I was watching this video showing this world map for every year of history:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymI5Uv5cGU4
For most of the video, large parts of the world aren't inhabited by any civilization.
- Is this because people didn't live in these areas or because they didn't organize into a civilization?
- If it's the latter, why didn't they organize into a civilization?
- Why didn't people in neighboring civilizations expand to take over these areas?
Even though this is not really a strictly historical topic, it's an easy one. The answer is: because this video is silly. Even if this video was renamed to read "History of Bronze Age Civilizations," it is still wrong. Maybe the creators relied on wikipedia, or had a bot that filtered "civilizations" by number of words per wikipedia article, or had some other arbitrary data source. Very glaringly absent is the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Anatolia, just by way of example, or the vast Corded Ware Culture.
There were of course human beings living all over the "white" areas on this map. There were Neolithic and then Chalcolithic communities in every every corner of the world, some of course more "successful" than others: in the Near East, in Europe, in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Steppe, East Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Some disappeared or were victimized by invasion of later, Bronze Age societies. Some coalesced or were absorbed by new societies generated during the Bronze Age. Every case in every corner of the map is different.
"Organize into a civilization" is not so easy to elucidate. What does that mean? What makes a civilization? Agriculture? Societal stratification? Religion? Poetry? Architecture? Metal-working? Technological innovation? Conquest? Minimum number of speakers of a language? Dozens, maybe hundreds of pre-Bronze societies showed evidence of these "achievements," mixing and matching, some more "successful" than others in this or that.