How Did Human Civilization Start?
How Can A Healed Femur Guide Us Toward The History of Civilization?
Evolution is my favorite subject.
Sometimes I think about primitive men who meandered in woods, looking for food and water, lit a fire with stones, and saved themselves from wild animals.
How would they have changed into cultured beings and built this sophisticated civilization?
How did human civilization start?
How did a man, who had lived amongst wildness, his whole life, turn into an elegant being that you and I, and everyone like us, are proud of?
What is it that makes us civilized?
This question was asked to American anthropologist Margaret Mead. And her answer to the commencement of human civilization was unexpected and surprising.
She could have answered craft, farming, tools, or accommodation, but she said a healed femur bone.
It means the thigh bone healed after getting fractured.
She explained her answer beautifully,
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur…
