The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

Re:The Oldest Living Civilization (1944) by brailsafe on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:46AM (#22167876)

Those may be true, but it seems like you're just defining civilization as the point at which a given group of people developed a writing system, and also pointing to a lot non-mutually exclusive events. That's far from "all evidence" and you're just describing multiple civilizations occurring at different times. You also had the Indus Valley Civ around the same time. Likewise, even if one is younger than the other, obviously doesn't mean it's considered to have the same longevity.

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Re:The Oldest Living Civilization (1944) by rsj_hn on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @06:39AM (#22168449)

I did not invent the criteria. When we talk about "civilization", we mean a writing system, public buildings, centralized government with some formalized structure.

If you are just talking about tribes of people with some arts and crafts, then you can find cave paintings in Spain dating back 35,000 years (https://www.oldest.org/artliterature/cave-paintings/), a structured society living in caves in Sri Lanka 35,000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_sites_b...) or the Gobekle Teple (the world's oldest temple) in Turkey 11,000 years ago -- and they even had "scripts" there. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worl...

The point is, humans migrated out of Africa a _long_ time ago and there is a long history of things like tool making, cooking, art, making structures, making symbols in proto languages, which is scattered all across the world from Latin America to Europe to Asia. But none of these by themselves constitute what is traditionally considered a "civilization", although of course this is just a long standing convention. Having a written language and organized public buildings is required for that.

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Re:The Oldest Living Civilization (1944) by cygx on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @06:53AM (#22168516)

There is a bit of a case insofar that we have a (limited) form of macro-organization along songlines.

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