I said that population, and population related issues, were probably the "greatest" single factor in driving human advancement, not the only one.
As I already said, the only "universal" element here are circumstances which push people outside of their comfort zones, and force them to adapt. "Comfortable" peoples simply don't tend to have a lot of motivation to change.
Such circumstances are quite often brought about as a result of population growth, but not always. Sometimes, there are other factors at play.
Necessity is the mother of invention. More people require more innovative means of keeping them fed and supplied, which in turn requires more complex forms of social organization and leadership.
It also means more minds who can potentially be set to the task of dreaming such things up.
Granted, other things can occasionally get in the way and prevent this from occurring, and sometimes the problem can be too dire for a society to be able to adapt in time. Such societies tend to either stagnate, or collapse.
However, the fact of the matter remains that the principle I stated above holds true far more often than it does not. One cannot very well have a "Revolution" without the manpower to make it workable.
No, I'm saying that such things tend not to develop in a vacuum. People don't simply wake up one day, think to themselves "I'm going to change the world," and make it happen. There are a whole range pre-conditions and criteria which must perfectly align before any conceivable "Revolution" is going to have even a minute chance of successfully taking hold over a given society.
While social attitudes can play a role in that, by far the greater influence is simple practicality. There must be a pressing
need for the existing status quo to change.
Society doesn't move forward because men are fundamentally better than they were before, as Eco seemed to be implying. It moves forward because there is no other choice in a lot of cases.
China didn't have a pressing need to change. They had different circumstances.
Europe, on the other hand, was a veritable "pressure cooker" of war, social conflict, and general unease. That stimulated adaptation and development.
To the contrary, it very much
is your "personal opinion." Claiming that we can know much of anything about pre-history as an "established fact" is nonsensical.
That's why it's called "pre-history" to begin with. All we can really do is infer certain conclusions from the evidence we have available.
In that regard, what's more likely? That people started hoarding artificial forms of currency with no one to trade them to, and only moved into large settlements afterwards?
or...
That large settlements were a requirement of seasonal agriculture, and that as they grew and developed, common forms of established currency were adopted as a means of standardizing transactions?
Frankly, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Currency is useless without a market in which to spend it.
Which "Agricultural Revolution" are you referring to here? The
Neolithic Revolution was supposed to have taken centuries to accomplish at least, and more likely millennia.
Not in the least. Again, what matters most here are circumstances which compel a people to change.
Not all societies are faced with the same pressures, or have the same resources available in dealing with them.
A hunter-gatherer tribe living in the middle of a dense jungle, for instance, might never feel a need to develop beyond their present level. They have more food available than they could ever possibly know what to do with, and the environment is naturally harsh enough to keep their population levels in check.
By way of contrast, a tribe living on a plain by a river with few natural hazards to keep the population in check, and where most of the native game animals have either been rendered scarce by over-hunting, or driven off, as such, isn't likely to be so fortunate. Food stuffs produced by local flora would probably have been the only workable alternative available under such circumstances. Over time, cultivation of those foodstuffs would have probably resulted in agriculture.
When did I ever deny that technology played an important role? In point of fact, I rather explicitly said that technological knowledge accumulates over time, as concurrent generations build on top of what their predecessors left behind.
Occasionally, that leads to a major breakthrough.
However, more often than not, if that breakthrough is going to be picked up upon, there has to be some other element at play. There has to be a pressing
need for the functionality it provides.
The Ancient Greeks, for instance, had mechanical calculators and steam engines. They never regarded them as more than mere novelties, however, as they were already comfortable where they were. The Europeans of the Renaissance era, by way of contrast, were not, so they used those tools to their full potential.
I'm willing to bet much the same will probably be true with our own society.
We have the technology to make it off this planet, but we have chosen not to make use of it, as we see no pressing need.
Do you think the same will be true a few centuries down the road when the global population sits at ten billion people or more and resources are starting to become scarce?
