On the birth of ancient civilizations: Comments on a paper by Eric R. Force

Abstract

AbstractForce's (2008) theory cannot explain the birth of several major ancient civilizations, including those in Egypt and China. In addition, most of the ancient civilizations considered in Force's research were not primary civilizations and they had been influenced to some extent by other, earlier civilizations. If one considers the world's major primary civilizations, then rivers and their cyclic nature of annual floods—not tectonic plate boundaries and earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions—were a greater catalyst to the birth of the world's oldest civilizations. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.