You provide this as evidence of a civilization?
Where’s the philosophy, the art, the sciences?
Egyptians were not Negroes, by the way, no more than dark skinned Indians are.
Skin coloration is but an aspect of racial characteristics.
Guns Germs and Steel explains the environmental conditions that were taken advantage of but does not explain the developmental course necessary to take advantage of them or how taking advantage of them may have affected these isolated groups.
Human groups are pressured out of their primordial environments in Africa.
Their weakness is forced to adapt to inhospitable environments or less ideal ones, for them.
Genetic isolation begins as groups are occupying pockets of environments they can survive in, leaving large gaps of unoccupied territories.
Some, if not most, perish. But then they figure out a way to take advantage of certain elements in their environment.
Those that do survive and flourish.
Isn’t this an intelligence leap?
That certain animals existed within an area and that they could be domesticated is the luck of the draw, but that they were didn’t happen automatically nor did these animals willingly volunteer their services nor did these plants willingly volunteer their crops.
There had to be an ingenuity leap, caused by the pressures to survive.
Diamond begins his narration when these environmental factors were harvested but does not explain the time in between these migrations occurred and the time agriculture began.
Humans migrated out of Africa long before any first civilization began or agriculture emerged.
It is during this time that genetic isolation must have diversified the human species into the subgroupings we know today.
Granted the differences are slight but over time they had a profound effect, didn’t they?
We may even say that the differences between the homo sapient and other primates isn’t that great either. But it is large enough to cause a profound difference.
and the differences between the Homo Sapient and the Neanderthal must have been even less.
I would suspect that all species diversity happened along these lines.
Sub-groupings are pushed out of ideal environments. These weaker, defeated ones are forced into less hospitable environments.
Most die off but one or two manage to survive due to a mutation, a unique characteristic which offers an advantage.
Adversity forces growth.
Which makes the excuses offered concerning adversity as a limiting factor all the more absurd and childish.
The do or die method is one nature uses continuously.
The challenges result in evolutionary changes. Comfort results in evolutionary stagnation. See the crocodile. It didn’t have to change and so it didn’t.
If anything racism and sexism should have produced growth.
But I digress.
This characteristic, which offered an advantage, is then propagated. The weak are now adapting to take advantage of the circumstances in their new environment. Those that cannot die off. those that can adapt and flourish.
They change further, as genetic isolation and in-breeding splinters the group from its ancestor, who having never left its ideal environment, didn’t have to change much.
Given enough time a new species emerges which is completely different than the original. Less time and a breed or a sub-category emerges which can still breed with the original group because the splintering wasn’t given enough time to cause a complete separation.