Why Did Humans Invent Cities?
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
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Cities are a relatively new invention, by human standards. Why did Neolithic people 11,000 years ago decide to give up their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lives and start to settle? And what were these early cities like?
Resources on this topic:
ourworldindata.org/urbanization
www.history.com/news/prehisto... this era%2C early humans,and were hunters and gatherers, www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
The City Shaped by Spiro Kostof www.amazon.com/City-Shaped-Pa...
www.theguardian.com/cities/20...
www.thoughtco.com/eridu-iraq-...
Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Written by Dave Amos and Hannah Woolsey
Select images and video from Getty Images.
Black Lives Matter.
Trans rights.
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! 🥰
😂
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
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.
Ancient cities always fascinated me.
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!
...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! 😬
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!"
@@eid8fkebe7f27ejdjdjduyhsvqhwu2 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.
Really interesting video keep up the good work 👍
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
I've been reading the city in history by Lewis Mumford which is a super interesting book that goes over this! Love the video
Excellent video, as always. Serious question though - How much of your content do you use in your college coursework?
Would recommend 'The Dawn of Everything' by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
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?
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
hey @citybeautiful, your videos are really engaging, where do you get your picture and video assests to create this kind of video production?
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!
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 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.
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.
Great video! Also, nebula is fantastic, it's great to see how much it's evolved these last few years
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.
Such an interesting video, I want you to make a documentary about ancient cities.
I wish you would have mentioned Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site but great video
This is a really good video!
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.
I didnt realize just how old Jericho was, that's insane
In ancient times, they needed cities to survive and to socialize with others that are different and to have a leader.
Never clicked on a video so fast after reading the title😂
I love playing Dawn of Man, Cities Skylines, Medieval Dynasty, Civ 6
Great Content..
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)
@citybeautiful always a fan of street maps, new and old, but the 3- equal part background with a clean blue center is balanced and keeps the eye on you as you talk. Mixing up the bookshelf contents once in a while could be a fun detail for eagle-eyes viewers to spot ...
Is there a way to stream Nebula on WebOS or Google TV (or other smart TV platform)?
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.
So City Planning is quite old in of itself if it kicked off in the Bronze Age as Cities became more complex 😮
Well made content ❤
Beautiful, amazing video. Greetings from Bogotá Colombia
bro this is great video please 10 hours more
Talk about harappa civilization as well
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
Great video.
I expected much more information, this is like 5% of what we were taught about first cities at history class in high school.
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.
"let's drink beer"
"Hmm we better find a place to make and drink beer"
Please give us more opportunities to talk to you, to ask you questions and make video suggestions
Like scheduled livestreams
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?
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 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
This is why I like the Kurzgesagt Human Era Calendar...
It states the year as 12,023 based on when we think the first city was built.
A much more universal start date than an eastern Roman citizen who may or may not have existed.
What about Sumeria? Weren´t there the first cities in the ancient times? What about Harappa, in the Indus Valley?
So it's pretty safe to say that if they never invented beer we'd still be in the Stone Age. Thanks beer.
"First, the car was invented"
-car nuts, probably.
Terminally online take right here
By accident. Small villages became big villages, then became cities
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
Will you be discussing NEOM and Telosa?
Yes, neom is bright tubes for display and the other one is an electric car
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
Because we needed a better cable network than pigeons.
So, what was the beer like?
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.
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.
To brew beer.
Actually might be one of the main reasons
Beer was weak at that point, it's won't result """"""""inequality""""""""
This is one of my favorite topics, and you did a great job.
I think you might be adding an "l" to Gobekli Tepli.
The answer is so simple...
It was answered in Sacha b Cohen's Borat movie
"I want window from a glass, my neighbour gets window from a glass"
Keeping up with Jones or.. in this case the first building of Babel
Emperor of the old Egytptian city built a huge tower with flowering ...flowers.. then his neighbour HAD to go better and made the tower of Babylon, people came to see them, and decided to stay, needing food and a place to stay, another person builds a market.
And so on the world over
I thought Jericho was the oldest city in the world
Humans love to develop efficiency. Building tall skyscrapers are an efficient use of land versus building 2 story houses for each family equal to the population of a large city.
Im so glad you added the Ggantija and Hagar Qim temple in Malta.
This is like discovering what the history lessons were actually meant to teach us
My favorite comment while I was in Turkey:
"See that city that is pretty and everlasting vs the one that is maybe 400 years younger; the young one looks worse, recycling the stone and other materials?
What is the difference?
They builders of the old ones had more slaves..."
I wonder if the first pub was created in the first city. Probably was, who are we kidding?
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.
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!
I'm just hoping Sam invites you to guest star on Jet Lagged one of these days!
humans need to depend on each other. Some humans work as artisans, builders, agriculture farmers, animal herders, fisherman, administrators, soldiers and so on. Nobody can survive with a person alone. So grouping together gives a better chance to thrive in a harsh environment.
True, thats why i cant believe that humans existed 300.000 years while the first cities existed 10.000 years. Makes more sense that humans discovered earlier on that staying together was safer and better.
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.
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 UA-cam is his side gig. I think it's better to see his current videos as preamble to the larger version on Nebula.
thx for reminding me to watch Jetlag
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.
lol 90% of this vid is an ad for nebula and he doesn't fully explain WHY humans built cities in the first place.
Tu qualify as a city must have plumbing so many settlements that look like cities actually aren't. Plumbing was invented around 3000 BCE so I would argue that Jericho was not a city before that period but just a settlement.
No mention about Talianky, Maidanetske and Nebelivka
Other animals have cities. Prairie dogs, termites, ants…
Perhaps those fortifications were to keep hostile animals away
No shoutout to Matera?!
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!
Explore Golgumbaz with Guide Jahangir, Bijapur,South India 🇮🇳
Safety, security, and prosperity. = Good reasons to start a city.
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.
Probably started out as a market to trade goods.
So humans invented suburbs before they invented, um, burbs?
There are many more classes of housing
Projects
The sticks
Down town
Down town but its redeveloped
Ghetto
Ghetto but now its cool to live there so its "upmarket"
Dress circle
Estate
Etc..
Your home town is what you make it, there's no point in classifying it as much as there is trying to pigeonhole music if you just enjoy it thats enough
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.
Urbanism as being the origin point of class inequity is an assumption that is being challenged within archaeology presently. Prolonged interaction between agricultural urbanists and neighboring highland pastoralists provides more insight into how our contemporary idea of what a city is came to be the dominant formula.
There wasn't much inequity in the first cities of Catal Huyuk and those of the Indus Valley culture. They did not have governments as we know them today, with a monopoly on the legal use of force. We know this as we see no signs of palaces, courthouses or prisons in the ruins. Nor does their art depict warfare.
Cities came before agriculture. there were large scale trade routes with small economic hubs hundreds of thousads of years ago.
the first mention of cities in about 4000 years ago... after someone invented writing...
I have a question... can cities be new today or is everything already established?
There are several new cities planned or already under construction around the world today
@talknight2 in the US too?
If there are opportunities in an area that are deemed long term resource.. a town may be built around it
Good example is what happens during a gold rush like in Ballarat Australia
If there is potential for more use such as agriculture and then service industries such as Texas.. this will turn into a city
A new city is today more easier achieved because hi tech can build roads and facilities fast.. however you still need people otherwise you get ghost cities like in China
Look up the planned city of Brasilia, the capital.
How do you make beer without agriculture. Aliens taught them.
Wild seeds
Why did they build cities? Well they had to have somewhere to put a Dunkin Donuts. ...though seriously, I enjoyed your coverage of this topic. Videos like this make people think. (Well, most people)
Against the grain is a really good book on this topic, basically linking imperialism and violence as a necessity to form cities.