Essay on Sociology The Development Of Civilization
Sociology The Development Of Civilization Term Papers
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The Development of Civilization in the Ancient World
In order to understand the evolution of civilization in humans, a long and almost as diverse process, complete with downfalls and dead-ends, as the physical evolution of mankind itself, we must first understand the conditions of life in that time period. Other factors we have to account for are the different physical capabilities and limitations of man and the climactic conditions of the ancient world.
The evolution has gone from simple groups of hunters to great empires to advanced forms of government such as democracy and communism. However, the main concept that has driven men to learn to work together is survival. Man, due to physical limitations, is unable to survive on his own. Men must interact with each other in order to survive. This common thread in the evolution of civilization has enabled man to develop to the level he has, from a time when cave drawings were considered historical records and had religious significance to an age when we have readily available at our fingertips the temperature of a city two thousand miles away.
In this essay, I am going to examine how mankind went from bands of hunters to the great cities that sprung all over Asia, the Middle East and southeastern Europe in ancient times. In examining this evolution, I will explain how man has become the in one sense the high end in evolution, in his ability to manipulate nature, and the low point in evolution, in his ability and apparent willingness to destroy himself. Also, any reference to the word man is implied in the general sense of the entire human race, male and female alike.
To begin this essay, I am going to discuss the need of man for other men. Whether the dependence that men have on each other is a positive or negative aspect of mankind is open for debate. However there is almost no one in this day and age, at least in western civilization, who is totally independent of others to survive. Not one of us is able to emotionally survive (totally ignoring the physical aspects of survival) loneliness. This eventually leads to madness and self-destruction.
However, the primary necessity that led to the development of civilization was not the mental factor, it was the physical factor. Men learned that in order to survive they were going to have to work together. Men learned that better cloaks could be made if one man made them all and that more and better food could be caught or gathered and eaten if one man or a group of men caught or collected all of it.
All of these realizations led to the development of the earliest communities of people. Men learned to work together in order to work more efficiently and to make life easier. Mankind could never have developed into what it is today if it wasn’t for its ability to work together, for this ability was the ultimate separation point between us and animals.
By working together, man was able to improve on his efficiency in food production. Man switched from simply gathering food and simply gambling that the next place he went would have the food he needed to survive. Now man began to insure that the food would always be there when he needed it by beginning to farm and domesticate animals. These farming techniques and the division of labor brought mankind to a turning point in his development. Animals, unlike humans spend every waking hour of their lives trying to survive and men did that until it was no longer necessary because they had enough food, if not more than enough to survive and so man was actually able to sit down and think about things, to consider, interpret and explore.
One of the greatest evolutionary accomplishments came from these accomplishments: spoken communication. Spoken communication, as advanced as ours, is one of the things that separate us from animals, because thoughts are worthless if there is no way to share them. It is incredible how much as evolved from the simple need to survive. The physical evolution of man, however great it is, has been well surpassed by the social evolution of man. It is simple to marvel at the past, but we can never really understand our current civilization without understanding its roots.
Even at this early level of civilization, art, one of the most wondrous and unique things about the human race, developed. It is believed that art started out as symbolic depiction’s of human relationships. This theory suggests that early social philosophers tried to interpret the demands of the social structure by depicting them symbolically. For example, cave bison were not meant to be seen as bison, but rather depicted as women, and horses were meant to be seen as men.
Some famous cave drawings can be seen in southern France/northern Spain. On these cave walls are depicted wondrous murals of animals, such as bison, bulls, horses, ponies and stags. Also, the cave painters were not of the hunters in their group, their roles in society was to draw these paintings. They were specialists at their art. These people spent their whole day, just like the hunter-gatherers spent their whole day, doing their job. This is evidence that division of labor is a very old concept. Cave drawings were obviously a very important part of a society in ancient days, and art itself came to be a very important part of every culture that has ever existed.
Later civilizations formed more advanced versions of art, such as sculpture, music and literature. These are all defined as arts. Almost every culture that had the ability to developed these forms of art, did.
After the social group of hunter-gatherers, another type of community evolved. This was the community of villagers. Villages would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the development of hand-tools, specifically the hand-ax. Hand tools made it possible for man to build some of the structures he built when he built the villages.
“Nineteenth-century scholars hypothesized four stages in human development: (1) a savage stage in which all people were hunter-gatherers, (2) a herdsman or nomad stage during which man domesticated some animals, (3) a farming stage, and (4) civilization. Researchers have since attempted to determine when and where man first changed from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist or agriculturist. “Many authorities have come to think that man's domestication of plants and animals caused changes in their formand that the presence or absence...
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