Until recently, anthropologists believed cities and farms emerged about 9,000 years ago in the Mediterranean and Middle East.
But now a team of interdisciplinary researchers has gathered evidence showing how civilization as we know it may have emerged at the equator, in tropical forests.
Not only that, but people started farming about 30,000 years earlier than we thought.
As a result, scientists simply didn't look for clues of ancient civilizations in the tropics.
Later, people began building "garden cities" in these same regions, where they lived in low-density neighborhoods surrounded by cultivated land.
That's why we can "occupy every environment on the planet, through periods of dramatic climate change, and became the last remaining hominin."
In other words, our ingenious, sustainable farms and cities may have been what saved us from the fate of the Neanderthals. »
