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human
2/4 THE SUSPICIOUS ADVENT OF CIVILIZATION

We know that hominids have existed in this planet for millions of years. They were stronger, and they had a higher craneal volume. Even if we stick to Homo 'Sapiens', we can find that one of the oldest fossils found in Ethiopia has at least 233,000 years.

And yet historians tell us that civilization came only a few thousand years ago. Ancient texts in every culture tell how some kind of instructor gods gave us:
>metallurgy
>agriculture
>writing
>cities
>religion

All of this at the same time.

So now, instead of a few hominids disperse around the world, we have large population masses living in the same spot.

With civilization came the rule of law. These rules are the same in every civilization: they basically regulate how people should live together without fighting or killing each other. They are essentially convivence rules, and they multiply the number of people you can cram together in a city.

Some of these rules were set in stone and become the basis of religions so that nobody could change them. Eg: the 10 commandments, the Quran. Religions might as well have been subverted and nobody could tell, because there is no living human that could have witnessed their origin.
gpt
Civilization is probably older than we think, and I don't mean it in the astral power pleidean atlantis hyperborea way.
The epic of Gilgamesh tells of other kings, of other civilizations older, and then there are civilized people that just didn't know how to write and died in obscurity, forgotten in prehistory. Also, developmentally modern humans only exist from 20,000 years back. which makes it a way shorter time than when the first anatomically modern humans showed up. Also, the inventions you talk about didn't just pop up from thin air, agriculture has a lot of history, we have megaliths dating from 9000 BC, religion is a natural part of human experience and it evolved as we did. Metalworking was invented independently at different times at different ages, so did writing.
Cities were a natural product of agriculture/animal husbandry taking off, and Jericho already existed before agriculture.

>With civilization came the rule of law. These rules are the same in every civilization: they basically regulate how people should live together without fighting or killing each other. They are essentially convivence rules, and they multiply the number of people you can cram together in a city.
This is just an example of convergent evolution of sorts, in my opinion, laws of convivence already existed before they were put in stone by proto governments. and because we are all roughly the same species, the laws are usually similar to each other.

As an off point, how do you explain civilization not emerging in several parts of the world, like Australia? In theory, It would be way more efficient to seed civilization in all of the world instead of just in Eurasia, west africa and with Sporadic civilizations in America (That being outside of the Andes and Meso America)
human
>cities were a natural product
No. Humans are social but they are also competitive. They fight each other unless you force them not to. Our ancestors were strong and they could live alone in small communities. Only when we got weaker (or were made) we 'voluntarily' gathered in cities.

>and because we are all roughly the same species, the laws are usually similar to each other
Well the aztecs had this habit of butchering people to the gods so that there were crops.

>civilization not present in several parts of the world
These gods seeded populations from their crafts. Idk, maybe equatorial locations were better for some reason. Maybe they researched climate and resources before kickstarting a city.