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Susanna Viljanen, works at Aalto University
Because there haven’t been any.
For the vast majority of its existence, Homo sapiens lived in small tribes with approximately 150 members. This amount is known as Dunbar's number, and it sets the upper limit for size of the human society in its natural state.
Humans are deeply genetically programmed to treat anyone outside their tribe as rivals and competitors, and to exterminate them. The natural state of humankind is endemic warfare.
The Dunbar number is a profound limit, and it effectively prevents the rise of civilization. Heck, it even prevents the adoption of agriculture! As long is there is no method on making humans acting against their biological programming and their selfish interests and not treating anyone coming from outside as an enemy, there is no way for adoption of agriculture nor evolution of civilization, and humans are doomed to remain as hunter-gatherers.

Susanna Viljanen, 在阿尔托大学工作
因为那时根本就没有文明。
在智人存在的绝大多数时间里，都生活在大约150人的小部落中。这个数字被称为邓巴数/150定律(Dunbar's number)，它设定了人类社会在自然状态下规模的上限。
人类有刻入基因的程序，将部落以外的人视为对手和竞争者，并将他们灭绝。人类的自然状态是地方性的战争。邓巴数是一个影响深远的限制，它有效地阻止了文明的兴起。见鬼，它甚至阻止了农业的发展!没有办法让人类做出违背基因程序、自我私利的行为，也没有办法不把外来者当作敌人，（这个时候）农业无法发展，文明无法进化，人类注定只能以狩猎采集为生。

The only way to exceed the Dunbar number for human population size is religion. This step cannot be taken before the cultural evolution produces Proto-Polytheism, which is the profound step from Animism to organized religion.
The profound revolution was rise of Proto-Polytheism, which superseded the tribal Animism, this may sound trivial but it isn’t. Psychohistory explains this well( See Early infanticidal childrearing - Wikipedia.) the tribal societies live in a state not unlike schizophrenia, seeing hostiles everywhere, whether they be humans, animals, or spirits. The rise of Proto-Polytheism makes the distinction between the living and the lifeless, between the subjective and obxtive and enables larger societies than 150 members.

唯一能超过邓巴人数的方法就是宗教。在文化进化产生原始多神论之前，这是从万物有灵论到有组织宗教的深刻一步。
原始多神论的兴起是一场深刻的革命，它取代了部落万物有灵论，这听起来可能微不足道，但事实并非如此。心理历史很好地解释了这一点(参见早期杀婴育儿-维基百科)。部落社会生活在一种与精神分裂症类似的状态中，敌意无处不在，无论是人类、动物还是精神。原始多神论的兴起区分了有生命的和无生命的，主观和客观，并使超过150个成员的更大的社会成为可能。
（早期杀婴育儿，是一个用于心理历史研究的术语，指旧石器时代、史前和历史上狩猎采集部落或社会中的杀婴行为。——维基）

This religious revolution happened during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, and it can be affirmed by archaeology.
This is also reflected in the myths, every Polytheist society has a myth of titanomachia, a war where the new (Polytheist) deities supersede the old, usually evil (Animist) deities beginning a new era for humans.
It also coincides with the adoption of agriculture. Large societies can organize themselves on distribution of labour and have greater productivity by agriculture and pasturelands. The same area of land can now feed far more humans than it would in a hunter-gatherer society.
This evolution has been quick. First comes Proto-Polytheism, and then comes larger societies, Then comes agriculture, and food surpluses, They allow some of the people not getting involved in direct production of food, which in turn allow even larger societies and states.
Finally the civilizations emerge, but that is another story.

这次宗教革命发生在新石器时代和铜器时代，这是考古学可以肯定的。这也反映在神话中，每一个多神论的社会都有一个类似提坦之战的神话——即一场新的(多神论)神取代旧的，通常是邪恶的(万物有灵论)神的战争，开启了人类的新时代。
这也与农业的发展相吻合。大型社会可以根据劳动分配组织起来，通过农业和牧场提高生产力。与狩猎采集社会相比，同样面积的土地现在可以养活更多的人。
这种演变是迅速的。首先是原始多神论，然后是更大的社会，然后是农业，粮食过剩，它们允许一些人不直接参与粮食生产，这反过来又允许更大的社会和国家。
最后文明出现了，但那就是另一个故事了。

Tudor Reece
Neatly put. Thanks

简洁清晰，谢谢。

Amarsanaa Narmandakh
Earth has a 4.5 billion years of history. Complex life arose only 540 million years ago. Mammals first appeared 300 mln years ago and first primates appeared 55 mln years ago. Homo erectus appeared 2 mln years ago and Homo sapiens appeared 300k years ago.Recent out of Africa migration happened 50–70k years ago.Agriculture started 11k years ago,Sumer civilization started 5.5k years ago, Scientific Revolution took 400 years ago, and Industrial Revolution started 260 years ago etc
What do we see from it? Acceleration. 5.5k years of complex civilization history is tiny part of human history.

地球有45亿年的历史。复杂的生命诞生于5.4亿年前。哺乳动物最早出现在3亿年前，灵长类动物最早出现在5500万年前。
直立人出现在200万年前，智人出现在30万年前。最近的走出非洲的迁徙发生在5 - 7万年前。
农业始于11000年前，苏美尔文明始于5500年前，科学革命始于400年前，工业革命始于260年前，等等。
我们从中看到了什么?加速。
5500年复杂的文明史只是人类历史的一小部分。
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Kieron Nelson
I'm not sure your evidence warrants your conclusion that things are accelerating. One thing I noticed is that the distinctions between each phase you mention get drastically smaller for each succeeding phase. Yes, civilisation hasn't been around for very long, but your 0phases are by no means apples to apples.

我不确定你的证据能证明你的结论:即事物正在加速发展。
我注意到的一件事是，你所提到的每个阶段之间的区别在随后的每个阶段变得非常小/微观。
是的，文明存在的时间并不长，但是你的提到的这些根本不是一回事。

Nic Harvard
I find it interesting that you set Dunbar at 150.
Most folk put it at two to three times that.
I put it an order of magnitude lower at between 15–30
You have to be able to not only know the status of your relationship with each of these people, you have to have a really good idea of each person’s with every other one.
Factorial sequences don’t add up quite as fast as logarithmic ones, but still… very quickly somewhere between 15–30 the brain has to stop doing this.
And then people become cartoons. Caricatures
And as you say, unless you have a functioning religion which allows living in larger groups, those caricatures very quickly become the enemy, other, and prey.

你把邓巴数设置为150，我觉得这点很有趣，因为大多数人会这个把设置为150的2-3倍。
我会把这个数降低一级，到15-30之间。
你不仅要知道你和这些人之间的关系，你还要非常清楚他们之间的关系。
……但当数量超过15-30之后，大脑对其他人的印象就会变得非常脸谱化。
就像你说的，除非你有一个有效的宗教，允许在更大的群体中生活，否则那些脸谱化的人很快就会成为敌人、他人和猎物。

Susanna Viljanen
Anyone who ever has been in the military, will immediately notice the number.
It is the size of a company - the basic unit. It has stayed the same for centuries. See Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.
By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
See the Wikipedia article Dunbar's number - Wikipedia

任何当过兵的人，都会马上注意到这个数字。
这是一个公司的规模——基本单位。几个世纪以来，它一直保持不变。参见《邓巴数/150定律:为什么我们只能维持150段关系》。这个数字最早是由罗宾·邓巴(Robin Dunbar)在20世纪90年代提出的，他发现灵长类动物的大脑大小与平均社会群体大小之间存在相关性。
通过人类大脑的平均大小，并从灵长类动物的结果推断，他提出人类可以轻松地维持150段稳定的关系。

Nic Harvard
I agree totally on your assessment just not on the number.
In fact, the brighter and more communication oriented people are … the more it seems to drop

我完全同意你的评估，只是不是在数字上。
事实上，越聪明、越注重沟通的人，这个数字下降得越多。

Martin Ivers
Agriculture was simply impossible because of the low CO2 levels.
The last time they were at roughly modern pre-industrial niveau, was some 180.000 years ago, which happens to be the time since when anatomical modern H. sapiens is around.
When the conditions became feasible around 8.000 years ago, agriculture, and shortly thereafter civilization appeared multiple times independently, in a process of convergent evolution, which shows humans figure it out pretty quickly when the conditions are right. (Wheat and barley in the fertile crecent, rice in China, taro in New Guinea, teosinthe and later corn in Mexico, various millets and tubers in Africa).
Demeter, who gave mankind the first grain of wheat, was the daughter of Chronos and Rhea. She owes her existence to the Greek titanomachia

由于二氧化碳水平低，农业根本不可能进行。
…………大约在8000年前，当条件变得可行时，农业和其后不久的文明在一个趋同的进化过程中独立地出现了多次，这表明当条件合适时，人类很快就明白了——肥沃的新月地带的小麦和大麦，中国的水稻，新几内亚的芋头，墨西哥的蜀黍和后来的玉米，非洲的各种小米和块茎。
给人类第一粒小麦的得墨忒耳（希腊神话丰饶女神）是克罗诺斯（时间之神）和瑞亚（众神之母）的女儿。她的存在就归功于希腊的提坦之战。

Binh Hoang
Thank you for explaining the Dunbar limit and how religion plays a role. I always wonder why the tech tree in the Sid Mier Civilization game(s) had researching different Religion levels as a requirement to advance your civilization. You explained it very clearly!

谢谢你解释150定律以及宗教是如何发挥作用的。
我一直想知道在《文明》系列游戏里的技术树，为什么为进一步升级文明需要研究宗教水平。
你的解释让这一切变清晰了！

Martin Ivers
I’m sorry but — while this is fascinating, you don’t actually answer the question. The question is about the when? the transition happened, and why then? H. sapiens has been around somewhere from 200.000 years by the largest estimates to around 30.000 by the lowest. Yet the premise of the question is civilizations are 8.000 years old at most (Let’s not argue over a few thousand years here. The beginnings of civilization occupy a relatively narrow length of time, in any case). Why did the transition happen then? That’s the question.
And that obviously implies: what caused it?
Or is your hypotheses the developement from animism to proto-polytheism just takes a certain, more or less constant, amount of time, and that in different places isolated from each other and different in every aspect?
It’s the terrestrial version of the Fermi paradox, really.

抱歉，虽然这很有趣，但你并没有真正回答这个问题。问题是关于什么时候?转变发生了，但为什么是在那个时候?
智人大约存在了20万年左右，据最大的估计是30万年左右。然而，这个问题的前提是为什么文明最多有8000年的历史。无论如何，文明的开端所占的时间相对较短。为什么会发生这种转变呢?这才是这个问题。
并且，是什么引起的（文明）?
或者，你的假设是从万物有灵论到原始多神论的发展（引起的文明），只是需要一定的，或多或少的恒定的时间，在不同的地方，彼此隔离，各个方面都不同?
这是人类的费米悖论。
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Chetan Vit
The “when” is neatly addressed by the probable explanation of climate change. The development of agriculture and sedentaritism coincided more or less with the end of the last Ice Age. And before the last Ice Age, there were no animals yet with sufficiently developed neo cortices to allow the emergence of complex society.

气候变化的可能性，巧妙地解释了“何时”。
农业和定居的发展或多或少与上一个冰河时代的结束相吻合。在最后一个冰河时代之前，还没有一种动物拥有足够发达的新皮质，足以让复杂社会的出现成为可能。

Kelly B. Reid, lives in Chicago
One very plausible theory has to do with how and why the last Ice Age ended. Until recently, it was assumed that the ice caps melted gradually as a result of a slowly warming climate. However, new research shows strong evidence that something much more sudden happened.
See the citations below for substantiating evidence, but here’s the short version. Twice a year, we pass through a ring of debris that came from a dead comet. In fact, if you went out on a clear night in early November, you might have seen some of these bits of debris in the form of shooting stars. This is the Taurid meteor stream, and it happens like clockwork every spring and fall.
Shooting stars happen when small debris hits the earth’s atmosphere and ignite as a result of the friction. When the debris is small enough, it burns away completely. When it’s bigger, then you have things like airbursts and surface impacts. Airbursts happen when the obxt detonates in the atmosphere. Impacts happen when the obxt, obviously, hits the surface of the planet.
You can see an example of an airburst in action during the Chelyabinsk meteor event, in which the shockwave from the detonation caused significant damage.

Kelly B. Reid, 住在芝加哥
一个非常可信的理论与上一个冰河时代如何以及为什么结束有关。
直到最近，人们还认为，由于气候缓慢变暖，冰盖逐渐融化。然而，新的研究表明，一些更突然的事情发生了。请看下面的证据，每年两次，我们都会穿过一片死亡彗星的碎片环。
事实上，如果你在11月初一个晴朗的夜晚外出，你可能会看到一些流星形状的碎片。这是金牛座流星雨，每年春天和秋天都会像时钟一样定时发生。
流星发生时，小碎片撞击地球的大气层，由于摩擦而点燃。当碎片足够小时，它就会完全燃烧掉。当它更大时，就会发生空中爆炸和地面撞击。当物体在大气中爆炸时，就会发生空中爆炸。很明显，撞击发生在物体撞击地球表面的时候。
你可以看到车里雅宾斯克（俄罗斯南部城市）流星事件中空中爆炸的一个例子，爆炸产生的冲击波造成了重大的破坏。

Comets are generally made up of things like ice, rather than thick chunks of heavy rock. So, getting hit by fragments of one is more akin to a shotgun blast than a rifle bullet (which is analogous to an iron meteorite). And since it takes the planet a few days to pass through this cloud, an unlucky path could mean a series of bombardments.
According to a number of scientists (see citations), this is exactly what happened. A demarcating layer called the ‘black mat’ is found in the geological record across a wide swath of the earth. Before this layer are things like Mammoths and the other megafaunta that went extinct. After it? None. This is similar to the abrupt marker found at the K-T Boundary that marks the end of the dinosaurs.
In addition, there are a number of impact proxies (things that tell us we got hit with something very fast and hot) in this layer. The angle of impact was northwest-to-southeast, which would have been a direct hit on the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets of North America and a less direct hit on the European ice caps.

彗星通常是由冰之类的东西组成的，而不是由重岩石组成的。所以，被彗星碎片击中更像是猎枪爆炸，而不是步枪子弹，后者类似于铁陨石。
根据一些科学家的说法，这正是发生的事情。在地球上一大片区域的地质记录中发现了一种称为“黑垫（black mat）”的划界层。在这一层之前是猛犸象和其他灭绝的大型动物。其后?一个也没有。这与在K-T边界发现的标志恐龙终结的突然标记相似。
此外，在这一层中还有许多冲击印迹(告诉我们这里被非常快和热的东西击中过)。撞击的角度为西北至东南，可能直接撞击了北美的科迪勒兰和劳伦蒂德冰盖，对欧洲冰盖的撞击则不那么直接。

That’s a big dip and it lasted for a thousand years. It seems plausible to correlate these two events given that their times match up almost precisely, and celestial impacts are often correlated with sunlight-blocking ejecta (also known as ‘dirt kicked up into the air’).
There’s yet a third piece of evidence that completes the puzzle. Meltwater Pulse 1a is a recorded rise in sea level due to a large influx of fresh water into the world’s oceans. And it happened around 13,000 years ago.

放射性碳年代测定表明，这一层大约是13000年前。在13000年前也发生了一些非常奇怪的事情。地球的温度下降得非常快，似乎毫无征兆。
这次降温非常迅速，而且持续了1000年。考虑到它们的时间几乎是精确匹配的，将这两个事件联系起来似乎是合理的，而且天体撞击通常与阻挡阳光的喷出物有关。

…………
So, what’s all this got to do with humans? Well, we’re really not sure what was going on before this, because just about anything in the path of the three phenomena described above would be utterly obliterated.
Anything in the blast radius of one of the air bursts or impacts would have been ignited and burned to ashes. These impacts ignited entire continents’ worth of biomass (trees, plants, etc).
Anything in the path of the torrents of water would have been ground into fine dust. If it can cut basalt and granite like a hot knife through butter, anything manmade wouldn’t stand a chance.
Finally, and most crucially, sea level rise. Most civilizations, advanced or primitive, build on coastlines. Take a look at where that would have been pre- and post-melt:

那么，这一切和人类有什么关系呢?我们真的不确定在这之前发生了什么，因为几乎所有上述三种现象的路径都将被完全抹掉。任何在空中爆炸或撞击的爆炸半径内的东西都会被点燃并烧成灰烬。这些影响了整个大陆的生物体(树木、植物等)。
激流经过的任何东西都会被撕碎。如果它能像热刀切黄油一样切割玄武岩和花岗岩，那么任何人造的东西自然都不可能留存下来。
最后，也是最关键的，海平面上升。大多数文明，无论是先进的还是原始的，都建在海岸线上。看看融化前和融化后的情况:

Look how much more land there is in northern Europe and between Alaska and Russia; the “land bridge” you hear about was almost a thousand miles wide. That’s basically a small continent’s worth of land! Also pay attention to southeast Asia, where Indonesia is not a chain of islands, but a single landmass.
Anything that survived the impact blasts and the scouring waters would have been drowned by the rapidly rising oceans.
So, in “short”, the reason we haven’t found any great detailed evidence is that anything before about 13,000 years ago was either burnt to cinders, ground to dust, or drowned beneath 400 feet of ocean water.

看看北欧以及阿拉斯加和俄罗斯之间的土地有多广袤。你所听说的“大陆桥”差不多有一千英里宽。基本上相当于一个小型大陆的面积!
再来看看东南亚，印度尼西亚不是一个岛链，而是一块单一的大陆。
所以，简而言之，我们没有找到任何详细证据的原因是，在大约13000年前，任何东西要么被烧成灰烬，要么被磨成灰尘，要么被淹没在400英尺深的海水中。
在所有这些混乱之后，无论曾经存在什么文明，都必须从头开始，从长达千年的“核冬天”开始(见上面的温度图表)。然而，像哥贝克力特皮（Golbekli Tepi）这样的遗址，经碳测定可追溯到12000年前，显示出的复杂程度远远超出了所谓的“简单的狩猎采集者”的能力，这可能被证明是一个很好的起点，可以用来调查我们作为一个物种是否在受到来自外太空的突然袭击之前，已经走得更远了。链接略
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Adam Wu, Evolutionary neurosurgeon
To start a civilization you need to have a large food surplus, which frees up the majority of your people to specialize in doing things other than food production. To get this kind of food surplus by hunting and gathering you would need a kind of edenic environment that does not exist on planet Earth. The only other way of obtaining such food surpluses is by farming. But even with early farming you can only produce the needed levels of food surplus in a very narrow range of favorable environmental conditions.
You also need a certain minimum population density, or you simply do not have enough people on the ground to run a civilization.

Adam Wu,神经外科医生
为了开始一个文明，你需要拥有大量的食物剩余，这将解放你的大多数人去专门从事食物生产以外的事情。为了通过狩猎和采集获得这种食物剩余，你需要一种伊甸园式的环境，而这种环境在地球上是不存在的。获得这些粮食剩余的唯一方法是农业。但即使是早期的农业，你也只能在非常有限的有利环境条件下生产出所需的剩余粮食。
你还需要一定的最低人口密度，否则你在地面上就没有足够的人来管理一个文明。

When our species first appeared 200,000 years ago, the earth was in the middle of the last glaciation of the last ice age. As far as we know, there were very few places on the planet, if any at all, that could have supported civilization-supporting farming during that period. The harsh environmental conditions (even well away from the glaciers, the world was much drier than it is today, because so much fresh water is locked into the ice sheets) also meant that human populations remained very small, and grew only slowly, if at all, and the needed population densities that would support a civilization probably were not reached. Indeed, with low population densities, hunter gathering is likely a superior way of life on a per person basis than early farming based civilization. Fossil evidence shows us that late neolithic hunter gatherers were on average taller, stronger, healthier, and lived longer lives, than the early farmers of the first known civilizations. What we know of the political systems employed in hunter gatherer societies suggests that individual hunter gatherers also on average had more freedom and autonomy, and greater overall equality between individuals, than the societies of the first civilizations. There would have been little incentive for individuals to choose to adopt civilization over hunter gathering, when population density is low.

当人类在20万年前首次出现时，地球正处于上一个冰河时期的末尾。据我们所知，地球上很少有地方能够在那个时期支持农耕文明，如果有的话。
严酷的环境条件(即便是远离冰川的地方，世界也远比今天干燥，因为海量的淡水被锁定到在冰原)也意味着人类仍然很少，增长缓慢，还不足以达到能够支撑文明的人口密度。事实上，在人口密度低的情况下，以人均为基础的狩猎采集可能是一种优于早期农耕文明的生活方式。
化石证据表明，新石器时代晚期的狩猎采集者平均比第一个已知文明早期的农民更高、更强壮、更健康、更长寿。我们对采猎社会所采用的政治制度的了解表明，与最初的文明社会相比，采猎社会的个体平均拥有更多的自由和自主权，以及更普遍的个人平等。当人口密度较低时，个体很少有动机选择文明而不是狩猎采集。

There is also the great genetic bottleneck event about 70,000 years ago, possibly lixed to the eruption of the Toba supervolcano, during which the human population dropped to maybe just a few thousand people worldwide. It would have taken some time for populations to recover from that event.
Only after the ice age ended and the current interglacial began, about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, would the environmental conditions arise that would allow for the type of farming that can support civilizations. And only after the interglacial began, with its milder conditions, could human populations grow to the point where hunter-gathering starts to become insufficient at providing enough food for the increased number of mouths, and the consequences of population pressure (famine, territorial conflict, etc) start making early farming and civilization a more appealing option for some previously hunter-gathering societies to think about adopting.

此外，7万年前还存在种群瓶颈事件，可能与多巴超级火山(Toba supervolcano)爆发有关，在那期间，全球人口下降到可能只有几千人。从那次事件中恢复过来需要一段时间。
只有在冰河时代结束，现在的间冰期开始之后，也就是大约2万到1万2千年前，（允许农业的）环境条件才会出现，为支持人类文明的农耕活动提供了条件。并且只有在间冰期开始后，随着气候变暖，人类的数量才会增长到狩猎采集开始无法为越来越多的人提供足够的食物，人口压力(饥荒、领土冲突等)的后果开始使早期农业和文明成为一些先前狩猎采集社会考虑采用的更有吸引力的选择。