Pratique du Shadowing: Why Did Human Progress Explode 10,000 Years Ago After 300,000 Years of Nothing? (11 Min Explainer) - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
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234 phrases
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1
Look at your hands for a second.
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Right now, they're holding a screen that can reach almost anyone on Earth.
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Later today, they'll open a door and turn on a light.
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They'll pick up food that somebody else grew for you.
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Now picture the exact same pair of hands 50 ,000 years ago.
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They're shaping a stone blade with a few careful strikes.
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Then they push a bone needle through an animal hide.
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And at night, they sit by the fire and paint a red animal on a rock wall.
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Those hands could make almost anything.
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And the brain behind them was the same brain you have right now.
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Your brain is probably telling you they were primitive.
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They weren't.
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They had fire and tools and even art.
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But still, our species went hundreds of thousands of years without building a single town.
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Then, about 10 ,000 years ago, people started farming.
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Towns and cities followed fast.
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Then came writing.
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Now, rewind from today.
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Go back 30 years, and the screen in your hand is gone.
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Another hundred years, and you're reading by candlelight.
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Keep going to 6 ,000 years ago, and nobody on Earth can read a single word.
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At 12 ,000 years, there isn't one farm anywhere on the planet.
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There aren't any towns, either.
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Every human alive is out in the wild finding their own food.
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Keep rewinding all the way back to 300 ,000 years ago, and you'll see the same guy doing the same stuff the whole time.
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He wakes up and looks for something to eat.
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A deer runs past, and he chases it and misses.
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Then he spends a while poking a beetle with a stick.
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Eventually, he finds some berries and calls it a day.
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And one day, he just dies.
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Then his kid shows up and does the exact same thing.
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That went on for almost 300 ,000 years.
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Then, in one tiny slice of time, at the very end, we built almost everything you see around you.
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So how did human progress suddenly explode in just the last 10 ,000 years?
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First, imagine you're living his life.
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You're in a group of about 30 people.
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And one woman in your group makes the best fishing nets anyone has ever seen.
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She knows which plant to use and exactly how tight to tie every knot.
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The kids watch her sometimes.
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Nobody has learned it all yet.
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Then one winter, she gets sick and never gets better.
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That spring, your group walks down to the river.
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Everyone remembers her nets.
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Nobody remembers how she made them.
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So, the nets are gone.
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And so are the fish.
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Now imagine your school worked like that.
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Your math teacher dies and math disappears from the whole town.
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That was life for almost every group on Earth.
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Every skill lived in one or two heads.
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And every funeral could erase one.
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It may have happened to a whole island.
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About 10 ,000 years ago, rising seas cut Tasmania off from Australia.
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A few thousand people were left on their own.
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Over the next few thousand years, their bone tools disappeared.
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Then around 3 ,800 years ago, fish vanished from their meals.
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Some researchers think a small group just couldn't hold on to everything it knew.
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Others think the people simply chose a different life.
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Either way, the danger is the same.
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Knowledge dies when too few people carry it.
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So why didn't they just get bigger?
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Because everything you own has to fit on your back.
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You follow the food and move camp every few weeks, so you can't keep a heavy grinding stone.
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You can't store food for the winter, and the wild land around you can only feed a few dozen mouths.
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Grow past that and there isn't enough to eat.
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So why not just stop walking?
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Let's try it.
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Your family finds the perfect valley.
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There's a river and wild grain on every slope, so you stay.
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Your kids grow up knowing every tree.
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Then the winters start getting longer.
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The grain comes back thinner every year, your kids aren't even grown yet, and the valley is already frozen and empty.
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So you pack up and start walking again.
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You're probably thinking that was just bad luck.
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It wasn't.
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The whole planet was swinging back and forth.
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Scientists drilled deep into the ice in Greenland.
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Every year of snow left a thin layer there.
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Those layers go back more than 100 ,000 years.
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So take a guess how fast the temperature could jump back then.
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Most people say a few degrees over a thousand years.
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The ice says 10 degrees or more in just a few decades.
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That's like the weather where you live turning into a different climate in your own lifetime.
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And it didn't happen once.
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It happened around 25 times.
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Even the air was against them.
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Back then, it held much less carbon dioxide.
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That's the gas plants feed on.
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So wild plants grew weaker and thinner than they do today.
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The planet punished anyone who tried to stay.
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So people kept walking.
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Walking kept the group small.
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And small groups kept losing what they knew.
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Then 11 ,000 years ago, it stopped.
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The last big cold snap of the ice age ended.
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In Greenland, the temperature jumped to a new level in about 40 years.
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And then the swinging calmed down.
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A study from 2018 found that temperature swings around the world became about four times smaller.
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You're living inside that calm right now.
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Every summer you've ever had is part of it.
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Go back to your valley, now it stays green for your whole life.
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It stays green for your grandkids too.
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Staying put finally stops being a gamble.
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So here's your second guess.
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How many times do you think humans invented farming?
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Most people say once.
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The real answer is more than ten.
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The Middle East started with wheat and barley.
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China started with rice and Mexico with corn.
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The Andes grew potatoes.
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And New Guinea grew bananas and taro.
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None of these people ever met and every one of them started after the Ice Age ended.
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Strangers on different continents don't invent the same thing by accident.
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The weather changed for all of them at once.
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But some people didn't wait for farming at all.
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After the Ice Age, the hills of the Middle East filled up with wild wheat and barley.
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Nobody planted it.
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It just grew there on its own.
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And it grew so thick that you could live off it without farming at all.
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In the 1960s, a scientist named Jack Harlan put that to the test.
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He went to the hills of southeastern
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Turkey where wild wheat still grows today.
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He cut it with a sickle made of stone.
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In one hour, he gathered about two and a half kilos of grain.
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He worked out
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that a family working for just three weeks could gather more grain than they could eat in a whole year
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Now picture what that means for your group a whole year of food in three weeks
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You don't have to chase animals across the land anymore.
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You don't have to move camp every few weeks
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You can stay right next to the wild fields
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and you're not the only ones other groups find the same fields and stay too
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For the first time hundreds of hunters are living near each other
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and a crowd that big can do things a small group never could
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About 12 ,000 years ago, people in southern
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Turkey dragged giant stones up a hill.
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They carved them into huge pillars, shaped like a T.
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Then they covered them with foxes and snakes and vultures.
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The place is called Gobekli Tepe.
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So, here's your third guess.
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How heavy is one of the big pillars?
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Some weigh around 10 tons.
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That's about as heavy as six cars.
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Your old group of 30 could never move a stone like that.
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Hundreds of people working together could.
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And these people still weren't farmers.
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Every animal bone found there came from a wild animal, but feeding a crowd
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that big takes a lot of grain Archaeologists found thousands of grinding stones on
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that hill and the easiest way to get even more grain is to plant it yourself
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So staying came first and farming came right after not every expert agrees on that order
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But either way people were now staying in one place for good and staying changed the math
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Remember how the wild land around you could only feed a few dozen people a field of planted wheat on
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that same land can feed far more so food stops being the limit, and your group no longer has to stay small.
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Go back to your valley one last time.
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This time, you never leave.
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You keep a heavy grinding stone and fill a storehouse with grain.
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More of your babies survive.
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Your group of 30 turns into a village of hundreds.
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And remember the woman with the nets?
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Now she teaches her trick to 50 people.
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She could die tomorrow, and the nets would still be there next spring.
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And it's not just her.
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A kid in your village can now learn from dozens of people instead of a handful.
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Every skill has backups now.
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One funeral can't wipe it out anymore.
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Villages kept growing into towns.
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About 9 ,000 years ago, a town in Turkey called Çatalhöyük held thousands of people.
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The houses were packed so tight that people walked across the rooftops.
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They climbed down a ladder to get home, and they stayed for generations.
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One wall there was plastered over more than 450 times.
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That many people meant some could do just one job all day.
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Picture the first person in your village who never hunts and never harvests.
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Every single day, they just make blades.
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A few years later, they're better at it than anyone who ever lived before them.
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And they pass every trick they found down to their kids.
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Soon, the towns were trading.
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Obsidian is a black volcanic glass that cuts sharper than steel.
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Pieces from a volcano in central
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Turkey turned up in villages in Jordan, 800 kilometers away.
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Picture a trader walking into your village with a lump of shiny black glass.
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He brings news along with it.
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Maybe a better way to store grain or a new way to build a roof.
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Your village copies it.
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Then the next village copies yours.
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Ideas started jumping from place to place, like a chain.
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Then, the biggest towns turned into the first cities.
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About 5 ,000 years ago, a city called Uruk in what's now Iraq held tens of thousands of people.
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Your group of 30 had grown into a crowd bigger than many towns today.
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And a crowd that big had a brand new problem.
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Nobody could remember who owned what or who owed what to whom.
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So people started pressing little marks into wet clay to keep count.
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They were counting grain and sheep and beer.
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That was the birth of writing.
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One of those tablets records a huge delivery of barley for a brewery.
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At the bottom is a signature.
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It reads, Kusim.
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It may be the oldest name of a real person we can still read.
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So the first name in history might belong to a guy counting beer.
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Now knowledge could outlive the person who knew it.
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And that changed the speed of everything.
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Each generation could now start where the last one stopped, instead of starting from scratch.
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It took our species 300 ,000 years to build its first city.
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Getting from that city to the screen in your hand took only about 5 ,000 more.
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Now here's the crazy part.
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You're not any smarter than that guy with the beetle.
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Drop yourself into his world with just your bare hands and you'd be him.
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A student in London named Thomas Thwaites once tried to build a cheap toaster completely from scratch.
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He traveled to old mines for iron and copper and melted the rock down himself.
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It took him nine months.
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He plugged it in and it started melting after about five seconds.
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Now think about the phone in your hand.
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Nobody on earth knows how to build one alone.
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It takes miners and chemists and chip factories and millions of people who each know one small piece.
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That guy with the beetle had nobody to build on.
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You've got 10 ,000 years of people stacked under you.
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Nothing was getting erased anymore.
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And progress exploded.
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But there was a catch.
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The first farmers came out shorter than the hunters before them.
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A 2022 study of skeletons across Europe found they were about 4 centimeters shorter than their genes say they should have been.
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In Chattel Hoyuk, rotten teeth went up from all that grain, and infections spread as the town got crowded.
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So, was it worth it?
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For them, probably not.
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For you, it's the reason you're holding that screen.
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Now look at your hands again.
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For 300 ,000 years, hands just like yours made nets and blades and paintings.
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And again and again, those skills were buried with the people who knew them.
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Then, the ice stopped swinging.
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People stayed in one place long enough to teach each other.
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And for the first time, what one pair of hands figured out got passed to the next.
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The screen you're holding is 10 ,000 years of that.
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So is the light above you.
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So is the food somebody grew for you.
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Every one of them could have died in one bad winter, just like the Nets.
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But this time, somebody remembered.
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Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette leçon d’expression orale s’appuie sur la vidéo « Why Did Human Progress Explode 10,000 Years Ago After 300,000 Years of Nothing? ». Les mots qui reviennent le plus souvent : grain, town, wild. Cette vidéo contient 234 phrases et 2241 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 10:46. Le locuteur parle vite, environ 208 mots par minute : attendez-vous à des liaisons et à des sons réduits. 85 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais ; le reste mérite d’être vu avant de commencer.
Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo
15 mots de la vidéo à retenir, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| grain nom | /ɡɹeɪn/ | grain |
| swing verbe | /ˈswɪŋ/ | osciller, se balancer |
| wheat nom | /ˈwiːt/ | blé |
| bone nom | /boʊn/ | os |
| thin adjectif | /ˈθɪn/ | mince |
| blade nom | /bleɪd/ | lame |
| mathematics nom | /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/ | mathématiques |
| grind verbe | /ˈɡɹaɪnd/ | moudre, piler |
| beetle nom | /ˈbiːtəl/ | scarabée |
| trick nom | /ˈtɹɪk/ | tour |
| chase verbe | /t͡ʃeɪs/ | poursuivre, chasser |
| skill nom | /skɪl/ | habileté, compétence |
| layer nom | /ˈleɪ̯ɚ/ | couche |
| funeral nom | /ˈfju.nəɹ.əl/ | funérailles, obsèques |
| hunter nom | /ˈhʌntɚ/ | chien de chasse |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| go back verbe | rentrer, retourner | |
| calm down verbe | se calmer, s'apaiser | |
| come back verbe | revenir | |
| come out verbe | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | sortir |
| figure out verbe | cerner | |
| grow up verbe | grandir | |
| pick up verbe | soulever | |
| show up verbe | apparaître, se montrer se pointer |
Des phrases à répéter
Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :
- Another hundred years, and you're reading by candlelight.
- First, imagine you're living his life.
- You're probably thinking that was just bad luck.
- You're living inside that calm right now.
- How many times do you think humans invented farming?
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait | were left · aren't even grown · is called |
| Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une chose | anyone who tried · anyone who ever · person who knew |
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | has ever seen · has learned · you've ever had |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 35 contractions et formes réduites, comme you're, can't, didn't. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « th »: thin /ˈθɪn/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, thick /θɪk/
- Les sons « sh » et « zh »: sharp /ʃɑɹp/, infection /ɪnˈfɛkʃən/, sheep /ˈʃiːp/, punish /ˈpʌnɪʃ/, vanish /ˈvænɪʃ/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, obsidian /əbˈsɪd.i.ən/
Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :
- /h/ — il se souffle, il n’est pas muet: hunter /ˈhʌntɚ/, handful /ˈhæn(d)fʊl/, harvest /ˈhɑɹ.vəst/, storehouse /ˈstɔː(ɹ)haʊs/
- /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: chase /t͡ʃeɪs/, scratch /skɹæt͡ʃ/, gene /d͡ʒiːn/, chip /t͡ʃɪp/, stranger /ˈstɹeɪnd͡ʒɚ/
- /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: grain /ɡɹeɪn/, grind /ˈɡɹaɪnd/, trick /ˈtɹɪk/, funeral /ˈfju.nəɹ.əl/, scratch /skɹæt͡ʃ/
Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo
- Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
- Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
- Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme grain, swing, wheat.
Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?
Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.