Civilizationkey turning points from farming to computers

Civilization starts with the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago, when humans domesticated wheat, rice, cattle and sheep. Only then came writing, bronze, ironworking, philosophy, papermaking and printing, then the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the age of electricity, computers and the internet. The time range of this era is "12,000 years ago – present", and it has eleven turning points.

Eleven turning points

• 12,000 years ago · Agricultural revolution: Wheat, rice, cattle and sheep are domesticated.
• 5,200 years ago · Writing: Cuneiform and oracle bone script.
• 5,000 years ago · Bronze Age: Copper–tin alloy.
• 3,200 years ago · Iron Age: Cheaper, harder tools.
• 2,500 years ago · Axial Age: A burst of philosophy and ethics.
• 1,900 years ago · Paper & printing: Knowledge can be copied.
• 1600 · Scientific revolution: Experiment and mathematics describe nature.
• 1760 · Industrial revolution: The steam engine changes the source of energy.
• 1880 · Age of electricity: Power grids connect cities.
• 1946 · Computers: Machines begin to calculate.
• 1990 · The internet: A global knowledge network.

The gaps on this timeline keep getting shorter: farming to writing took a very long time, the industrial revolution to the age of electricity only a little over a hundred years, and computers to the internet just a few decades.

What farming brought

Comparing thousands of rice genomes showed that cultivated rice originated from wild rice in the area of the Pearl River basin in China (Huang et al., Nature, 2012). Farming changed more than how people ate: the expansion of farming populations carried their languages to new places and shaped the distribution of language families today (Diamond and Bellwood, Science, 2003).

To know how long ago these ancient events happened, you need a ruler. Radiocarbon dating gave archaeology a "clock", and its inventor won the 1960 Nobel Prize (Arnold and Libby, Science, 1949).

Physics changed the world

James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism and calculated that the speed of electromagnetic waves equals the speed of light: light is an electromagnetic wave (Maxwell, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1865). Albert Einstein showed that time and space are not absolute. This clerk at the patent office published four papers that changed physics within a single year (Einstein, Annalen der Physik, 1905).

Medicine

A mold that grew by accident in a culture dish killed the bacteria around it, and the antibiotic era began (Fleming, British Journal of Experimental Pathology, 1929).

Computers and the internet

Alan Turing imagined an abstract machine that defined what "computation" is, laying the theoretical foundation of modern computers (Turing, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936). Claude Shannon turned "information" into a measurable quantity, and the bit was born (Shannon, Bell System Technical Journal, 1948). In the same year, a piece of semiconductor was shown to amplify signals. It replaced the vacuum tube and shrank computers from room size to pocket size (Bardeen and Brattain, Physical Review, 1948). The World Wide Web began as an internal proposal, which his boss annotated "Vague but exciting" (Berners-Lee, CERN, 1989).

How the theory lines up with the timeline

Many theories came earlier than the matching era node. Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory was published in 1865, while the age of electricity, with grids connecting cities, is at 1880 on the timeline, so the theory led by more than a decade. Turing's computability paper appeared in 1936, and the computer event, when machines begin to calculate, is at 1946 on the timeline, so the theory led by ten years. Shannon's information theory and the transistor both date to 1948, and both came after the computer event on the timeline. The proposal for the World Wide Web is from 1989 and the internet event on the timeline is 1990, almost the same time. Laying the years out like this shows the rhythm of "theory first, technology catching up".

Want to read the originals? Search these titles

• Huang et al. (2012): A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice
• Diamond and Bellwood (2003): Farmers and their languages: the first expansions
• Arnold and Libby (1949): Age determinations by radiocarbon content: checks with samples of known age
• Maxwell (1865): A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field
• Einstein (1905): Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies"
• Fleming (1929): On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium
• Turing (1936): On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem
• Shannon (1948): A mathematical theory of communication
• Bardeen and Brattain (1948): The transistor, a semi-conductor triode
• Berners-Lee (1989): Information management: A proposal

How the game shows it

In the game, the Civilization era has the resource knowledge, and its generators are Farmland, City-states, Academies and Factories, roughly matching the stages of farming, cities, scholarship and industry.