Childhood is always happy, even in the Stone Age.
But people must eventually leave childhood behind.
For example...
Watching your father fall in a pool of blood.
"This is all your fault. I didn't want to kill my brother. He was the strongest and wisest among us. We would listen to his words and lead the people through the cold winter again and again... That's how it should have been, until you were born."
"My nephew, Neos!"
"You always have too many strange ideas. It would be fine if you just spoke them quietly, but why did you tell your father that you wanted our people to leave the cave, like those barbarians from afar?"
Silence.
Neos simply stared at the corpse in the pool of blood.
He wasn't angry. He just trembled, his whole body shaking, his mind completely blank.
He wasn't killed.
The uncle who murdered his father became the new leader.
He simply exiled Neos, ordering him to leave the cave without food, without even fire.
To let him stumble through the long night.
...
...
"Embankment."
"Earth ridge."
Adam cut thick branches with a stone axe, sharpened them simply, and stuck them into the ground.
It was a wooden fence. A relatively simple fence. Extremely fragile. Fire or a pack of wild beasts could destroy it.
But it was a demonstration. If you could make a wooden fence, why not use the bones of prey, or heavy stones?
As a result, the ribs and leg bones of large prey were raised into terrifying walls; huge stones that required no processing, or carefully constructed stones, formed more permanent boundaries.
Even as an offering to the tribal leaders, a better idea emerged: "trench + wooden fence" — dig a shallow ditch, pile the excavated earth on one side of the ditch, and then stick wooden stakes into the mound.
This was the original defense system.
Adam knew.
It could only withstand night attacks from small and medium-sized beasts (such as wolves and hyenas), not large-scale warfare.
But large-scale wars shouldn't start in the Stone Age, right?
The cause of war in ancient times was resources.
When population explosion and limited resources collided, competition was inevitable. The classic contradiction between man and land would inevitably arise.
And the people of the Stone Age were exactly like that.
If you worked hard enough, you could gather enough wild fruits; if you were brave enough, you could hunt enough beasts.
Not to mention the outbreak of war—one tribe might not see another for decades, or even centuries.
This was also the reason Adam wasn't in a hurry to research military technology.
There would never be a group that stopped gathering, hunting, and preparing fuel for winter just to spend a lot of time and energy fighting another tribe that was also struggling, right?
Even the emperors of the feudal age didn't have such power, let alone the tribal leaders in this dark and obscure age.
So there was no reason to worry about distant wars.
First, turn your gaze back to the ground beneath your feet, to obtain enough nutrients from the earth.
Like this ridge
This was the first humble fold that humanity had folded with the skin of the earth.
It wasn't architecture, but the initial birthmark left on the earth's body by the concepts of "farming" and "territory."
The material was also the earth itself.
It was enough to use a stone shovel, a wooden stick, or even just hands to pile up or dig out soil and turf.
It looked like a slightly raised ridge, or a combination of a shallow ditch and a low mound, surrounding the settlement—low and long.
"Use water like fire."
Adam laid out the plan to the crowd: where rain was abundant, the ridge was a drainage bank; in arid areas, ridges were miniature dams that intercepted precious water.
Although Stone Age people didn't recognize the function of ridges, the instinct to survive allowed them to learn to store water.
The rain of the warm summer, and the ice and snow of the cold winter, would be stored in dug trenches or pits.
Of course, smaller groups didn't have such concerns.
"I'm not just asking you to store water."
Adam planted a seed of a certain plant in the soil and said meaningfully, "One day, our footprints will cover every inch of the land, and the race will prosper greatly."
"At that moment, there won't be enough food."
"No matter how generous the earth is, it cannot endure blind demands. We must learn to give back, and agriculture is our inevitable choice."
[Slash-and-burn cultivation]
The agricultural species were arranged on the ridges—this was the embryo of the earliest ridge farming technology.
It was an important turning point in human destiny—just an inconspicuous earth ridge, but it marked the transition from "taking from nature" (hunter-gatherer) to "consulting with nature" (agricultural settlement).
It meant that, for the first time, the land was regarded as a resource that could be divided, exploited, and passed on.
Watching the people of the tribe in a daze,
Adam's heart couldn't help but tremble. In his mind, it seemed as if the image of the future was swirling: ancestors would pile up earth ridges with handfuls of soil, and there would be drops of sweat, fragments of stone tools, and charcoal embers... People would not only stay here, but would also shape its landscape.
The Stone Age ridge would become the first draft of "permanence," clumsily written on the earth.
Instead of trying to point to the sky like a monument, it humbly clung to the ground and became part of the earth. It said:
"We will be here, slowly, in a long conversation with the land and the seasons. This bulge is the first round of our conversation."
When the first earth ridge was intentionally piled up, people ceased to be merely inhabitants of the land and became the most basic accomplices in shaping the landscape.
If the fence defined the ownership of space, then the earth ridge laid the trajectory of time.
It marked agriculture, inheritance, and year-after-year expectation.
It was the most humble, yet deepest, connection of civilization's root system, deeply embedded in the soil.
This was the eleventh year of Adam's time travel.
He had already begun working on the cornerstone of human civilization—the longest goal.
Waves of golden wheat would appear on the land. People would be further from hunger, and more people could be saved from mere survival.
They would have time to think about the fate of humanity, and civilization could be born from the stupefying darkness earlier.
By the way,
There was a young man who had lost everything, from a distant place, an outcast from another tribe.
The kind of...
Hungry lamb yearning for grass, life in darkness calling for light.
He staggered towards this land, as if an invisible fate was destined to bring him here, to this newborn tribe, to meet this man who was a little special.
"Ah..."
The young man, Neos, his dry lips moved up and down.
He was very hungry and thirsty, weakly leaning against a boulder, ignoring the guards around him, and stared blankly at the man in the center of the crowd.
And the man, without hesitation, asked for a piece of dried meat from those around him and approached.
This was the first time Neos met Adam.