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.
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.
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.