A New Understanding of Human History and the Roots of Inequality | David Wengrow | TED
Summary
TLDREl texto ofrece una visión desafiante de la historia de la humanidad y la civilización. Contra la narrativa tradicional que vincula el desarrollo de la agricultura con el surgimiento de estructuras jerárquicas y la desigualdad, el autor argumenta que hubo un período de 4,000 años donde las aldeas permanecieron y se desarrollaron tecnologías sin la formación de clases sociales rígidas. Se destaca la existencia de ciudades antiguas en todo el mundo que no muestran evidencia de gobernantes autoritarios y sugiere que la historia humana está plagada de experimentación social y estructuras más igualitarias de lo que comúnmente se cree. Además, cuestiona por qué no tenemos un léxico para describir estas sociedades y por qué perpetuamos la idea de que la desigualdad es el precio necesario de la civilización. Finalmente, el discurso invita a reconsiderar la historia y a explorar nuevas formas de organización social que podrían ser posibles con las tecnologías modernas.
Takeaways
- 🧐 La creación de la agricultura no provocó inmediatamente una sociedad desigual; hubo un período de 4,000 años en el que las aldeas permanecieron aldeas.
- 🏰 A pesar de la ausencia de clases sociales rígidas, hubo un avance tecnológico significativo sin la necesidad de reyes, burocracias o ejércitos permanentes.
- 🌐 Estas primeras poblaciones agrícolas se desarrollaron y se expandieron sus innovaciones desde el este del Mediterráneo hasta el Mar Negro y el Golfo Pérsico.
- 🏡 La arquitectura más impresionante de las primeras ciudades no eran templos ni palacios, sino las viviendas bien equipadas de los ciudadanos comunes.
- 🔄 La historia de las ciudades y las sociedades humanas antes de la agricultura está cambiando con la arqueología moderna, desafiando las nociones tradicionales.
- 🌟 Las primeras ciudades, como Teotihuacan, tuvieron una organización sin gobernantes y se reconstituyeron en una gran colección de villas cómodas para la mayoría de la población.
- 🕍 Encontramos evidencia de que las ciudades existían en el mundo con anterioridad a la aparición de dinastías o estructuras de mando centralizado.
- 🤔 La narrativa estándar de la historia humana que vincula la desigualdad con la civilización debe cuestionarse dadas las evidencias arqueológicas.
- 🏙️ Las ciudades y las confederaciones regionales de hace miles de años, unidas principalmente por el consenso y la cooperación, sugieren que es posible replicar tales estructuras hoy en día.
- 🌱 La idea de que la agricultura significó un alejamiento de un Edén egalitario o que las sociedades a gran escala tienen que tener estructuras de mando jerárquico es cuestionable.
- 👥 La participación en la democracia no está limitada a comunidades pequeñas; la evidencia sugiere que es posible a una escala mucho mayor, incluso en la era de tecnologías modernas.
- 🌟 La historia de la humanidad sugiere que existen múltiples formas de organización social y civilización, desafiando la noción de que nuestro mundo actual es el único posible.
Q & A
¿En qué lugar y año se encontraba el narrador durante la época de verano mencionada en el texto?
-El narrador estaba en Iraqi Kurdistan en el verano del 2014.
¿Qué aspecto de la historia de la agricultura ha intrigado al narrador desde que comenzó a estudiar arqueología?
-El narrador se ha intrigado por la creencia de que la invención de la agricultura por nuestros antepasados en esa región del mundo desencadenó una cadena de consecuencias que moldearon nuestro mundo moderno en una dirección particular.
¿Cómo describe el narrador la relación entre la invención de la agricultura y la propiedad privada?
-El narrador sugiere que con la práctica de la agricultura, nuestros antepasados desarrollaron nuevos lazos con la tierra que habitaban, lo que llevó a la invención de la propiedad privada.
¿Qué evento significativo ocurrió después de la invención de la agricultura según el relato del narrador?
-Según el narrador, después de la invención de la agricultura, hubo un período prolongado de alrededor de 4,000 años en el que las aldeas permanecieron como aldeas, y no hay mucha evidencia del surgimiento de clases sociales rígidas.
¿Cuáles fueron algunas de las innovaciones tecnológicas que se desarrollaron durante el período de 4,000 años después de la invención de la agricultura?
-Durante ese período, se desarrollaron conocimientos matemáticos, metalurgia avanzada, el cultivo de olivos, viñas y palmeras de dátiles, la invención del pan de levadura, la cerveza, y se desarrollaron tecnologías textiles como la rueda del alfarero y la vela.
¿Cómo se describe el concepto de 'villa global' en el texto?
-El narrador describe el período de 4,000 años después de la invención de la agricultura como la era de la primera 'villa global', no solo por las innovaciones tecnológicas sino también por las innovaciones sociales que permitieron a las personas hacer todas estas cosas sin formar centros o crear una clase de líderes permanentes sobre todos los demás.
¿Qué crítica hace el narrador al concepto tradicional de 'civilización'?
-El narrador critica el concepto tradicional de 'civilización' por ser usualmente reservado para sociedades altamente desiguales y estratificadas que surgieron miles de años después, argumentando que hay una falta de palabras para describir períodos largos de la historia humana en los que no se comportaban de esa manera.
¿Con qué antropólogo fallecido trabajó el narrador para abordar algunas de estas preguntas sobre la historia humana?
-El narrador trabajó en estrecha colaboración con el antropólogo David Graeber para abordar algunas de estas preguntas.
¿Qué sorpresas arqueológicas encontró en la ciudad de Teotihuacan en el valle de México?
-En Teotihuacan, los arqueólogos encontraron una gran colección de villas cómodas en lugar de pirámides y templos, y que la mayoría de la población vivía en palacios con patios espaciosos y drenajes subyacentes, con hermosos murales en las paredes.
¿Qué tipo de evidencia encontró el narrador sobre las sociedades humanas antes de la llegada de la agricultura?
-El narrador encontró evidencia de una amplia variedad de experimentación social antes de la llegada de la agricultura, incluyendo redes sociales extensas en África, enterramientos grandiosos en Europa durante la Edad de Hielo, construcción de edificios públicos en el Medio Oriente y earthworks masivos en América del Norte.
¿Qué implicaciones contemporáneas sugiere el narrador que pueda tener la nueva evidencia arqueológica sobre la historia humana?
-El narrador sugiere que si ciudades y confederaciones regionales cohesionadas principalmente por consenso y cooperación existieron hace miles de años, podríamos crearlas de nuevo hoy en día con tecnologías que nos permiten superar la fricción de la distancia y los números.
Outlines
🌾 La era de la primera aldea global
El primer párrafo aborda la curiosidad del narrador sobre cómo la invención de la agricultura supuestamente dio lugar a cambios drásticos en la sociedad humana. Sin embargo, desafía la narrativa común al señalar que, después de la invención de la agricultura hace aproximadamente 10,000 años, las aldeas se mantuvieron relativamente estables durante otros 4,000 años. Durante ese tiempo, hubo un desarrollo tecnológico significativo sin la aparición de clases sociales rígidas o estructuras de mando permanentes. Se destaca la importancia de las innovaciones sociales y tecnológicas, como la creación de pan horneado, cerveza y tecnologías de textiles, que se difundieron ampliamente. Además, cuestiona por qué no tenemos un mejor léxico para describir estos períodos de la historia humana en los que no hubo explotación o dominación mutua.
🏙️ La historia humana revisada
El segundo párrafo explora la colaboración del narrador con el antropólogo David Graeber para cuestionar la narrativa estándar de la historia humana. Destaca que la visión tradicional de la historia, que sugiere que la agricultura y el crecimiento de las ciudades llevaron inevitablemente a la desigualdad y la concentración de poder, no se alinea con la evidencia arqueológica. Muestra ejemplos de ciudades antiguas en diferentes partes del mundo que no presentan evidencias de gobernanza autoritaria y sugiere que la desigualdad no es un precio necesario para la civilización. Además, cuestiona la noción de que la humanidad vivió en bandos igualitarios hasta la llegada de la agricultura y desafía la creencia de que la modernidad actual depende de la concentración de la humanidad en unidades más grandes y la acumulación de desigualdades.
🏛️ Ciudades sin gobernantes
El tercer párrafo profundiza en la idea de que las ciudades antiguas no necesariamente estaban gobernadas por dinastías o clases gobernantes. Presenta ejemplos de ciudades como Teotihuacan, que se reconvirtió en una colección de villas cómodas para la mayoría de su población, y Tlaxcala, una república indígena que no tenía gobernantes y estaba gobernada por un parlamento urbano. Destaca que estas sociedades no eran perfectamente igualitarias, pero comparadas con otras de la época, como Atenas, que estaba fundada en la esclavitud, podrían haber gestionado mejor la desigualdad. Además, desafía la idea de que las ciudades sin gobernantes eran un fenómeno raro en la historia humana, apuntando a la existencia de Tlaxcala y otras ciudades como ejemplos contrarios.
🌱 La diversidad de las sociedades preagricolas
El cuarto y último párrafo cuestiona la noción de que la invención de la agricultura significó un alejamiento de un Edén egalitario y sugiere que las sociedades preagricolas tuvieron una diversidad de estructuras sociales y experimentaciones. Muestra evidencias de redes sociales extensas en África, enterramientos grandiosos en Europa, construcciones públicas en el Medio Oriente y grandes terraformas en América del Norte. Argumenta que estas evidencias sugieren que las sociedades pequeñas no necesariamente son más igualitarias que las grandes y que, si ciudades y confederaciones regionales existieron en el pasado, podrían ser creadas nuevamente en la actualidad con las tecnologías modernas que nos permiten superar las barreras de la distancia y el número de personas.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡arqueología
💡agricultura
💡cambio tecnológico
💡global village
💡civilización
💡inequality
💡Teotihuacan
💡Tlaxcala
💡caza y recolección
💡Göbekli Tepe
💡participatory democracy
Highlights
The speaker was in Iraqi Kurdistan with a team of archaeologists, exploring the origins and consequences of agriculture on human society.
Contrary to the common narrative, the advent of agriculture did not immediately lead to the development of private property or social inequality.
For around 4,000 years after agriculture, villages remained small and there was little evidence of rigid social classes.
Early farming populations made significant technological advancements without centralized authority or social stratification.
The era following the invention of agriculture is referred to as the 'first global village' due to the spread of innovations across vast regions.
The concept of civilization as we know it, which implies social stratification and inequality, is questioned as not being universally applicable.
The speaker collaborated with anthropologist David Graeber to challenge the standard narrative of human history.
Modern archaeological findings suggest that cities and complex societies predated the rise of dynasties and ruling classes.
Ancient cities like Teotihuacan in Mexico evolved away from pyramid temples and human sacrifices towards a more egalitarian society.
The existence of Tlaxcala, an indigenous republic without rulers, challenges the notion that all pre-Columbian American societies were hierarchical.
Archaeological evidence indicates a wide variety of social structures existed before the advent of agriculture, contrary to the idea of small, egalitarian bands.
The speaker suggests that participatory democracy and non-hierarchical societies are not only possible but have historical precedents.
The speaker calls for a reevaluation of our understanding of civilization and the potential for alternative forms of social organization.
The applause at the end indicates the audience's appreciation for the challenging of conventional historical narratives and the call for a new perspective on civilization.
Transcripts
In the summer of 2014,
I was in Iraqi Kurdistan with a small team of archaeologists,
finishing a season of field excavations near the border town of Halabja.
Our project was looking into something which has puzzled and intrigued me
ever since I began studying archeology.
We're taught to believe that thousands of years ago,
when our ancestors first invented agriculture
in that part of the world,
that it set in motion a chain of consequences
that would shape our modern world in a particular direction,
on a particular course.
By farming wheat,
our ancestors supposedly developed new attachments to the land they lived on.
Private property was invented.
And with that, the need to defend it.
Along with new opportunities for some people to accumulate surpluses,
came new labor demands,
tying most people to a hard regime of tending their crops
while a privileged few received freedom
and the leisure to do other things.
To think, to experiment,
to create the foundations of what we refer to as civilization.
Now, according to this familiar story,
what happened next is that populations boomed,
villages turned into towns, towns became cities,
and with the emergence of cities,
our species was locked on a familiar trajectory of development
where spiraling populations and technological change
were bound up with the kind of dreadful inequalities
that we see around us today.
Except, as anyone can tell you,
who's looked at the evidence from the Middle East,
almost nothing of what I've just been saying is actually true.
And the consequences I'm going to suggest
are quite profound.
Actually, what happened after the invention of agriculture
around 10,000 years ago,
is a long period of around another 4,000 years
in which villages largely remained villages.
And actually there's very little evidence for the emergence of rigid social classes,
which is not to say that nothing happened.
Over those 4,000 years,
technological change actually proceeded apace.
Without kings,
without bureaucracies, without standing armies,
these early farming populations fostered the development of mathematical knowledge,
advanced metallurgy.
They learned to cultivate olives, vines and date palms.
They invented leavened bread, beer,
and they developed textile technologies:
the potter's wheel, the sail.
And they spread all of these innovations far and wide,
from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean,
up to the Black Sea,
and from the Persian Gulf,
all the way over to the mountains of Kurdistan,
where our excavations were taking place.
I've often referred, half jokingly, to this long period of human history
as the era of the first global village.
Because it's not just the technological innovations that are so remarkable,
but also the social innovations
which enabled people to do all these things
without forming centers
and without raising up a class of permanent leaders over everybody else.
Now, oddly enough,
this efflorescence of culture is not what we usually refer to
as civilization.
Instead, that term is usually reserved for harshly unequal societies,
which came thousands of years later.
Dynastic Mesopotamia. Pharaonic Egypt.
Imperial Rome.
Societies that were deeply stratified.
So in short,
I've always felt that there was basically something very weird
about our concept of civilization,
something that leaves us lost for words, tongue tied.
When we're confronted with thousands of years of human beings,
say, practicing agriculture, creating new technologies,
but not lording it over each other
or exploiting each other to the maximum.
Why don't we have better words?
Where is our lexicon for those long expanses of human history
in which we weren't behaving that way?
Over the past ten years or more,
I worked closely together with the late,
great anthropologist David Graeber
to address some of these questions.
But we did it on a much larger scale
because from our perspective as an archaeologist and an anthropologist,
this clash between theory and data,
between the standard narrative of human history
and the evidence that we have before us today
is not just confined to the early Middle East.
It’s everything:
out whole picture of human history that we’ve been telling for centuries,
it’s basically wrong.
I'm going to try and explain a few more of the reasons why.
Let's go back to some of those core concepts,
the stable reference points around which we've been organizing
and orchestrating our understanding of world history for hundreds of years.
Take, for instance, that notion that for most of its history,
the human species lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers,
until the advent of agriculture ushered in a new age of inequality.
Or the notion that with the arrival of cities came social classes,
sacred kings and rapacious oligarchs trampling everyone else underfoot.
From our very first history lessons,
we're taught to believe that our modern world,
with all of its advantages and amenities,
modern health care, space travel,
all the things that are good and exciting,
couldn't possibly exist
without that original concentration of humanity
into larger and larger units
and the relentless buildup of inequalities that came with it.
Inequality, we're taught to believe,
was the necessary price of civilization.
Well, if so, then what are we to make of the early Middle East?
Perhaps one might say there was just a very, very, very long lag time,
4,000 years,
before all these developments took place.
Inequality was bound to happen, it was bound to set in.
It was just a matter of time.
And perhaps the rest of the story still works
for other parts of the world.
Well, let's think a bit about what we can actually say today
about the origin of cities.
Surely, you might think, with the appearance of cities
came the appearance of social classes.
Think about ancient Egypt with its pyramid temples.
Or Shang China with its lavish tombs.
The classic Maya with their warlike rulers.
Or the Inca empire with its mummified kings and queens.
But actually, the picture these days is not so clear.
What modern archeology tells us, for example,
is that there were already cities
on the lower reaches of the Yellow River
over 1,000 years before the rise of the Shang.
And on the other side of the Pacific,
in Peru’s Rio Supe,
we already see huge agglomerations of people
with monumental architecture 4,000 years before the Inca.
In South Asia, 4,500 years ago,
the first cities appeared at places like Mohenjo-daro
and Harappa in the Indus Valley.
But these huge settlements present no evidence of kings or queens.
No royal monuments, no aggrandizing art.
And what's more, we know that much of the population
lived in high-quality housing with excellent sanitation.
North of the Black Sea,
in the modern country of Ukraine,
archaeologists have found evidence of even more ancient cities
going back 6,000 years.
And again,
these huge settlements present no evidence
of authoritarian rule.
No temples, no palaces,
not even any evidence of central storage facilities
or top-down bureaucracy.
Actually what we see in those cases are these great concentric rings of houses
arranged rather like the inside of a tree trunk
around neighborhood assembly halls.
And it stayed that way for about 800 years.
So what this means is that long before the birth of democracy in ancient Greece,
there were already well-organized cities
on several of the world's continents
which present no evidence for ruling dynasties.
And some of them also seem to have managed perfectly well without priests,
mandarins and warrior politicians.
Of course, some early cities did go on
to become the capitals of kingdoms and empires.
But it's important to note that others went
in completely the opposite direction.
To take one well-documented example,
around the year 250 AD,
the city of Teotihuacan, in the valley of Mexico,
with a population of around 100,000 people,
turned its back on pyramid temples and human sacrifices
and reconstituted itself
as a vast collection of comfortable villas housing most of the city's population.
When archaeologists first investigated these buildings,
they assumed they were palaces.
Then they realized that just about everyone in the city
was living in a palace with spacious patios
and subfloor drainages,
gorgeous murals on the walls.
But we shouldn't get carried away.
None of the societies that I've been describing
was perfectly egalitarian.
But then we might also remember that fifth-century Athens,
which we look to as the birthplace of democracy,
was also a militaristic society founded on chattel slavery,
where women were completely excluded from politics.
So maybe by comparison,
somewhere like Teotihuacan was not doing so badly
at keeping the genie of inequality in its bottle.
But maybe we can just forget about all that, we can look away.
Perhaps all of these things I'm talking about are basically outliers.
Maybe we can still keep our familiar story of civilization intact.
And after all,
if cities without rulers were really such a common thing in human history,
why didn't Cortéz and Pizarro and all the other conquistadors
find any when they began their invasion of the Americas?
Why did they find only Moctezuma and Atahualpa
lording it over their empires?
Except that's not true either.
Actually, the city where Hernan Cortéz found his military allies,
the ones who enabled his successful assault
on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán,
was exactly one such city without rulers:
an indigenous republic by the name of Tlaxcala,
governed by an urban parliament,
which had some pretty interesting initiation rituals
for would-be politicians.
They'd be periodically whipped
and subject to public abuse by their constituents
to sort of break down their egos and remind them who's really in charge.
It's a little bit different from what we expect of our politicians today.
And archaeologists, by the way, have also worked at this place Tlaxcala,
excavating the remains of the pre-conquest city,
and what they found there is really remarkable.
Again, the most impressive architecture is not temples and palaces.
It's just the well-appointed residences of ordinary citizens
arrayed along these grand terraces overlooking district plazas.
And it's not just the history of cities
that modern archaeological science is turning on its head.
We also know now that the history of human societies
before the coming of agriculture
is just nothing like what we once imagined.
Far from this idea of people living all the time
in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers,
actually, what we see these days
is evidence for a really wild variety of social experimentation
before the coming of farming.
In Africa,
50,000 years ago,
hunter-gatherers were already creating huge networks,
social networks, covering large parts of the continent.
In Ice Age Europe, 25,000 years ago,
we see evidence of individuals singled out for special grand burials,
their bodies suffused with ornamentation,
weapons and even what looked like regalia.
We see public buildings constructed on the bones and tusks of woolly mammoth.
And around 11,000 years ago,
back in the Middle East, where I started,
hunter-gatherers constructed enormous stone temples
at a place called Göbekli Tepe in eastern Turkey.
In North America,
long before the coming of maize farming,
indigenous populations created the massive earthworks of poverty point
in Louisiana,
capable of hosting hunter gatherer publics in their thousands.
And then Japan, again, long before the arrival of rice farming,
the storehouses of Sannai Maruyama could already hold great surpluses
of wild plant foods.
Now what do all these details amount to?
What does it all mean?
Well, at the very least, I'd suggest
it's really a bit far-fetched these days to cling to this notion
that the invention of agriculture meant a departure from some egalitarian Eden.
Or to cling to the idea that small-scale societies
are especially likely to be egalitarian,
while large-scale ones must necessarily have kings,
presidents and top-down structures of management.
And there are also some contemporary implications.
Take, for example, the commonplace notion
that participatory democracy is somehow natural in a small community.
Or perhaps an activist group,
but couldn't possibly have a scale up for anything like a city,
a nation or even a region.
Well, actually, the evidence of human history,
if we're prepared to look at it,
suggests the opposite.
If cities and regional confederacies,
held together mostly by consensus and cooperation
existed thousands of years ago,
who's to stop us creating them again today
with technologies that allow us to overcome the friction
of distance and numbers?
Perhaps it's not too late to begin learning from all this new evidence
of the human past,
even to begin imagining
what other kinds of civilization we might create
if we can just stop telling ourselves
that this particular world is the only one possible.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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