What's The Best Temperature for Civilization?

last week I made a video about the global climate system and to help explain some things I used this map which besides being very colorful shows the average temperatures across the world and well when I first found this map I immediately started looking it over for interesting details and soon enough a couple hours again by because you know time flies when you're having fun but during this time I began to think about climate and how it might affect human behavior specifically I started trying to figure out if there was one climate in particular that was optimal not only for the survival of humans but for the construction of advanced human civilizations because this is the type of stuff I like to do in my free time in short what temperature if any supports human development the best before we get into it real quick I want to talk about human biology typically our bodies prefer to keep an internal temperature of around 37 degrees Celsius or nearly 99 degrees Fahrenheit this is so that all the enzymes and such in our body don't denature and we can continue on you know functioning and living so knowing this you would expect the optimal temperature for humans to live in to also be around 37 degrees Celsius but if you've ever actually experienced 37 degrees you know that it's hot and miserable and nowhere near the ideal temperature for humans in reality the human body prefers an ambient temperature closer to 21 degrees Celsius or 70 degrees Fahrenheit this way all the excess heat created through our metabolism can be fully exhausted to our surroundings without removing too much heat as to force our metabolisms to speed up in order to compensate basically at this temperature excess heat production equals heat lost to our surroundings and therefore we neither gain or lose heat okay so knowing this let's take a look back at our map first I'd like to point out East Africa it was here that modern humans first evolved and is there for the natural environment we are all best adapted for and we can see that the temperature here is pretty close to 21 degrees all around which isn't a coincidence being comfortable with the average temperature in this region meant that our bodies had to spend less energy controlling our body's temperature either by sweating or by shivering so we could spend more of our energy on other activities like hunting or thinking therefore when thinking about places that will encourage human development the most it makes sense to suspect places that have a similar climate to of East Africa would feature the most successful human civilizations on this map 21 degrees is represented by this lighter orange color so if I color select for this and mute everything else we can see where on earth the average temperature is roughly in line with our biological optimum doing this we can see that the nearby Sahara Desert actually fits inside our ideal range as well this is likely the effect of having extremely hot days matched with near freezing nighttime temperatures though I think the climate of this area is far too dry to have been ideal for any advanced civilization to emerge interestingly if you do add water to a place like this maybe in the form of a river the story changes and that is exactly what happened here where the Nile River gave birth to the early civilization of Egypt so with this temperature and a reliable source of water for drinking and more importantly irrigation a highly complex civilization was able to arise the exact same is actually true further east as well where we'll find the only complex civilization which predates Egypt Mesopotamia but again most of this temperature is actually found further south in the Arabian desert while the part that was densely populated for the time relied on rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates to thrive that being said - looking elsewhere isn't too promising in South America there's the central region on the border between Argentina and Paraguay where no real advanced civilization ever emerged the same could be said for these small areas in North America where it occurs as well moving over to Europe we can see it's entirely absent here there are some small pockets in southern China as well as Southeast Asia but these zones are actually just a narrow gradient areas wedged between more dominant temperature zones I'll return to them in a second lastly this is also the average temperature across a lot of the Australian Interior which much like the one in Africa and Arabia occupies a large desert area and as a result also never hosted a large complex society so on the whole despite being the human optimum only two small areas within this average temperature ever really hosted substantial human civilizations and I don't think it's a coincidence that these two happen to be the oldest ones ever recorded so I believe we'll need to keep looking if we want to find the best temperature for civilization if we try looking at areas that are warmer say between 25 to 30 degrees Celsius on average we'll get a map that like this from this we can see that this is the temperature most often found around the equator and included in this range are most tropical rainforest and warm deserts and overall neither of these environments are ideal for the development of large civilizations which explains why none have really ever emerged in these areas also included in this temperature range however is tropical savanna which is much better at accommodating humans in particular tropical savanna is the dominant environment across much of the Indian subcontinent here we'll find the second soon to be first most populous country on the planet and the cradle of several advanced civilizations I think it's safe to say India is an anomaly in this way with few other civilizations ever finding long-term prosperity within this higher temperature zone and on the whole this temperature typically creates some of the most challenging environments to human society so as expected we'll have to look at other temperatures now it was at this point in my search that I made a pretty obvious realization humans do work and when we do work our Blood starts to flow and we get hotter in order to build the largest civilization a lot of work has to be done farmers need to plow fields soldiers need to March people need to run errands things need to get done what I'm getting at is maybe a climate needs to be slightly colder than the human ideal to allow people to remain comfortable while working instead of while resting after all it's really the amount of work done by a civilization that determines how successful it is or at least that's my hypothesis anyway so if we look back to the map and look for temperatures slightly below 21 degrees around 16 to 19 degrees we'll get a map that looks like this and this I think is where we'll find the answer to our question doing this we can see seven distinct regions take form one in North America one in South America another in southern Africa perhaps the largest surrounding the Mediterranean Sea another one over the Middle East one over eastern China and finally one in southern Australia and if we take a closer look at a couple of these an interesting pattern emerges the Mediterranean for example was the region that hosted among others the Roman Empire for hundreds to thousands of years interestingly we can see the Roman Empire almost exclusively stuck within this temperature range going far north as England while leaving lands of differing average temperature unconquered despite them being much closer to the center of the empire looking at the African portion of Rome it clearly straddles the northern coast also where the temperature remained in line with that of the rest of the empire moving over to the Middle East another huge center for human civilization and what do you know we come across another large expansive or slightly below ideal temperature not to pick favorites as a lot of important civilizations came out of this region as well but perhaps the most well-known of them would be the Persian Empire and once again we can see that their borders roughly coincide with this narrow temperature range what I find most interesting is the eastern border of this empire where it virtually expands right until the temperatures change making it deep into Central Asia and all the way to the Indus River but stopping relatively precisely at the point where it either gets much hotter or much colder of course other factors were also at play in deciding the shapes of both of these empires and temperature was hardly ever the only reason an empire stopped expanding namely resisting people groups like the Germanic tribes fighting the Romans or the Greeks fighting the Persians accompanied by natural barriers like the Sahara Desert and the Himalayan mountains also would have prevented growth moving further east we reach perhaps the most productive area in the world in terms of humanity China on this map we can see that only the easternmost side of modern-day China is contained within this temperature range which actually helps support this idea you see looking at a population density map of the country we can see that Eastern China is actually where the population is concentrated that's why if we look at any of the borders of ancient Chinese dynasties this one is of the Qin Dynasty we can again see this almost perfectly aligns with our selected temperature range with only a little bit of the south spilling into warmer temperatures and a bit of the north spilling into colder areas clearly we can see these three regions which have been at the center of many prosperous human civilizations continuously for thousands of years all have the same average temperature but that doesn't mean there are the only centres of humanity and recently a new seat of power in the world has arisen to challenge those previously mentioned today the United States has arguably joined the ranks of one of the most powerful civilizations in history and it just so happens to fall right atop another area with the 16 to 18 degree drange if we switch again to density we can see that the population here is also concentrated within our given temperature range it's similar to China's population the country's most populous state California is almost entirely within this range and same goes for its second most populous state Texas then taking a look at the country's least populous states Wyoming and Vermont we can see that they're both completely outside of this range in the end it would seem that many of the most powerful and influential civilizations and even the most powerful states within a country from ancient history all the way to modern times have at least one thing in common made clear by this map human civilization seems to reach a maximum whenever operating in a temperature range slightly colder than our biological optimum again my theory for this is that it allows humans to work more comfortably but I'd like to hear your theories as well so let me know in the comments however looking at this map a little longer we can see that these four areas we looked at aren't actually the only regions in the world that experience this temperature over a large area there are in fact one to three additional large regions which feature the same average temperature one in South America roughly corresponding to what's called the pampas region shared between Argentina and Uruguay another one in southern Africa occupying what's today called the Kalahari Desert reaching all the way from the country of South Africa all the way up to the bottom of the dr congo and then lastly we have another one stretching across the lower half of australia so once i got to this point i was left with the question why did into these three regions ever host a similarly successful civilization after this i started doing more in-depth research but I couldn't find anything focusing on these specific regions or these specific questions but I have an education in environmental science and geography so at the very least I can try to figure this out on my own obviously this is a complex question and any answer I come up with will be an oversimplification also I'm open to other ideas and opinions that being said I believe the biggest factor which restricted the formation of advanced civilizations in these areas to be isolation looking at these three remaining regions each one of them hides behind several natural barriers and would have been difficult for people to reach in the past the Pampas region of South America for example was tucked behind both the Amazon rainforest and the Andes Mountains as migrating humans came in from the north these likely provided too great of a barrier for significant populations to settle here and therefore left of the region largely underpopulated for most of history moving over to Australia the same can be said we're early migrating humans would have had to cross tremendous obstacles to even find this area let alone settle it above this is the Australian outback a mostly desert region preceding that is the ocean another difficult boundary to cross and what Islands there were four people to make the journey on were covered in dense rainforests providing three challenging barriers to the discovery and wide-scale settling of such an area lastly we have the region in Africa that roughly corresponds to the Kalahari Desert and that should be your first hint as an ideal temperature isn't the only thing necessary for an ideal climate even the name Kalahari comes from the SWA no word Tagalog Adi which literally translates into a waterless place add on to that a shielding provided by the Congo rainforest and then the Sahara Desert and this region was also very difficult to reach and settle for most of human history now this theory of isolation helps but I'm sure at least some of you have already come up with the next question both China and the United States are isolated as well and yet they still manage to take advantage of their climate to become influential powers on the world stage and this leads me to an important secondary contributing factor population today all of Europe has a combined population of around 740 million people while the Middle East hosts around 410 million meanwhile China alone today contains nearly 1.4 billion more than both of the other two places combined of course these proportions were a little different thousands of years ago but for the most part China has always had a massive population one that was large enough to sustain technological advancements on its own without the need for cultural exchanges meanwhile the Middle East and Europe each one individually smaller than China traditionally relied more on trading of different ideas and technologies between each other I think the United States proves both of these points very well as prior to 1500 populations here were relatively low and isolated a worst case scenario you might say with no influx of new ideas and without enough people to truly drive its own advancement the nations here stayed small and onion off' eyed but after 1500 this isolation ended when transatlantic exchange with Europe became possible and once an influx of people through colonization and immigration occurred another seat of power in the world was created in short once enough people with contact to the outside were in the right place a stable unified state could form all together I believe this shows that the isolation of areas people and cultures most often leads to a failure to build a complex civilization even if the natural conditions like temperature favored such a development however as our technology advances isolation will become less and less of a problem as the Internet allows for the spreading of ideas and culture across the globe instantaneously the effects this could have on civilize as a whole is still unknown but I think given another couple hundred years we might see the rise of several more substantial powers centered around these three regions that's just a prediction on my part however and of course history and civilization is more complex than just temperature I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did I hope you consider donating to my patreon as it really helps videos like these get paid and you could get your name in the video like all these generous people other than that yes subscribe if you want to keep seeing my videos I try to make one every week thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 615,221

Rating: 4.725244 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, civilization, society, temperature, climate, egypt, mesopatamia, sahara, australia, mediterranean, middle, east, china, united, states, pampas, kalahari, population, isolation, culture

Id: oG19fCFSamQ

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Ru4pigsizedelephants]

Gotta be 69. Gotta be.

[u/PastelFlamingo150]

You also need native plants and animals that you can domesticate.

[u/GetSwifty1001]

Depends on what your doing. Sleeping Working Etc

[u/[deleted]]

Interesting idea, but a bit of a let down on the historical front. He needed to do a bit more research.

[u/knuckles_the_dog]

42 or 69, either is an acceptable answer

[u/nsfwaward]

/r/MapsWithoutNZ

[u/LeonAfricanus]

Temperatures and availablity of water have both changed over the last few thousands of years, i think it is important to include a time axis to find more solid correlation and get more insight.

[u/rddman]

You can have the bestest temperature, but without abundant resources there's not going to be advanced civilization.