented?
That's a Sacramento joke.
Like integrated circuits, distance is key to innovation and culture spread, That's why cities are usually the incubator of new ideas, up rises and breakthroughs
That's so interesting. It's such a shame that so much was lost to time. 12,000 years of human civilization, and there is very limited good data until the 19th and 20th centuries. If we're still around in another 12,000 years, what will it be like to have the internet and millions of exabytes of raw historical data from 2000 CE to 14000 CE? Imagine if we knew everything about the history of our ancestors. The scale of what we currently know is incredible and it's going to exponentially increase.
That’s a super interesting way to think about it
@@ajs1998 I think in a thousand years most of the data of today will have neen deleted or lost access to it. As it takes resources to store the data, which at some point needs to be purged to some extent to make room for newer more important data. So ultimately a similar fate will fall upon us as has on the men of thousands of years ago
they were also known for a long time as place you go to die due to poor diet, sanitation and poulation
@Alex Sweeney @Jin Jun Liu They did not have internet, but they had something else, called oral tradition, which was not about piling up ever more data, but about densely packed meaning in a story form that could be understood at different levels.
As long as generations kept the stories alive, the important information would not run out of storage.
When writing started in Sumer and Akkad, people did not stop telling the old stories.
But when the Jewish elite of scribes was in exile in Babylon, they feared there lineage and stories may end so they decided to write down some old stories that no one ever bothered to write probably because everyone knew them.
There you have it: Adam and Eve, pars pro toto: meaning humanity.
Garden of Eden: The good conditions that made the people settle down, created by God, today we would say something like: the way the universe goes, but in a personalised form so that even the kids could hear the story.
Cain and Abel: Also pars pro toto, where this one farmer, Cain,stands for agriculture, and Abel for livestock breeding.
Something happened,like drought, anyways crops failed, but cattle could still find something to eat, so the farmer(s) went after the shepherd(s)...there was killing,
Climate got worse, so no more paradise, "God", or: "that what happens that is beyond our human power" condemned Cain to a life of wandering...
Far fetched? They analyzed living aboriginal stories in Australia and found details related to geological events over 10.000 years ago.
Today people think God is an old man with a long beard in a white dress sitting on a cloud, who does not exist.
And we have an exponentially growing pile of data sucking up ever more resources, but all meaning is lost.
It's called progress I guess.
the takeaway is that beer is older than farming and writing
Beer and bread may been developed together, but historians debate whether beer or bread actually came first. Some argue it was beer!
The thought occurs that humans were developing beer around the same time as cities, social hierarchy, and inequality, and beer is great at dumbing people down and keeping them in line. In Mesopotamia, the government gave people beer rations. Intriguing...
Lol good point!
@@pongop ancient beer was quite weak compared to modern beer and water was typically unsafe in cities so the ration was probably because it was safer to drink than water from a cistern. Also a dog walks into a tavern and says "I can't see a thing, I guess I'll open this one"
@@pongop not everything could be critical theory'd,beer's just malty water by that point,search how to make kvass by life of boris.
A BIG (probably the most important) reason you missed here is because of climate. For most of human history, the climate changed so drastically (and was on average much colder) for people to maintain farms for multiple generations.
We can see that people figured out how to farm thousands of years prior to the neolithic age, but when the climate stabilized, it suddenly (or rather slowly) became possible to maintain one's crops for longer spans of time, thus kickstarting the ability to stockpile resources (which itself came with its own pros and cons, being resource abundance and large-scale war).
Once you realize this, it also becomes way easier to see why/how various cities/civilizations collapsed due to over-farming/fishing/mining/tree cutting. The vast majority of famines were a result of over exploitation of the environment. This is also why many hunter-gatherer societies still exist today even though they could switch to agriculture, because they learned the lessons of over-centralization/over-exploitation.
We need to learn those lessons as well now more than ever since our cities our over-exploiting more land than ever before.
All that said, I do think we could figure out how to create more sustainable cities now that we have the ability to measure things better, but that's going to take the realization that cities don't come without a cost, and that nature isn't some endless resource we can continuously exploit.
Yes! Great points!
Human civilizations didn't collapse in their totality. They only collapsed to the point that they became sustainable once more. Nature took care of the over-population. Famine, disease, etc., reduced the populations to sustainable levels. Cities can only be made sustainable up to a point. The real way to protect cities is to reduce human population to prevent the resources from being over-exploited. Putting efforts on city resource sustainability alone isn't enough when you have a large resource hungry population that is constantly growing at an exponential rate. Cities will just keep growing along with the population consuming more resources until there is a collapse. Population Control is the elephant in the room that folks don't want to talk about.
@@laurie7689 Population control doesn't solve the problem. It's just a symptom, if that.
If you have a small population that exploits the hell out of the environment, it will still collapse.
Cities def can't just keep growing though. They should naturally fission. And they would if they maintain sustainability as a core principle and part of the culture.
Humans naturally will create their own family planning/birth control so long as they are aware of their environmental impact and available resources.
@@elijahclaude3413 Humans don't naturally plan birth control in relation to environmental impact, unless it is a famine or disease. Rather, they turn to crime to obtain the resources they need/desire, or war if it is a country and not a city that is running low on resources.
@@laurie7689 killing millions like in soviet union,cambodia or china won't help the environment
Historians have speculated the first cities were cooperatives around the production of wheat but especially beer and bread.
Pure speculation, but entirely possible
The grid plan seems to work really well.
The Greeks used three main east-west boulevards to define their colonial city of Neapolis. (New City. Really creative name, there.) The three main roads are still there and still define the central city, the most famous being the Spaccanapoli, the Naples splitter.
A well aligned road system can last for millenia.
One day the roads were icy and a sugar truck spilt some sugar on the road
People came to eat it and a eager entrepreneur shoveled some and sold it to a market as neopolitan
However unlike the stuff he sold our modern day equivalent is artificially flavoured and not the strawberry he put in, the vanilla bean and the mud because he was cutting corners and just had slushy mud
I've been reading the city in history by Lewis Mumford which is a super interesting book that goes over this! Love the video
I was so excited at the title and the video delivered! This is one of your best videos of all time! I appreciate it as a history/social science teacher. This is a great, brief overview! I may actually use it in class. It fits in perfectly with my World History units at the start of year. I love the Simpsons reference! I wasn't aware of ancient cities in Malaysia and Myanmar, so that's awesome to know. Great points about the problems with cities, civilization, hierarchy, private property, and inequality. The thought occurs that humans were developing beer around the same time as cities, social hierarchy, and inequality, and beer is great at dumbing people down and keeping them in line. In Mesopotamia, the government gave people beer rations. Intriguing...
The timing and content--about humans' shift from villages to cities and the accompanying change from circular cities to rectilineal cities--is especially interesting to me right now. I just watched an amazing video about how to turn a standard neighborhood into a village (rectilineal to circular). Folks are seeing the disadvantages of cities and wanting to benefit from the advantages of villages.
Anyway, amazing stuff!
Could you please use AD and BC to define time periods please? It really breaks the flow of learning and understanding of the content to slip in “CE”. It’s not even settled or clear what the common era even is.
I agree. I really dislike this usage in some academic circles.
Would recommend 'The Dawn of Everything' by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Ancient cities always fascinated me.
Okay, the Nebula plugs in this video were quite annoying, Almost as if the video was made just to advertise Nebula. Tell you what, tell them to add comments on Nebula and I will join, honestly that's the only thing preventing me from joining it. These videos lose something when you can't have discussions about the topics they cover with other people.
A lot of ideas regarding the birth of cities, property, human rights, and agriculture are challenged by the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Definitely worth the read.
thanks, I also came here to recommend this book. I love this channel but did cringe at a few of the old assumptions in this video.
David Graeber was awesome!
Yes, definitely lots of problems with cities, civilization, hierarchy, private property, and inequality. The video mentioned it briefly, but more on this topic would have been great.
Wow i came to comment the same thing, awesome to see Graeber's work getting more recognition, even posthumously. Dawn of Everything is an ambitious and well-researched work whose impact may not be fully realized for some time.
Came here to look for this. Thanks. Everyone needs to read this
I really appreciate this video. I'm a professional technologist (and someone fascinated with urban planning), and this concept is a core to learning what a technology is, what makes it successful, and how to plan for future technologies. Thanks for connecting two of my passions together for everyone to enjoy.
Planning is fine, but cities where not innovated. First Cities were either Military Baracks, Slave Encampment or Refugee camps. I don't think free humans would naturaly cluster together like that if the world is open and free.
@@goddyfame3424 A fine opinion. Any evidence to support it that I could read?
1:04 beer and sedentary lifestyles actually make perfect sense together. Municipal-level water purification is a very recent development in human history. Before that, drinking water from an unknown source carried a serious risk of diseases like dysentery. It's one thing to be a nomad and drink from water sources that don't get a lot of use/pollution. It's another thing entirely to try and drink water that came from the ground just a few dozen paces from the hole where someone else put their sewage. The alcohol in beer makes that second option much safer.
Also, beer is an easy way to get calories from grain, especially barley. My ancient history professor taught me that barley was an important crop early on because it's one of the easiest to grow, but its grain tends to be tough and can grind a person's teeth down to stubs if they eat it every day. Drinking barley beer was actually better for a person's teeth than eating barley bread!
No one would make beer from dirty/contaminated water though. Wells/cisterns existed even back then, so fresh water wasn't that much of an issue.
I think it is less about sfae water to drink, but making water last longer. Depending on the water, it can spoil in just weeks or less, so it wasn't suited for droughts and travels. Ferment it and it quickly lasts months since acid and alcohol kicks out MOST (not all) harmful bacteria and leaves Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces behind, which are the same genus of microbes that take the most part of the gut flora. Controlled spoilage is key to preservation.
And also human's love for booze. Eating rotten fruits and grains made us feel funny, and we quickly learned "yo, i can do this on purpose!"
@@angela_merkeI nobody would make beer from water that is visibly contaminated. But if your fresh water is near my latrine and both go into the ground, then microscopic pathogens from my latrine might seep their way into your drinking water without you noticing it. That's where the alcohol in beer really becomes useful.
@@NothingXemnas entertainment value definitely was a bonus, but the controlled spoilage you're describing basically reinforces my point about contamination.
Love from Palestine ❤️💚🤍🖤
I didnt realize just how old Jericho was, that's insane
Anthropology PhD is here. This video is full of factual mistakes and repetitively information phrasing.
What do you mean by repetitive information phrasing?
Could you please provide an example/evidence?
What mistakes were made in this video, oh wise one?
The problem wasn't that they didn't understand how streets work-- they hadn't figured out pavement yet. Walkways would become mud rivers when it rained. Walking above the streets on rooftops would make more sense. These people weren't stupid, dude. They just thought differently than we do.
That's silly havnt they heard of parkour... or bouncing on shop shade clothes like in old school SNES alladin
Safety was probably an issue as well, especially at night. Who knows what critters could wander into the town at night. Walking on the roofs kept them safe from predators.
The Qadan culture (13,000-9,000 BC) was a Mesolithic industry that, archaeological evidence suggests, originated in Upper Egypt (present-day south Egypt) approximately 15,000 years ago. The Qadan subsistence mode is estimated to have persisted for approximately 4,000 years. It was characterized by hunting, as well as a unique approach to food gathering that incorporated the preparation and consumption of wild grasses and grains . Qadan peoples were the first to develop sickles and they also developed grinding stones independently to aid in the collecting and processing of these plant foods prior to consumption.
That's the name quatar wanted for their country
Every one can pronounce that! But they wanted to be original so instead stuck with Qatar
This presents theory as fact. I am not saying the theory is wrong but l hate the way TH-camrs like this refer to “scholars” without naming anyone or discussing the various strands of thought. Ultimately our ideas about how cities originated are derived from Marx’s concept of Modes of Production. This basic idea was adopted by Thomsen in the late nineteenth century and has been with us more or less ever since. This guy has more to say about his sponsor than he does about the possible reasons why cities were created.
"First, the car was invented"
-car nuts, probably.
Terminally online take right here
A factor not mentioned: mate selection. A small nomadic tribe would have few potential mates as opposed to a city. We still do this with colleges and hot spot cities. Move to the big city for a few years, get your career started, meet someone then move out to the burbs because it's too damn expensive to buy a house in the city.
But the commute in every day is such a time waster. Fighting all that traffic leaves you drained by the time you come in.
@@mikekolokowsky that's really only if you live on a car dependent city like American ones. If your country has good public transit this isn't an issue and the suburbs are actually really nice
@@lq3552 For a while, I was commuting by train, which was much easier than driving. But it was still 45 minutes in each direction and the hassle of ticketing and being on time for the train or you're half an hour late. A suburb to a city takes time no matter how you go. Bus, train, Uber or private car.
@@hogenmogen8545 the main issue here is city design. Car centric cities are much more stretched out and massive, they have to build a ton of parking spaces, roads, infrastructure, making the city a nightmare, not only for drivers, or city people but also literally everyone else, including the people taking the bus stuck in the traffic caused by this design, the trains that have to cross much bigger areas due to this design, the bikers who have to practically risk death on every commute becsuse of this
This is not only an American issue, but America does it the absolute worst
What about Sumeria? Weren´t there the first cities in the ancient times? What about Harappa, in the Indus Valley?
Great video! Also, nebula is fantastic, it's great to see how much it's evolved these last few years
We may be finding OLD settlements, but we will never find the first ones. We will only find defeated settlements, and then someone else moved in nextdoor. People are good at reusing what they have to make life easier. They would've dismantled their cities to improve them.
cities were likely to be independently developed multiple times in different parts of the world
Have you heard of pyramid like temple structures being built in separate regions with no knowledge of the others existence?
They also had strange "sky gods" who came to visit
Creepy
So City Planning is quite old in of itself if it kicked off in the Bronze Age as Cities became more complex 😮
lol 90% of this vid is an ad for nebula and he doesn't fully explain WHY humans built cities in the first place.
I expected much more information, this is like 5% of what we were taught about first cities at history class in high school.
Jericho is in Israel 🇮🇱
Excellent video, as always. Serious question though - How much of your content do you use in your college coursework?
7:10 Pakistan? There's nothing called Ancient Pakistan. If it's about the present day location of civilization, then India has more sites than Pakistan, along the most important dried up river Saraswati of the civilization.
7:36
“Jericho sort of looked more like an Amiibo…”
Me: *NINTENDO AMIIBO FLASHBACKS*
(I know that’s obviously not what he’s talking about lmao)
here to plug in an non sponsored way that the Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow is a great book that speaks on these topics
In ancient times, they needed cities to survive and to socialize with others that are different and to have a leader.
To charge people rent
Let's just stick with..BC and AD..all the bce..cd something stuff is to confusing.
Please add metric to your scripts 😊
There was basically thousands of years of experimentation from the upper paleolithic settlements until we finally got to Uruk, which (at least when I was in school around 20 years ago) was considered the first true city.
6:14 - Yeah, priesthood is the oldest grift around. Tell people your imaginary friend needs animal sacrifices so he’ll keep the river flowing, and what do you know, free barbecue.
😂 complaining about wealth accumulation in 10000 bc
Because we needed a better cable network than pigeons.
Don’t most modern suburbs lack town centers, monuments and market places?
They have them...just not IN the suburb itself.
Just makes for neccesary transport
If there is no transport there is a problem
I thought Jericho was the oldest city in the world