From Small Bands to Cities: How Humans Settled Down

For most of our time on Earth, people lived in small groups and moved about. Then, in a few places and over a few thousand years, some of them began to stay put, grow food, store it, count it and live among strangers. Almost everything we think of as ordinary life follows from that change.

This article walks through it in order, in plain words. It draws on the early chapters of my book The Human Story, which asks of each turning point what it changed for ordinary people and how we know.

The advantage was what people knew

Every person alive today descends from people who lived in Africa. Our species took shape there over hundreds of thousands of years: fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco are around 300,000 years old.

By the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, humans lived on every habitable continent with much the same bodies their ancestors had in Africa. What had changed was what they knew. Our real edge is cumulative culture: each generation inherits tools, skills and ideas, improves a few of them and passes the lot on. The psychologist Michael Tomasello called it a ratchet, because gains are kept and do not slip back.

There is a neat piece of evidence for how deep this runs. In experiments, young children copy unnecessary steps shown by an adult, such as tapping a box with a stick before opening it, far more faithfully than chimpanzees, who skip straight to the reward. We are built to copy first and ask questions later, which is a poor way to open a box and a very good way to inherit a toolkit.

People also had company by then. The dog was the first animal humans domesticated, and it happened while everyone on Earth was still a hunter-gatherer.

Farming was a slow drift, and it happened many times

Around 11,500 years ago, as the last Ice Age gave way to a warmer and steadier climate, people in the hills of south-west Asia began doing something odd: putting good food back into the ground.

The usual name for this is the Neolithic Revolution, but it was less a revolution than a slow drift, and it happened independently in at least seven places. Wheat, barley, lentils, sheep and goats in the Fertile Crescent. Millet beside the Yellow River and rice along the Yangtze. Taro and bananas in the New Guinea highlands. Squash and maize in Mexico. Potatoes and llamas in the Andes. Sorghum on the southern edge of the Sahara. Nobody had a plan, and nobody copied the idea from a single source.

Nor did anyone set out to redesign a plant. A wild wheat ear is built to fall apart. When it ripens, the little stem that holds the grains in place turns brittle and shatters, scattering seed for next year. For a harvester this is a nuisance: by the time you arrive with a flint sickle, much of the crop is already on the ground. A few mutant plants, though, held on to their grains. Every time people cut ripe stalks, carried them home and sowed some of the seed the following spring, they quietly favoured those mutants. Over many generations a self-sowing grass became a crop that cannot survive without us.

It is worth noticing who domesticated whom. The wheat could no longer manage alone, and before long neither could the people.

One caution against a tidy story. The great carved pillars of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey were raised around 9500 BC by people who, as far as excavators can tell, still lived largely by hunting and gathering wild food. Big shared projects did not wait for the farm.

Villages ended the option of walking away

For most of human history, if you disliked your neighbours you could simply walk away.

Villages ended that. From around 9000 BC people in south-west Asia, and later in China, South Asia and Europe, began living year-round in the same houses, rebuilding on the same spot for generations.

The most famous example is Çatalhöyük, on the Konya plain of central Turkey, occupied from about 7100 to 5950 BC by perhaps three thousand to eight thousand people at a time. It had no front doors at street level. Everyone came and went across the rooftops, which served as the town's pavements, workshops and meeting places.

Staying in one place sounds like a small thing. It meant that property, quarrels and neighbours all became permanent, and that people had to find ways of living with all three.

Surplus paid for everyone who did not farm

A harvest that feeds a family and someone else is a revolution.

A harvest that feeds a family for a year is survival. Once farmers could reliably grow more than they ate, and store it safely, some people no longer needed to farm at all. That spare food, the surplus, quietly paid for potters, weavers, smiths, priests, scribes, soldiers and kings.

The largest surpluses came from rivers. The first great farming societies grew up beside rivers that were both generous and dangerous. Every summer the Nile rose, spread across its floodplain and drew back in autumn, leaving a layer of black silt and soaked ground ready for sowing. The Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow River in China fed similar plains. Taming them meant digging channels, raising banks and storing water, and that work, done year after year, reshaped how people lived and who gave the orders.

So surplus brought specialists, and shared waterworks brought organisers. It also brought large projects, though not always in the way legend has it. Some of the Giza pyramid builders were buried in tombs near the pyramids with offerings of bread and beer, a sign they were respected workers and not the slaves of popular legend.

Cities, accounts and rules

Sometime after 4000 BC, a few villages kept growing until they became something new. Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, may have held 40,000 people or more by around 3100 BC. Cities soon rose along the Nile at Memphis, along the Indus at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and in China at Erlitou. In Peru, Caral built pyramids and plazas around 2600 BC.

A city was not just a big village. It was a place where most people did not farm and where strangers lived side by side. That created a problem of memory.

Writing was not invented by poets.

In Uruk, the first tablets of around 3300 to 3200 BC are almost all accounts: sheep and goats, barley rations, beer, workers and fields. Temple administrators needed to remember who owed what to whom, and memory alone could not keep up with a city of tens of thousands. So they pressed marks into soft clay with a reed. The same need produced the same answer elsewhere: writing was invented independently at least three times, in Mesopotamia, in China and in Mesoamerica.

Rules followed records. Around 1754 BC, King Hammurabi of Babylon had his laws carved on tall stone pillars and set up in public: some 282 rulings, framed by a prologue declaring that the king was appointed "so that the strong might not oppress the weak". Historians debate whether those laws were ever used as a working code, since thousands of Babylonian court records survive and almost never cite them. Either way, the idea that rules should be written down where people could see them had arrived.

City life had a cost that is easy to miss. For most of history, cities had more deaths than births and only kept growing by drawing in a steady stream of migrants from the countryside.

What to take from this

• Humans spread across the world on the strength of cumulative culture: each generation kept what the last one learned.
• Farming was a slow drift that began around 11,500 years ago and arose independently in at least seven places.
• Crops were shaped by harvesting habits, not by design. Domesticated wheat cannot survive without us.
• Permanent villages removed the oldest way of settling a dispute, which was to leave.
• Surplus food paid for everyone who did not farm, from potters to kings.
• The first writing was bookkeeping, and it was invented independently at least three times.
• Early cities depended on migrants, because more people died in them than were born.

The story carries on from there for another five thousand years. The Human Story: How we became who we are follows it through one hundred turning points, from the first upright steps to thinking machines, with a detailed plate in every chapter. It is a 294-page PDF and EPUB, and it costs £9 on Gumroad: matsiems.gumroad.com/l/the-human-story.