Imagine building the biggest  city the world has ever seen.

Thousands of people living out  their lives in close quarters along planned streets with  a central meeting space. And then you go “eh, never mind” and  you burn the whole thing to the ground.

Over 5,000 years ago, that’s exactly what the Cucuteni-Trypillia people in Eastern Europe did. Just one of their settlements may have  been home to as many as 46,000 people. That many humans living in the  same place was virtually unheard of anywhere in the world at the time.

And then they torched it all on purpose. And the early history of cities is  full of bizarre stories like this. “Where and when did people build the first city?” sounds like a simple enough question. But archaeologists have been arguing  about it for more than 70 years.

And spoiler alert, they still  can’t agree on an answer. While it’s tempting to think of the  history of human civilization as a straight line from nomads, to  camps, to villages, to cities, that is not at all what happened. The climate warmed and stabilized  after the last Ice Age.

After that, early urban experiments popped up independently on nearly every inhabited continent. Most of those experiments eventually failed. Lots of people came up with the idea of  cities, but for all kinds of reasons, they didn’t necessarily pull it off.

Their cities collapsed, and they went back to living in more distributed communities. Today, we’re going to explore  the idea of why cities fail, and why living communally in  cities isn’t inevitable for humans. So join me on a tour of the world’s first  cities… most of which didn’t work out. [♪ INTRO] In the 1950s an archaeologist named V.  Gordon Childe came up with a list of criteria to try and define what  constitutes a city across ancient cultures.

First, there are the obvious  things, like a population larger and denser than anything that  came before it in the area. Also, big monumental public buildings. But the list also includes economic aspects, such as specialist jobs like craftspeople  and full-time artists, long-distance trade, and production of a surplus that  can be taxed and concentrated.

It even includes the presence of a  social hierarchy and elite class, as well as a system of writing  that enables long term planning. His list is a little out of date in some ways, and it’s definitely not  universally used by archaeologists. But it can help us think about what to  look for when we use the word “city.” We can find a list of examples that  check a few or even most of the boxes – yet their people never achieved true city-building cultures for one reason or another.

Here’s why so many early cities failed. Our story begins in the Middle  East, in Anatolia, or modern Turkey. Archaeologists discovered  Göbekli Tepe in the 1960s, but they did not fully recognize its significance  until they excavated it 30 years later.

The ruins date back to 9500 BCE. And it’s part of a network  of similar nearby sites, some of which could even be older. Archeologists can figure out how old these settlements are through radiocarbon dating.

Carbon-14 is a radioactive version of carbon that slowly decays and turns into stable nitrogen. Carbon-14 is constantly  produced in the atmosphere, and plants naturally absorb it along with regular carbon-12 as they photosynthesize. But when those plants die, they stop absorbing new carbon and what they’ve  already taken in is left to decay.

So by measuring the amount of  carbon-14 that is left in a sample and comparing it to the amount  of regular non-decaying carbon-12 in the same sample, scientists  can figure out how old it is. At Göbekli Tepe, there are small bits of  plant material from soil in the wall plaster. Radiocarbon dating reveals the ruins  were built between 9,300 and 9,700 BCE.

Once, over 20 oval-shaped  stone structures stood here. The largest featured 5.5-meter  tall T-shaped pillars decorated with artwork of animals and symbols. This is the oldest known example  of humans building monuments within a settlement, so it checks off one  of the boxes for being a city right there.

Initially, however, it was thought  that no one lived there year-round, only coming there periodically  for religious festivals. Without a permanent occupation, that’s  a big strike against being a city. But in the 2010s, archaeologists suggested some of the large buildings could  actually be communal houses.

And modern chemical analysis of residue  in large cooking pots suggests they made huge batches of carb-rich porridge  to feed large groups of people. These discoveries raise the question: could  Göbekli Tepe be the oldest known city? The answer is still unclear.

It was certainly a place  for ceremonies and feasts, but whether it was permanently  occupied is still up for debate. While there is evidence the  inhabitants collected rain water, there isn’t another easy  source of water near the site, which would make it difficult to  live there through all seasons. Even so, the discoveries at Göbekli Tepe have turned old ideas of early  urbanization on their head.

See, Childe coined the term Urban Revolution  to refer to the social, political, and economic shifts that took place as ancient humans started living closer together. For him, it was the next reorganization of  society following the Neolithic Revolution, when nomadic hunter-gatherers transitioned to small agricultural settlements  with domesticated animals. But Göbekli Tepe makes all  those lines very blurry.

This settlement actually predates farming, animal domestication, and even pottery. So it has many elements associated  with the urban revolution, but they would have occurred before  or during the Neolithic revolution. And its emphasis on monumental  ceremonial buildings suggests that maybe the first city didn’t grow from a village, but instead came from  communal ceremonial practices.

However, after 1500 years of  use, Göbekli Tepe was abandoned. So early urbanism wasn’t a one  way path for ancient cultures. Maybe it’s better to think of these as  experiments, rather than revolutions.

Archeologists long thought that  people buried the city intentionally. However, new research points to the  surrounding landscape as the culprit. It neighbors steep hillsides  that could give way to landslides during heavy winter rains.

So it may have just been that that particular  site was too much work to maintain. Remember the first three rules of early  city planning: location, location, location. This early urban experiment may not  have been a total failure, though.

We’ll come back to that idea in just a bit. One location that has stood the test of time  is Jericho, located in modern Palestine. Radiocarbon dating indicates that  humans have lived here since 9000 BCE.

Its main claims to fame are its monumental stone walls and watchtower,  dating back to 8000 BCE. This is another early example  of people coming together to complete monumental projects  for the benefit of the community. This tower was just over 8 meters tall,  and it even had an internal staircase, which was incredible engineering for the time.

It was essentially the world’s first skyscraper. But archaeologists disagree about  why it was built – for example, whether it was intended for defense. One study hypothesized that it  was an ancient astronomical marker and timekeeper, since the  shadow of a nearby mountain falls exactly on this tower each summer solstice.

While building such a monument requires  social organization and planning, it’s not clear how intricate this was. And the population was still  small, only a few thousand at most. Jericho didn’t fully urbanize until  thousands of years later, around 3000 BCE.

But what sets Jericho apart from  the other settlements on this list is that while the population has  gone up and down over the millennia, there are still people living there today. People just kept coming back and  congregating in the same spot. And that’s about as far from an  urban failure as you can get.

And the reason why is likely pretty simple. While it's in a desert, it has  the spring of Ein es-Sultan, which provides a reliable source of fresh water. Once again, location, location, location.

Heading back north to Anatolia,  we’re skipping ahead to around 500 years after the burial and  abandonment of Göbekli Tepe. Because while the urban experiment  at Göbekli Tepe didn’t last, it was very far from being the  only such experiment in the region. Beginning in 7400 BCE, Çatalhöyük  grew to be a huge sprawling village.

Archaeologists first noticed two  large mounds of earth in the 1950s, although the locals were of  course already well aware of them. These kinds of mounds are called tells, mounds that form from the gradual  accumulation of debris produced by humans living and building in  one place over generations. Archeologists disagree about  how many people lived here, with some estimates as high as  10,000 and some as low as 600. Çatalhöyük had many dense mudbrick houses without any planned streets between them.

Many buildings had entrances in their  ceilings, so walking along the rooftops may have been the most efficient way  of going to visit your neighbours. The people here actually  buried their dead directly underneath the houses they lived in. Interestingly, female children buried here have five times more grave goods than male children.

And there was actually a study  of ancient DNA from the site that found that while people buried together  were not always biologically related, houses remained within maternal lineages. All this evidence paints a picture of a  culture that held women in high regard. Artistic female figurines are  also common finds at Çatalhöyük.

While this settlement was certainly a  dense group of people living together with their own social customs, there is  no evidence of communal public spaces like temples or marketplaces  or a central government. So it ticks a few boxes for  being a city, but not many. After a long slow decline,  Çatalhöyük was abandoned by 5950 BCE.

A changing climate may have been one reason, but researchers have found  evidence of many problems that come along with living in dense groups. Early farming of grains allowed  Çatalhöyük to support a dense population. But that change in diet led to tooth decay: cavities are present in about 10% of teeth.

Analysis of the proteins in  several cooking vessels also reveal some of the earliest evidence  of humans drinking cow’s milk. However, there is residue of both animal  and human feces on the walls of houses, which could indicate poor sanitation  potentially leading to disease. Possibly indicative of this,  one third of human remains from the site had signs of  infection on their bones.

Even more upsetting, over one quarter of remains had skull fractures from violence. The residents of Çatalhöyük were still  learning to get along in close quarters – from public health to playing well with others. So it seems like the downfall  of this particular experiment in communal living was all  those pesky other people.

But let’s end our tour of the Middle East on probably the least disputed early city out there. The one you probably know of as “the” first city. While calling anything that came before  them a “city” is somewhat controversial, you’d be hard-pressed to find an archaeologist who says Mesopotamia did not have true cities.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers bring  nutrient-rich soils to the area, allowing for efficient agriculture  to supply dense settlements. These include Tel Brak, Ur, and a  little bit later, the famous Babylon. But let’s focus on Uruk, in  what is today southern Iraq.

Uruk formed around 5000 BCE,  and within a thousand years it was the largest settlement in the world. The city had temples, a social hierarchy, and a system of government and bureaucracy. For example, pottery bowls were  manufactured in standardized sizes, which dictated the size of  grain rations people received.

To grow these grains, people engineered networks of canals and dams to  provide irrigation to their fields. So Uruk checks a lot of the economic  and bureaucratic boxes such as long term planning, community projects,  and concentration of agricultural surplus. And perhaps most importantly they even  had the earliest known writing system, cuneiform, evolving around 3400 BCE,  just before Egyptian hieroglyphs.

They used this to track and record  transactions in the city’s growing economy. There is no doubt that Uruk met all  of Childe’s criteria for city status. The city’s power declined  gradually, but it was inhabited all the way up until 700 CE, long after  most other ancient Mesopotamian cities.

That’s literally the Middle Ages, so  cities are very firmly established by the time this one is fully abandoned. Changes in the climate are often blamed for the collapse of many great Mesopotamian cities. But a 2021 study found that by  the time of a sudden shift to a cold and dry climate around 2200 BCE, the cities were already feeling the  pressures of dense urban living.

These researchers looked at nearly  a thousand radiocarbon dates to estimate the population over time,  and they found there was a rapid increase in population before the change  in climate, and a fall afterwards. So climate might have been the nail in the coffin, but the cities were already under  pressure from rapid growth beforehand. We’re going to now leave the Middle East and tour some early-maybe cities around the  world, but first, a quick message.

This SciShow video is supported by DeleteMe, the hands-free subscription service  that removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker  and people search sites. DeleteMe has been the leading expert  in Personally Identifiable Information removal for over 15 years and was recently named by Wirecutter as the  #1 data-removal service. So lots of folks trust them,  from medical providers to judges.

Even our executive producer signed up  and had tons of listings removed for her. They reviewed 1,200 records for her. They also made it easy for her to request removal of additional listings herself  with the click of a button.

You can join all those folks using  DeleteMe with the QR code on screen or at joindeleteme.com/SCISHOW with  the promo code SCISHOW at checkout. You’ll get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans. So that’s the story of the first  cities as we normally hear it.

But the Fertile Crescent isn’t the only place where humans experimented with  coming together to live in groups. In fact, it happened just about  everywhere humans existed. And many of the same factors existed to  draw people together or push them apart.

So let’s move over to Eastern Europe, what is today Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Back around 5000 BCE, the  Cucuteni-Trypillia people lived here. Their settlements boasted over a thousand  houses and as many as 46,000 people.

That would make them way larger  than the Mesopotamian cities that existed at the same time. However, other estimates  suggest the sites were smaller, with only around 12,000 people. These settlements all followed a similar plan: large rings of houses with streets between  them leading into a large central plaza.

We don’t have big obvious ruins to study, since their settlements were made of wood, but we can still see where they  were and how they were built. Archaeologists can see where these  buildings stood using geomagnetic surveys. Every material reacts to Earth’s  magnetic field a bit differently, so by measuring the magnetic  field over a wide area, archaeologists can see faint outlines of where humans concentrated particular  materials like wood or clay.

But high temperatures like you get in a fire  reset the magnetic field within minerals. So rock or soil that has been burned  shines extra brightly in a magnetic survey, even thousands of years after the fire. This is very cool.

We can see into the past. These settlements may have been created  to establish strength in numbers. The Cucuteni-Trypillia had  some dangerous neighbors.

But it’s unclear if they had a  centralized government or hierarchical social structures, and some researchers think they were not even occupied year round. So that’s three strikes against. However, recent discoveries show  some buildings were larger or given more decoration than others,  and a set of figurines appears to depict a council-like gathering.

This could hint toward both  hierarchy and governance. So some archaeologists have started making the argument that these were true early cities. But the strangest thing  about the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements is that they burned  down roughly every 70 years.

This is why the outlines of Cucuteni-Trypillia buildings show up so clearly on magnetic surveys. Now, this could have been the  result of accidents, or invaders. However, experiments based on  reconstructed Cucuteni-Trypillia homes have found that they are  incredibly difficult to burn down.

Researchers conclude that  because the structures would have required so much fuel to ignite and burn,  this must have been done deliberately. Why these cities were burned and abandoned  is a mystery that persists to this day. Perhaps these people needed  to find new arable land after they had farmed in one spot for a  while and they burned their own cities!

Starting around 3200 BCE,  the Cucuteni-Trypillia people stopped building megasites altogether,  returning to smaller villages. It’s not clear why they made this decision, but it demonstrates that urban civilization is not an inevitable one-way  path for ancient cultures. Before we leave Europe we need to give  an honorable mention to Solnitsata, a village located in modern Bulgaria.

Founded in 5500 BCE, it grew  to its height by 4700 BCE. While small, consisting of  only a few hundred people, it’s important because it’s one of the earliest examples of a settlement  with economic specialization. They mined and traded salt.

In fact, it was traded so frequently  and over such long distances that it may have acted as one  of the world’s first currencies. The value of Solnitsata’s salt production created a tremendous accumulation  of wealth in the village. Surrounded by huge defensive stone  walls, 3 meters high and 2 meters thick, it may have been the strongest  fortification in the world at the time.

The houses inside were also made  of stone and had multiple floors. And that wealth was on  display at a nearby cemetery, which was found to be incredibly  rich in gold and copper grave goods. The village ended in 4200 BCE when  it was destroyed by an earthquake, but a drought may also have  played a role in its downfall.

Of course, no tour of early urbanism  would be complete without a trip to Egypt. Let’s focus on one of the earliest  settlements, before the time of the Pharaohs. This was a city called Nekhen, later  known by its Greek name Hierakonpolis.

Neolithic cultures gradually settled  along the Nile around 5000 BCE. The fertile soil and reliable freshwater provided some of the necessary building  blocks of urban development. Nekhen’s height was during  a wet period in the climate.

Its location had a slight elevation that  offered some protection against floods. By around 3500 BCE the city could  have had as many as 10,000 people. While the Nile was vital for the cities of Egypt, it also makes an archaeologist’s job challenging.

Over the course of millennia, the river can shift by multiple kilometers and  lay down many meters of sediment. In fact, Nekhen extended  beyond the Nile floodplain, which could be a factor in why  we have the site preserved today. In many ways, the city was a template for  the great Egyptian cities that came later: industrialized pottery production,  administrative buildings, and what may be the oldest known decorated tomb.

Archaeologists uncovered a building  full of large ancient vats. Mass spectroscopy of the residue in these revealed that this was one of the world’s  first large scale breweries. In these vats, skilled brewers fermented barley with yeast and even added dates for flavor.

I’d like to try it. Nekhen also had what may have  been the world’s first zoo, animals kept not for food  but as a display of power, which is evidence of an elite class. You can draw a direct line from Nekhen to  the later Egyptian cities of the Pharaohs.

But when the climate dried out a little bit, people spread out and power  shifted away from Nekhen. It was largely abandoned by 2300 BCE, although its temples were still used long after. While smaller settlements in China  incorporated detailed urban planning much earlier, Liangzhu in the  Yangtze Delta was arguably the first large-scale city in ancient China.

Discovered in the 1930s during  the construction of a highway, workers kept finding jade artifacts. As archaeologists learned more,  they realized the elite members of the Liangzhu culture were  particularly rich in jade. The city began around 3300 BCE, as rice agriculture began  to pick up in the same area.

Producing an agricultural surplus gave  craftspeople the time to develop intricate artistic practices which in turn allowed  the elite class to showcase their status. Buildings were made out of grass and clay  bricks, all formed in a standard size. But the city was built on wetlands, so they engineered a massive compact  earth foundation to support it.

To manage the constant threat of water, there was an extensive system of 11 dams. They even built earthen walls and a large elevated section to protect palaces  and the royal cemetery from water. But it was not enough.

A study of oxygen and carbon  isotopes from stalagmites in a nearby cave reveals  ancient precipitation patterns. Around 2300 BCE, a period of  particularly intense monsoons appear to have overwhelmed the dams,  and the city was abandoned. This was sudden, and there is no evidence of significant human development in  the region immediately afterwards.

However, the people of Liangzhu  didn’t disappear entirely. Artifacts and customs from the city  appeared in other regions of China, up to 1000 kilometers away. So while the city of Liangzhu never returned, the technology and customs developed there spread out across China along  with its former inhabitants.

Across the ocean in North America, early  versions of cities looked very different. Poverty Point in Louisiana is a mound  site that was built starting in 1800 BCE. That’s not its original name, and we don’t know what the inhabitants of the  site originally called it.

It’s not the oldest mound site, but it’s  certainly one of the most impressive: a grand earthen monument of 6 massive semi-circular ridges around a central plaza. While people worked on building  it over a period of 600 years, the largest mound was built in less than 90 days. Constructing such a monument that fast would have required as many as 9,000 laborers.

The site facilitated long distance trade. Archaeologists have found many artifacts  made of materials from far-off places, such as copper from the shores of the Great Lakes. They’ve also found an abundance of clay balls, so many that they’re now simply  called Poverty Point Objects.

The landscape surrounding the  site lacks natural stones, so these clay balls were heated  and used to warm pit ovens. They made their own rocks! Mound sites like Poverty Point may not  have been cities in the modern sense, since it’s not clear whether  they were inhabited year round.

However, these examples prove you don’t  need intensive agriculture or a written system of record keeping to come  together and construct large monuments. So Poverty Point shows there wasn’t  a single path of progress that cultures followed as people came together  in large numbers for the first time. We’re gonna move back across  the Atlantic for our final city.

In 2500 BCE, the city of Mohenjo-daro  could have had 40,000 residents. This was part of the Harappan  Civilization in the Indus Valley. Today this is part of Pakistan.

They had a written language, but the catch is that we have  not been able to decipher it yet! Mohenjo-daro had many features that we  now take for granted in modern cities but were revolutionary at the time. It had a square grid pattern of roads,  multi-room and multi-storey houses, and large public buildings  for people to gather in.

But it was their ability to engineer  water that was especially unmatched. They built large, almost monumental public baths, waterproofed by placing tar between the bricks. There was a sophisticated water  collection and distribution system, with one water well for every three houses.

It even had a centralized sewage disposal system with a direct output pipe from many of the houses. All this water management  might have come from necessity, since the city was completely flooded  on up to six different occasions. So they also built large flood defense platforms.

But Mohenjo-daro and other Indus Valley  cities were abandoned by 1700 BCE, possibly due to shifts in the  monsoons patterns and rivers. These shifts were partly due to  the same global climate anomaly that put so much stress on  the cities of Mesopotamia. The Indus Valley experienced both  repeated floods and droughts, so even their remarkable ability to  engineer and harness water wasn’t enough to respond to unpredictable patterns,  and this amazing civilization also faded.

After the cities on this list sprung  up, the urban revolution spread fast. A ton of fascinating cities appeared  in the next couple of thousand years, from San Lorenzo to Great  Zimbabwe to Angkor and many more. But humanity’s path towards building  cities wasn’t a straight line.

It was thousands of years of trial and error, with attempts and false starts  by many different cultures. And these cultures often did not  have direct contact with each other. So urban life didn’t evolve once and spread.

It started independently all over the world. But sustaining these early  cities was clearly difficult. Ancient people needed to learn  new ways of producing food, keeping a city clean, and  dealing with social unrest.

And when a natural disaster  struck or the climate shifted, these experiments were often abandoned. People came together when the factors were right and then broke apart when they weren’t. But they kept trying, and clearly  we eventually figured it out.

Now we just need to bring back the  rooftop highways of Çatalhöyük, and hopefully that’ll speed up my morning commute. [♪ OUTRO]