PLOS ONE journal has published a study regarding ancient cities and a full comparison between them and the modern ones. The results were unbelievable and it offers a great new perspective of our lives today.
Firstly, in terms of size and density, the ancient cities have been found to be bigger and denser than the ones humankind lives in today, making it possible for the residents to work differently together, to have more possibilities to develop and expose their entrepreneurial ideas and become more efficient in time.
Experts at La Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder –have studied the ancient and modern cities, temples and houses in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic Basin, gathering information and drawing valuable conclusions. The analyzed structural dimensions have helped estimating the productivity within a household and they found out how the race for building monuments influenced the populations and densities. There has been a certain purpose that the experts wanted to fulfill and it has regarded the functionality of old settlements in comparison with the new ones and if the ancient and the current settlements are similar in nature.
Researcher Scott Ortman, from Department of Anthropology of University of Colorado Boulder, has stated that:
“Our findings indicate the fundamental processes behind the emergence of scaling in modern cities have structured human settlement organization throughout human history.”
Additionally, the findings prove that the contemporary urban systems are based on a continuance, a perpetuity in time of the settlement systems of a smaller-scale that are famous from the historical and archaeological researches that have existed until the present time.
He also said that the human kind present today in the cities has been raised on a steady diet telling us that the modern world is very different nowadays in comparison with the past, thanks to capitalism, industrialization and democracy. However, their findings show that “the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic pattern in modern cities precede all that.”
Another amazing discovery made by the scientists has been that the number of people grew along with the development of monuments. Also, when private wealth was easier to earn, people made more children that were able to enjoy this kind of life. As a conclusion, the house area distribution was closely related to the income phenomena, which is obviously something that happens today aswell.
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