The Developement of Civilization

The Developement of Civilization

According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, civilization is “a relatively high level of cultural and technological development, specifically the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained”. Other sources trace the meaning of civilization to political, economic, military and social structures as well as the heightened intellectual and artistic aspects of life (Spielvogel,xxxi). Civilization developed as the crises of everyday life necessitated change. As history progresses, we study our past in search of guidance and other crucial information to help us along the way. The study of civilization also plays as an agent to defer us from duplicating past blunders.

Before recent finds in East Africa, paleoanthropologists thought civilization began in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, often referred to as the fertile crescent. In the year 1959, Mary Leaky, coming from a prestigious paleoanthropological family, found a nearly complete human like skull which dated back to before the fossils of any Southeast Asian finds. In 1972, a team led by her son Richard found the remains of a skeleton over 200,000 years older (Lerner,4-5). These ancient people are known as Australopithecines and wandered through East and South Africa (Spielvogel,3) The tools of these people were very crude. They seem to have been made for agricultural purposes. From this human like species, also referred to as Homo habilis, another group sprouted. They represent the second stage of human life and are called Homo erectus (Lerner,6-7).

The finds in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley date at about 1.5 million years old. Migrants from Africa, also part of the Homo e...

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...ry, or even to have a permanent home. Although mental capacity is advantageous, it has next to nothing to do with civilization in its base form. The only brainpower that matters in civilization is the ability to think rationally. The smaller mental capability of the Homo habilis still held those prehistoric people together. It supplied them with a sense of community and responsibility toward it. We still don’t always think rationally, and yet we are a civilization.

Bibliography:

Works Cited

Calder, Ritchie. After The Seventh Day: The World Man Created. New York: Mentor,

1961.

Lerner, Robert E., Edward McNall-Burns, and Standish Meacham. Western

Civilizations. 11th Ed. vol.1.New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1988.

Spielvogel, Jackson J., Western Civilization. 3rd Ed. St. Paul: West Publishing

Company, 1997.