Toby Wilkinson: belief

Transcript context

…This is a very speculative question, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Humankind has been around for a long time and it seems there’s not much progress. Then all of a sudden, there’s the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the ancient Egyptians, then more. What is it you think happened? Was it writing? Something else? I think when we look at the origins of these great civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, there’s a combination of factors that each one individually perhaps wouldn’t have tipped the balance, but taken together they made a difference. Climate, very important one. This is a period where there is a shift in the rain belt across North Africa and the Middle East. It shifts further south. It leads to the drying out of large swathes of land that had previously been inhabitable by cattle herders and small-scale farmers. What this does is concentrate population in river valleys. People head for the permanent sources of water. That critical mass of people in a fairly constrained area does give rise to social change and to the emergence of civilization. Climatic stress, climate change, environmental pressures, certainly a big factor right across the Middle East. There’s a whole world of people, and for 300,000, 400,000 years this never happens. I always find that strange. Maybe it did happen and there’s no surviving record of it, but that’s strange as well.…

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