Why Did Humans Invent Cities?

Cities are a relatively new invention, by human standards. Why did Neolithic people 11,000 years ago decide to give up their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lives and start to settle? And what were these early cities like?

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Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Written by Dave Amos and Hannah Woolsey
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[CityBeautiful]

I moved to a new studio! It’s still a work in progress. What should I add to the background?

[stevieinselby]

Why did humans invent cities? Because they realised that SimVillage 2000 and Villages Skylines would only have limited gameplay...

[isiahfriedlander]

Like integrated circuits, distance is key to innovation and culture spread, That's why cities are usually the incubator of new ideas, up rises and breakthroughs

[elijahclaude]

A BIG (probably the most important) reason you missed here is because of climate. For most of human history, the climate changed so drastically (and was on average much colder) for people to maintain farms for multiple generations.
We can see that people figured out how to farm thousands of years prior to the neolithic age, but when the climate stabilized, it suddenly (or rather slowly) became possible to maintain one's crops for longer spans of time, thus kickstarting the ability to stockpile resources (which itself came with its own pros and cons, being resource abundance and large-scale war).

Once you realize this, it also becomes way easier to see why/how various cities/civilizations collapsed due to cutting. The vast majority of famines were a result of over exploitation of the environment. This is also why many hunter-gatherer societies still exist today even though they could switch to agriculture, because they learned the lessons of

We need to learn those lessons as well now more than ever since our cities our over-exploiting more land than ever before.

All that said, I do think we could figure out how to create more sustainable cities now that we have the ability to measure things better, but that's going to take the realization that cities don't come without a cost, and that nature isn't some endless resource we can continuously exploit.

[jeffreymyles]

the takeaway is that beer is older than farming and writing

[roberttaylor]

Historians have speculated the first cities were cooperatives around the production of wheat but especially beer and bread.

[silver]

I imagine the early proto-cities, despite having worse living outcomes, were probably still attractive because they offered 2 things the hunter-gatherer life didn't offer as well: A sure food supply and Security.

Those were probably viewed as the two chief concerns of early humans, all other factors being less important. A life spent hunting and gathering may have surely been more nutritious IF one was able to hunt and gather a sufficient amount.

And considering a small group of 100 people needed 500 square miles, cities probably also offered a way forward for cooperation and safety for multiple groups. An acre of land, if growing barley, could feed about 6 people per year with a mediocre harvest. 500 square miles has 320, 000 acres on it. It was just a better deal on the whole.

[JustClaude]

The grid plan seems to work really well.
The Greeks used three main east-west boulevards to define their colonial city of Neapolis. (New City. Really creative name, there.) The three main roads are still there and still define the central city, the most famous being the Spaccanapoli, the Naples splitter.
A well aligned road system can last for millenia.

[fredashay]

...because, even 11000 years ago they know someone would invent cars someday, and so they needed to invent cities so there would be a place to build massive parking lots 😛

[hallamhal]

I can kind of understand why early houses would be built so close together that you need to climb over your neighbour's house to get home - harder for wolves to follow you home

[pongop]

I was so excited at the title and the video delivered! This is one of your best videos of all time! I appreciate it as a history/social science teacher. This is a great, brief overview! I may actually use it in class. It fits in perfectly with my World History units at the start of year. I love the Simpsons reference! I wasn't aware of ancient cities in Malaysia and Myanmar, so that's awesome to know. Great points about the problems with cities, civilization, hierarchy, private property, and inequality. The thought occurs that humans were developing beer around the same time as cities, social hierarchy, and inequality, and beer is great at dumbing people down and keeping them in line. In Mesopotamia, the government gave people beer rations. Intriguing...

The timing and content--about humans' shift from villages to cities and the accompanying change from circular cities to rectilineal cities--is especially interesting to me right now. I just watched an amazing video about how to turn a standard neighborhood into a village (rectilineal to circular). Folks are seeing the disadvantages of cities and wanting to benefit from the advantages of villages.

Anyway, amazing stuff!

[theysisossenthime]

I really appreciate this video. I'm a professional technologist (and someone fascinated with urban planning), and this concept is a core to learning what a technology is, what makes it successful, and how to plan for future technologies. Thanks for connecting two of my passions together for everyone to enjoy.

[newyorka]

The Qadan culture (13, 000–9, 000 BC) was a Mesolithic industry that, archaeological evidence suggests, originated in Upper Egypt (present-day south Egypt) approximately 15, 000 years ago. The Qadan subsistence mode is estimated to have persisted for approximately 4, 000 years. It was characterized by hunting, as well as a unique approach to food gathering that incorporated the preparation and consumption of wild grasses and grains . Qadan peoples were the first to develop sickles and they also developed grinding stones independently to aid in the collecting and processing of these plant foods prior to consumption.

[hawklord]

Pastoralism was the first step to farming animals and allowed nomadic people to have a fixed place while their peoples would herd the animals of distence to grazing and back again, often to highlands and back down to the lowlands as the grass grew. Garden planting was then able to be established, before field farming.

[eccefuga]

Would recommend 'The Dawn of Everything' by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

[doomkitty]

1:04 beer and sedentary lifestyles actually make perfect sense together. Municipal-level water purification is a very recent development in human history. Before that, drinking water from an unknown source carried a serious risk of diseases like dysentery. It's one thing to be a nomad and drink from water sources that don't get a lot of use/pollution. It's another thing entirely to try and drink water that came from the ground just a few dozen paces from the hole where someone else put their sewage. The alcohol in beer makes that second option much safer.

[spongebobsucks]

I think you should have emphasized the cities that pop up around structures like Gobelki Tepe. With modern archeology and research we may be starting to see that cities popped up around places of worship rather than vice versa. Especially seeing as Humans likely had knowledge of basic farming practices in the Neolithic.

[ana]

I've been reading the city in history by Lewis Mumford which is a super interesting book that goes over this! Love the video

[anlyldrm]

I liked the detail about the artificial city name “Sehir Guzel” at 4:57, which literally translates to ‘City Beautiful’ in Turkish :)

[synscient]

A lot of ideas regarding the birth of cities, property, human rights, and agriculture are challenged by the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Definitely worth the read.