- yesterday
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:01Our ancestors traded life in the open for crowds and congestion.
00:07Why?
00:09When for most people, life became tougher.
00:13Once cities appeared, there was no going back.
00:17We're still paying the price in the sins of the city.
00:22I'm Cara Cooney, an Egyptologist on a worldwide quest.
00:28I look at human behavior, both past and present, through the lens of ancient Egypt.
00:36And the more I travel the world, the more similarities I see.
00:41Exploring why we are who we are often leads me out of Egypt.
00:51This is the modern-day city of Luxor.
00:55As with the rest of the world, the majority of Egypt's population lives in crowded cities like this.
01:03But it wasn't always this way.
01:05Not long before the ancient Egyptians began building their greatest monuments ever,
01:09the very concept of a city would have been unheard of.
01:13Cities are a relatively recent invention.
01:17Humans had always been hunter-gatherers, living in small, mobile family groups.
01:26They had few possessions.
01:28They moved with the seasons, tracked game, and foraged for fruit and vegetables.
01:34But today, more than half the world's population lives in congested, urban centers.
01:42So when and why did cities start?
01:45What conditions led populations to settle down and build up?
01:50It didn't happen all of a sudden.
01:53The first step was agriculture.
01:59Successful farming meant staying in one place.
02:03Farming also produced a real surplus of food for the first time in history.
02:08Extra food meant that while the farmers farmed, some people could do other things.
02:14It looks idyllic, but even in Egypt, where the Nile soil is so rich, farming is a difficult life.
02:24In many ways, it was easier for early people to be mobile, to follow the migrations of the animals they hunted,
02:30and to forage for vegetables and plants in the wild.
02:33As natural as it seems to us to grow our own food, settling down into farms and into cities was a radical move in human history.
02:41It's called the Neolithic Revolution, the period in human history when people were tied to the land for the first time.
02:51And when that happened, everything about human society changed.
02:56Egypt has some of the oldest evidence of farming on Earth, in a place called the Fayoum, about 80 miles southwest of Cairo.
03:06Much of the Fayoum borders the Nile River. It's fertile land, ideal for farming.
03:16But over the millennia, the Nile has shifted its course.
03:20Land that in ancient times was nourished by the river, and a huge lake, is now barren desert.
03:27It's in one of these arid regions where my colleague, Willeke Ventrich, has recently unearthed evidence of an ancient farming community, dating to 5500 BCE.
03:403,000 years before the first pyramids were built.
03:44Is it fair to say that these trenches represent the first settlement in Egypt, the first evidence of settlement, or do we have earlier settlements?
03:55There may have been earlier settlements, but we haven't found them.
03:58So this is really the earliest evidence that we have for settlements.
04:01And it's not a settlement as you would expect with streets and houses.
04:07Willeke's team studies layers of material deposited by people over time.
04:13It's called stratigraphy.
04:15Dark layers of ash reveal that the ancient settlers built fires in permanent hearths.
04:21This tells us that people lived on this spot for decades.
04:26Something they could only do if they had control over their food source.
04:31And the only way to have had that control was to raise crops and animals instead of hunting and gathering.
04:39They're not only doing wheat and barley, so agriculture, but they also have sheeps, their goats, their pigs.
04:46We found a lot of pig as well.
04:48The funny thing about pigs is that they don't like to walk.
04:52So pigs tend to point at settled living.
04:59So why did these ancient people choose to settle down, plant crops, and build a community?
05:06Maybe changes in the climate made farming possible.
05:10Or perhaps farming became necessary to feed more people.
05:14Or maybe some people figured out that growing and controlling food gave them power over others.
05:22It's hard to say exactly what caused the human leap to agriculture.
05:27But whatever inspired it, this farming settlement appears to have been occupied for 500 years.
05:34So life must have been good.
05:37It's easy if you know where your resources are.
05:41So you have one spot and from there you can go and you know where to find stuff.
05:46You have this wonderful lake which is plenty full of fish.
05:50So you have a well-balanced way of living.
05:54This site is the earliest farming village ever found in Egypt.
05:59But in other parts of the world, the move to settle down began thousands of years earlier.
06:09In central Turkey, a massive protective structure has been erected over one of the world's most important archeological digs.
06:15And the largest Neolithic site ever found.
06:18The settlement of Çatalhöyük.
06:22People began to settle here almost 2,000 years before the first farmers appeared along the Nile.
06:29Çatalhöyük was first discovered in the late 1950s.
06:34Archeologist Karis Eklen has agreed to take me through this remarkable site.
06:40There's tons of layers here. This place was occupied for a while.
06:44Do you guys know how long?
06:45Yeah, it was occupied continuously for about 1,400 years.
06:49They first settled here in 7400 BCE and they abandoned the site about 6,000 BCE.
06:57And how many people are we talking about?
06:59Population estimates vary between 3,000 to 8,000 people and it probably changed over time.
07:07So the site is not only older but much, much bigger than the Fayum site in Egypt.
07:13This is one of the world's very first cities.
07:18The homes at Çatalhöyük were built from mud brick or adobe in rectangular shapes.
07:26Wooden posts supported roofs made from packed mud and reeds.
07:31Each building had one, two or three rooms separated by thinner walls.
07:38We look at a place like this, people living in four walls and it seems completely normal.
07:43But in a way this is absolutely radical for people who used to be free and mobile moving about the countryside to cramp themselves into this kind of a living space.
07:54Yeah, and the houses that they lived in here too are a lot different than the houses that we live in today.
07:59They're much smaller for one thing.
08:03There's actually no room in between the walls of the houses.
08:07They built their homes so close together, sometimes they shared walls, sometimes they're only centimeters apart, so that there were no streets.
08:14And we think that they moved about on the rooftops and descended into homes through holes in the ceilings.
08:21Homes probably accommodated eight to ten people each and were clustered next to each other like a honeycomb.
08:31Archaeologists have unearthed 18 layers of construction at Çatalhöyük, a depth of nearly seven stories.
08:40The average lifespan of a building was about 80 years.
08:43And when people were ready to abandon a building, they went through a very special process.
08:49They first cleaned the whole house, they scrubbed the floors, they scrubbed the walls, they dismantled the roof, took out the posts, and they collapsed the upper halves of the walls.
09:01Then they very carefully filled in the rest of the building with dirt, and they built the next house directly on top.
09:09Archaeologists here have found four houses directly aligned over an earlier one, with the walls, ovens, and hearths in exactly the same place.
09:19So in this ancient city, there's a remarkable continuity over time.
09:26There are several theories about who lived at Çatalhöyük.
09:32Some archaeologists think they were all farmers, who worked the rich floodplains surrounding the city.
09:37But others think at least some of the residents may have been free to pursue other occupations, because there was plenty of surplus food.
09:45If you think about all of the functions of a modern town, churches, cemeteries, industrial zones or factories, residences, at Çatalhöyük what we see is all of those places brought into one place, into the home.
10:00They're burying their dead underneath the floors, they're cooking and eating and living in the main room.
10:06So everybody's living their own discreet life, packed into this town.
10:10Yeah, but at the same time, of course, you have this balance, because you're also living in a community with 5,000 other people.
10:17For the residents of Çatalhöyük, this dense lifestyle brought dramatic new challenges, like how to cope with human waste, filth, and disease.
10:27At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, archaeologists have been working for years to excavate these Neolithic houses, some of them over 9,000 years old.
10:43They've reconstructed one of the ancient homes, and they call it the Experimental House.
10:48Going down, Karen.
10:49It gives us a glimpse of what life was like in one of the world's very first cities.
10:58We've got the entrance hole here, people would have come down on a ladder or some sort of stairs.
11:04We've got the oven directly underneath the door to let the smoke out, and the door really would have been the only source of ventilation or light, because we don't have any evidence of windows.
11:16And it's not that dark, it's pretty bright. When you whitewash all of this, it reflects off of here, and it creates a bright room.
11:24Houses like this contained heavy grindstones, a clear indication that the people depended on grains and beans for food, foods that needed to be processed before they could be eaten.
11:37One interesting thing about the diet is that each house had its own storage capacity, so they were storing their own food, and they were preparing their own food.
11:44You need big grinding materials like this to actually be able to eat the food, so these people can't just pick up and go.
11:51They'd have to move all of this material, and you can't take this with you. This is a moveable property.
11:56Yeah, they're definitely committed to staying here, and we see that particularly in the artwork, too.
12:02This is a replica of an original here.
12:04Yeah, this is a replica of a painting. It's been interpreted in different ways. Some say that this here is a volcano.
12:11It's called Hassan Da, and on clear days, you can see it from the site. Some people think that it's the eruption of a volcano, and that these blocks here represent the houses of Chatelhuyuk.
12:23An alternate interpretation is that this is a leopard skin, because we know that leopards were very important.
12:28Life in Chatelhuyuk appears to have been efficient and reliable. These ancient people clearly had worked out how to successfully stay in one place in close proximity over time.
12:44But with the first dense human settlements in history, came a number of unintended consequences.
12:51With a population of 5,000 living in the same space year after year, never moving to a cleaner location, hygiene was bound to suffer.
13:00And although it's hard to see in the skeletal remains, infectious diseases and parasites like tapeworms and lice were probably rampant.
13:08The move to city life was a slippery slope.
13:15So what about trash? How did they deal with it here?
13:18So they actually threw away their trash on site. There were some spaces in between the buildings that we now call midden areas, or trash refuse areas.
13:27This is where they disposed of all of their domestic waste, the human waste.
13:33It must have been really smelly. It must have been…
13:35It probably was, and we wonder about that. It's probably smelled, it probably attracted flies, mice probably lived in the little spaces in between the buildings.
13:44When you consider the downsides, like infections, disease, and vermin, life in the crowded and cramped conditions of Chatelhuyuk hardly seems like a step forward.
13:55So what was life like before the Neolithic Revolution, before permanent settlements?
14:01One way to understand is to find a culture that still follows a hunter-gatherer existence.
14:06There are very few of these people left, and most of them live in remote, inaccessible places.
14:12But fortunately, there are people with a living memory of this lifestyle, much closer to home.
14:20The state of Oregon is where the Plateau tribes live, the Umatilla, the Cayuse, and the Walla Walla.
14:29These Native Americans still practice hunting and gathering.
14:34Although they live in permanent towns and cities most of the time, for several weeks each year, in the spring and fall, they leave the urban world behind, and return to the mobile lifestyle of their ancestors.
14:48Brian Connor and Ken Hall are tribal hunters.
14:55Why do people of tribal descent still try to live in the old ways as a hunter-gatherer?
15:01If you can have one person behind that can still speak the language, still knows how to hunt and gather, still knows the customs, out of maybe a hundred, if you have one person there that can still do that, then it's alive.
15:13Bobbi Connor is director of the Tribal Cultural Institute, where she teaches the old ways to new generations.
15:22Now, the Plateau tribes have been in this area, you think, for about 10,000 years?
15:26At least 10,000 years.
15:27And they never lived in cities? They always lived in smaller settlements?
15:31We lived in villages along rivers and canyons and sheltered areas in the winter especially, and then migrated to various locations of our food sources as the seasons changed.
15:46Migrating to resources meant traveling light, especially when it came to shelters.
15:53Marjorie Wahenica has been hunting and gathering since she was a child.
15:58One of the words that always comes to mind out of people is nomadic.
16:02It's correct in a way, but not really, because we weren't just traveling around, we had purpose with the traveling.
16:08It's more migratory.
16:10Yes, it was more, there was a purpose of food gathering.
16:14The perfect shelter for this mobile lifestyle was the tipi.
16:20The Plateau tribes usually traveled in family groups of about 25 people.
16:26Clever!
16:28The women of the tribes were responsible for building the tipis.
16:33There.
16:34You guys make this look so easy.
16:36Each tipi housed five or six family members.
16:41Experienced builders can erect a tipi in about 20 minutes.
16:46That was my best one so far.
16:48That was good.
16:49How high do I have to go?
16:51All the way up.
16:56Sometimes the girls could actually shimmy, you know, up there.
16:59Or stand on each other's shoulders.
17:01I think she's needing a chair.
17:03I need a chair.
17:04It's the first time I've ever said that in my whole life.
17:07But I'm not tall enough.
17:10Come on.
17:12There you are.
17:13Yay!
17:14Marjorie, this didn't take that long to put together.
17:18And I'm just thinking of how this compares to city life,
17:21when everyone's all crammed together into these permanent structures.
17:23This wouldn't have been a bad way to live at all.
17:25No, it wouldn't.
17:26And we're always outside.
17:28We were always active.
17:30You're hunting, you're gathering, you're riding horses,
17:32you're camping every now and then in tipis like this.
17:35It's a very healthy lifestyle.
17:36Very healthy.
17:37It wasn't until the non-Indian came in that we started developing all of these diseases,
17:42all of these things that restricted the length of our life.
17:47The new diseases restricted more than just the length of the Indians' lives.
17:52The movement of white settlers into the West almost destroyed a whole way of life.
17:58The newcomers wanted land, and they wanted to own it.
18:02Now, as farmers and grazers moved in, did they build a lot of fences and shut down the hunting that you guys were doing?
18:09It changed. It was a whole new concept.
18:12We couldn't get into an area.
18:13We usually went seasonally, and then we had to go someplace else, and that just created more conflict.
18:18Though on a much smaller scale, and for only part of the year, the Plateau Tribes of Oregon will carry on as long as there are roots and berries to gather and herds to hunt.
18:30The lifestyle that we did have, it was thousands of years proven.
18:36This country here is only a couple hundred years old.
18:39And the struggles that are going on globally, we might end up going right back to what we still know.
18:45So if everything goes to hell in a handbasket, you guys know that you're going to be okay.
18:48We know what we have to do.
18:49Well, I'm coming up here.
18:51I'm going to start walking to Oregon.
18:53I'll hang out with you.
18:54I'll adopt you.
18:55You'll adopt me? Can I hunt?
18:56I would suck at you.
19:01Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for millennia.
19:05It wasn't that they lacked the knowledge or the skill to farm.
19:08They knew that if you planted a seed in the ground, it would grow.
19:11But they also understood that a mobile lifestyle allowed them a rich, healthy, and flexible way to adapt to their surroundings.
19:17So why did this change?
19:19New archaeological research into ancient bones may tell us.
19:26This is Tel Aviv University in Israel, home to the skeletal remains of some of the earliest humans in the Mediterranean.
19:35I've come here to find out how life in towns and cities affected people's health 7,000 to 9,000 years ago.
19:42Using high and low-tech methods, scientists can learn a lot from the bones of ancient settlers.
19:51Some of the bones are showing burning signs. They are black.
19:55The skeleton was actually under the floor, so they were very close to the fire.
20:00Israel Hershkovits is a leading physical anthropologist.
20:05Human bone analysis is a vital part of his studies.
20:09Long bones, like arms and legs, reveal a lot about nutrition and disease.
20:15But just one small tooth can tell the life and death story of an ancient human being.
20:21Teeth can tell you about everything.
20:23Teeth can tell you about everything.
20:24Teeth can tell you about everything.
20:25Teeth can tell you about this diet, about general health, about growth and development, daily life, about occupation, because people are using their teeth as a tool, you know, not just for dietary purposes and so forth.
20:40Dr. Hershkovits has studied thousands of specimens from the late hunter-gatherer period called the Natufian and the first farmers of the early Neolithic.
20:53Through microscopic analysis and chemical testing, he's determined key differences between the two lifestyles.
21:00According to his study, Neolithic settlers, especially women, generally lived longer and less violent lives than their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
21:11So at first, it seems that living in a town was actually safer and easier.
21:17But life in permanent settlements came at a high price.
21:21More stress from repetitive physical labor, like farming, and worse.
21:25For example, you see there is over here what you call new bone formation.
21:31Okay.
21:32Okay, over here.
21:33It's a plaque of bone, like a carpet, a new bone carpeting the bone.
21:37Okay.
21:38This tells you right away this individual suffer from some kind of infectious disease, very likely tuberculosis.
21:45Once you are living within a contaminated environment and you live with the animals, with the newly domesticated animals,
21:58which brought a lot of diseases into the human population, this explains why such a high rate of inflammatory diseases
22:05is found within the early farming communities.
22:08Tuberculosis was only one of the new diseases connected to city life.
22:13Illnesses like measles, smallpox, influenza, cholera, malaria, and bubonic plague could spread like wildfire in a city.
22:24If moving to permanent settlements meant more disease and for many a harder life, why did people do it?
22:30What was the benefit?
22:32The best evidence to answer these questions comes from one of the very first cities in the world.
22:38This is the modern city of Jericho.
22:48Today, about 20,000 people live here in the Palestinian territory near the Dead Sea.
22:54Jericho is believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth.
23:05First established around 10,000 years ago, probably even before the first settlement at Çatalhöyük.
23:12I'm climbing up on the oldest wall that we know of in history. It's over 9,000 years old, may even be older.
23:23And it doesn't look like much, but it goes down another meter, maybe another meter and a half.
23:28It's not just that. It's connected to this huge, round, monumental tower that has a staircase in the middle of it.
23:35Probably the first staircase in all of human history.
23:39Most archaeologists think that a wall like this and a tower like this are built for defense.
23:45In cities, there was something to defend. Stored food supplies and all the fixtures of settled life.
23:53For the first time in history, there was something beyond yourself and your family to protect.
23:58Jericho was a vibrant, bustling, Neolithic community.
24:04Archaeologists think that each household would have amassed things of value over the seasons.
24:09Stockpiles of food, like grains and oil, and crafted goods.
24:14And it all needed to be defended.
24:17Residents wove baskets, created textiles on a loom, or tanned animal hides into leather.
24:24Others ground grain and baked bread, among the most time-consuming and back-breaking tasks in the ancient household.
24:36Precisely because Jericho was a resource-rich community, the massive walls surrounding the city were probably built to protect these valuable commodities.
24:45When hunter-gatherers had trouble, they could quickly move on.
24:50But the new city dwellers didn't have that flexibility.
24:54They had to stand and fight.
24:58Avi Gopher specializes in the Neolithic Revolution.
25:02The whole thing about agriculture is that you harvest and then you store it.
25:08While if you were a hunter and gatherer, usually you don't store anything.
25:11Because you're always moving around, you're going to where your brains are, or you're going to where the animals are.
25:14No, it's part of the basic ethics of hunters-gatherers, not to store.
25:18To share equally, to use everything.
25:20To share equally and use, immediate, with no delayed consumption.
25:24The minute you have it stored, and some other peoples within the community, or in other communities, don't have enough, then politics go away.
25:36And with politics inevitably come power struggles over the ownership of land.
25:43A concept rarely seen with hunter-gatherers.
25:49For me it's clear that when the Neolithic starts, and you start harvesting fields that you've been sowing a few months earlier,
25:58then territoriality is becoming a major issue.
26:01This is the beginning of walls and wars and everything.
26:03What was once shared suddenly becomes a source of competition, conflict, and war.
26:13And that wasn't the only source of trouble.
26:16Some people inevitably were better at producing and protecting surplus foods than others.
26:21When people settled down, they began to amass wealth.
26:26This changed the entire social system, creating something else humans had never seen before.
26:31Rich and poor.
26:33As villages became towns and towns became cities, the wealth and power of the emerging ruling class reached new heights.
26:39And once that genie was out of the bottle, there was no putting it back.
26:48In early cities like Çatalhöyük, and probably also Jericho, there was little difference in size or luxury between houses.
26:57So it appears that there was no wealthy elite.
27:01But over thousands of years, as cities evolved, the idea of rich and poor, and the gap between haves and have-nots, became familiar and accepted all over the world.
27:14This is the ancient city of Ephesus.
27:18Originally a Greek trading colony on the Turkish coast, it became part of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century BCE.
27:24It was a place for wealthy merchants, middle class craftsmen, and dirt poor slaves.
27:31Ephesus was established by the Greeks in the 4th century BCE.
27:35Under the Romans, it grew to become a leading port on the Aegean Sea, with a population of over half a million.
27:45It was clearly a stunning city.
27:48A metropolis, with marble-paved streets and marketplaces.
27:52A beautiful library holding 12,000 scrolls.
27:56And an immense amphitheater, seating more than 20,000 spectators.
28:00Ephesus had all the markers of a full-fledged modern city.
28:07Monumental buildings.
28:09A diverse population.
28:11Jobs that defined social status.
28:14And a ruling elite who lived in opulent homes like this.
28:20I'm walking through ancient villas in the city of Ephesus, and this is amazingly well-preserved.
28:27You've got mosaic floors, you've got wall paintings, atriums, fountains.
28:34All the kinds of things that the elites would have surrounded themselves with.
28:38You can see other rooms that would have been used for entertaining.
28:43Rooms that have rich mosaics and beautiful wall paintings that just pop with color.
28:48The divide between rich and poor in Ephesus is easy to see.
28:53That's because here, as in cities throughout the world, the rules had changed.
29:00The few had determined how to extract taxes and labor from the many.
29:05And they became rich doing it.
29:09There's evidence of this exploitative relationship everywhere in the ancient world.
29:13Including at an amazingly well-preserved archaeological site in South America.
29:22I'm on the Peruvian coast at an ancient site called Chan Chan.
29:27From around the year 1000 to 1450, this was a sprawling city.
29:32At its height, over 30,000 people lived here.
29:35All part of a complex empire called the Chimu.
29:38Chan Chan was the center of imperial power, where Chimu kings ruled a vast empire.
29:46At the center of the city was a complex of imperial palaces, surrounded by high walls.
29:53These separated the royal and elite classes, physically and symbolically, from the commoners.
29:59But the elite also depended on the commoners for the fruits of their labor.
30:06Craftsmen supplied them with fine tapestries, textiles, pottery, and finished metal goods.
30:13They delivered these extravagant goods to the palace.
30:17But as people of lower status, they were denied free access to the royal spaces within.
30:22What at first glance appears to be nothing more than a maze of decorative adobe walls,
30:30is in fact a series of elaborate barriers, designed to restrict entry to areas where Chan Chan's riches were stored.
30:38Archaeologist Jason Toohey shows me the evidence of social inequality in this city.
30:45The access to this area, because it's in the center of the plaza, would have been tightly controlled.
30:49So, we're at the center of it, and I notice there's all of these twisty, turny little passages.
30:54The walls would have been really high. It's hard to get into this space.
30:57You're controlling high-cost goods and making sure that people don't take it,
31:01and that you're doling out what goes where.
31:04Absolutely. The empire went to great lengths to make accessing these inner areas of storage of high-quality goods very difficult.
31:11Movement inside what would have been very high walls would have been very controlled, very slow.
31:20The Chimu believed that social status had been determined by creation itself.
31:26According to their myths, the sun god populated the earth with three eggs.
31:32Gold for the ruling elite, silver for their wives, and copper for everyone else.
31:38Everyone else belonged outside the palace walls.
31:42Chan Chan was a city of kings, but it must also have been a city of the desperately poor.
31:51So, we're outside the palace walls, and immediately I can see the difference in the architecture.
31:56This is the remains of a structure.
31:57You can tell that this is architecture.
32:00Yeah, but it's nothing like, obviously, the palace.
32:02Side, side, side.
32:03Yep, yep.
32:04If we look around us, we can tell the rough outline of buildings, right?
32:09But there's absolutely nothing grandiose about what's out here.
32:12Out here is where the coarse adobe homes and workshops of Chan Chan's artisans once stood.
32:22This is a hallmark of ancient cities around the world.
32:25Most of their populations were controlled by an elite few.
32:30And it was a trap.
32:31These people weren't living as well as those people, but what are they going to do?
32:36They're tied to this city, and there's really nowhere else for them to go.
32:40Right.
32:41After a certain point, there are very few options for people to escape a system like this.
32:48In this case, extreme social separation, economic separation.
32:52I think a lot of people looking at this might say,
32:53oh, well, you should just go out and be a hunter-gatherer again.
32:55There you have equal status.
32:56Yeah.
32:57But this isn't something that you can just go back out and do,
32:59because the memory's not there to remember how to hunt for yourself or to gather.
33:04Right.
33:06Regional empires like the Chimu developed in many parts of the New World,
33:11with the elite class believing it was invincible.
33:15But that was an illusion.
33:17Sometimes their power and reach could be surprisingly fragile.
33:24In the 16th century, Spanish explorers came upon an astounding sight
33:28in the jungles of southern Mexico.
33:31An abandoned city filled with magnificent stone structures.
33:35Pyramids, temples, and palaces.
33:39The local Maya people called the ruins,
33:43Otulum, meaning land with strong houses.
33:47The Spanish name, Palenque, means fortification.
33:50Although the name evokes strength, Palenque, like most cities throughout history,
33:57was destined to fail.
34:01Colossal stone temples like this one in Palenque, Mexico,
34:05were built by powerful kings who could muster the manpower and the resources of an entire region.
34:09Those kings, along with a massive exploited workforce, transformed Palenque into a thriving city-state
34:19that flourished between the years 400 and 800.
34:23At the city's height, about 7,000 people were crammed into a small area.
34:29The kings continued to build more and more grand structures, broadcasting their right to rule.
34:35Recent mapping has identified nearly 1,500 buildings, and archaeologists say they've only unearthed a small fraction of the grand ceremonial city.
34:46For five centuries, the farmlands and jungles surrounding Palenque were able to provide enough food and resources for the city to grow,
34:56and for its population to prosper.
34:59The location was good.
35:00Archaeologist Benito Venegas studies Palenque.
35:05There's five rivers that cross Palenque, so you have enough water for human conception.
35:12And in the north, you have a great wall.
35:16It's a cliff, and in the back, it's a mountain.
35:19So it's naturally protected. It's a safer space.
35:21Naturally protected, yes.
35:23But something went wrong.
35:24As in virtually every ancient city all over the world, the power structure collapsed, and its buildings became ruins.
35:32Palenque was abandoned in less than 100 years.
35:36By 900, the jungle had begun to reclaim the grand city.
35:41What caused this apocalyptic fall?
35:43Before the construction of the temples, they began to cut all the trees around Palenque.
35:52The trees were used for fuel to make stucco for the massive stone buildings.
35:58One ton of stucco required burning three tons of timber.
36:03Wood was plentiful, but only for a while.
36:06When consumption outpaced supply, the jungle around Palenque disappeared.
36:12And without roots to hold it, the jungle's topsoil quickly eroded away.
36:18And without trees, you don't have enough soil to make your maize, your beans grow well.
36:26As competition for resources increased, Palenque saw its share of warfare.
36:31And there's also evidence of devastating drought in the 9th century.
36:37It's now believed that the ultimate death of this city, like ancient cities everywhere,
36:42was because it expanded beyond the limits of its natural resources.
36:48When a city grows too far too fast, collapse is inevitable.
36:53Around the same time Palenque was falling, a city on the other side of the world was achieving prominence.
37:06Between the 9th and 15th centuries, the ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia was a vibrant, sprawling metropolis.
37:14Filled with magnificent temples, shrines and palaces, as well as thousands of homes to accommodate a massive population.
37:27Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, the largest and most powerful in Southeast Asia.
37:33Each new Khmer ruler expanded the city until it eventually covered over 1,000 square miles.
37:44It's the largest pre-industrial city ever discovered.
37:49Larger than all five boroughs of New York City.
37:55Archaeologists attribute this remarkable growth to the city's highly sophisticated water system.
38:00In the year 2000, radar images from NASA revealed an intricate network of canals and reservoirs.
38:13This amazing feat of design and engineering captured water during the annual monsoon.
38:21Then distributed it during the dry months for drinking and irrigation.
38:25The water system worked so well that Angkor continued to grow unchecked, until the population had exceeded 1 million.
38:42Ironically, the elaborate waterworks that allowed Angkor to grow so big also probably led to its downfall.
38:48Over the centuries, it became harder and harder to maintain the colossal infrastructure.
38:57As the water system disintegrated, punishing droughts added to the crisis.
39:03The weakened city became increasingly vulnerable to invaders, who took full advantage.
39:08The causes of the collapse and abandonment of Angkor mirror those of Palenque and almost all other ancient cities.
39:18Overpopulation, unchecked growth, and the rapid depletion of resources eventually led these cities to fail.
39:26A grim lesson about the limitations of technology.
39:36Over the last 10,000 years, cities have grown from simple collections of mud brick houses to complex webs of concrete and steel.
39:45Our modern urban lifestyle seems unstoppable.
39:53But since the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, countless cities have fallen under their own weight.
40:00These same challenges still plague every single city in the world today.
40:06As metropolitan populations continue to explode, crime, exploitation, and malnutrition still dominate the urban scene.
40:20Divisions between rich and poor were obvious in ancient cities like Ephesus or Chanchon.
40:29They're obvious in modern cities, too.
40:31It seems to be the nature of cities to bring people together in a big crowded space, then split them up according to ethnicity, occupation, religion, and status.
40:46Jerusalem is one of these cities where a densely packed, divided population competes for limited resources.
40:53Nimrod Luz has studied these conflicts in Jerusalem for over 20 years.
41:01This is the Christian quarter, and the Muslim quarter is here.
41:06These distinct communities all live on top of each other, packed together.
41:10This is the renovated Jewish quarter.
41:13And to finish the lookout, this is the small Armenian quarter.
41:16The space for actual living.
41:19Nimrod believes the problems created by this close proximity are typical of city life everywhere.
41:27It's overwhelming. I feel, I wouldn't be able to figure my way around here.
41:33So not only do I feel lost, I'm confused.
41:36Because there's so many layers of religion and ethnicity and architecture.
41:39I think the key, I think the key word is overwhelming.
41:43There are people you don't talk to, there are communities you don't know how they work, where they shop.
41:48When different people don't mingle and they don't know how to react to each other, they opt for indifference.
41:58Everything about social interaction is intensified in the pressure cooker of a city.
42:04I'd say that the difference between pastoral communities and urban communities is what's at stake here.
42:09And in the urban communities, there's much more at stake.
42:12Things are much more complex, more elaborate.
42:14More dug in.
42:15More dug in, yeah.
42:18Modern humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.
42:22But we didn't start living in cities until less than 10,000 years ago.
42:27Almost all of the cities of antiquity have fallen.
42:33New ones have replaced them.
42:36More cities, bigger cities, there's no end in sight.
42:40The urban problems of sanitation, disease and water supply have been held in check by advances in medicine and engineering.
42:50Allowing population numbers to explode.
42:52But are we on the brink of a new round of urban collapse?
42:59The Earth has never known a human population this large.
43:04Close to seven billion people.
43:07Most of them living in cities.
43:09Clean drinking water is growing scarcer.
43:12Deadly infectious diseases are on the rise.
43:15The competition for oil, trees and space has become fierce.
43:22Violence is increasing.
43:24Could city life be just a passing phase?
Recommended
1:28:43
|
Up next
19:41
22:11
1:32
4:26
2:15
48:08
50:12
29:10
14:56
57:37
42:01
0:27
2:15
2:46
58:38