What Was the First Civilization?

🏛️ What was the first civilization in human history? Not Egypt, not Greece, and not Atlantis. This video sorts out three words people confuse: civilization, culture, and theory. It covers what historians actually require before calling something a civilization, why the Capsian hunter-gatherers of Tunisia and Algeria (around 10,000 to 6,000 BC, famous for their mountains of snail shells) are a culture and not a civilization, why Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük don't qualify either, how Sumer's city of Uruk became the first civilization around 3500 BC and invented writing to track grain and bee# rations, the rivals in Egypt, the Indus Valley and Peru, and where the Atlantis story really comes from: two books by Plato with no physical evidence in 2,400 years.

📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES:

▸ Noura Rahmani — "Technological and Cultural Change Among the Last Hunter-Gatherers of the Maghreb: The Capsian (10,000–6000 B.P.)" (2004, Journal of World Prehistory) https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOWO.000003...

▸ David Lubell — "Continuité et changement dans l'Epipaléolithique du Maghreb" (2005), and Lubell et al. on Capsian escargotières (1976, Journal of Archaeological Science)

▸ V. Gordon Childe — "The Urban Revolution" (1950, Town Planning Review) — the classic criteria for civilization https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.21.1.k853...

▸ Klaus Schmidt — "Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia" (2012, ex oriente)

▸ Ian Hodder — "The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük" (2006, Thames & Hudson)

▸ Samuel Noah Kramer — "History Begins at Sumer" (1956; 3rd ed. 1981, University of Pennsylvania Press)

▸ Denise Schmandt-Besserat — "How Writing Came About" (1996, University of Texas Press)

▸ Ruth Shady Solís et al. — "Dating Caral, a Preceramic Site in the Supe Valley on the Central Coast of Peru" (2001, Science) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1059519

▸ Plato — Timaeus and Critias (c. 360 BC), translated by Desmond Lee (Penguin Classics)

▸ Society for American Archaeology — open letter on "Ancient Apocalypse" and lost-civilization claims (2022): https://www.saa.org/

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