Creating a First Civilization

In class, we were given the project of creating/ inventing our very own first civilization. While many might think it is something that comes very easily, there were many factors that we had to consider while making our civilization. Just coming up with the area in which it would be placed in was difficult. We had to think of things such as to what environment would be the most convenient to our civilization based on it's fertility, access, and available resources, primarily water. We also had to think of what we would have to face in such environments. Would this civilization be affected by hurricanes? Could it receive significant damage if it was hit by an earthquake? If a disease came to the community, what type of resources would the civilization have to be able to overcome it? Were floods a possibility?

Considering the fact that as a primitive, first civilization, it possibly had no real way of accessing water easily as we do now, my group thought the best way to have access would be for this civilization to be placed near some kind of body of water, preferably a fresh body of water. We chose a river because unlike a lake, it has a constant flowage of water passing by which would be good for us since it would serve as a place where we could bathe and also get clean water out of without risk of having to ingest what was used to be cleaned and also avoiding the ingestion of dirty water due to accumulation of animal's waste.

With the idea of a river, we then came to trees and vegetation if any. We thought of various possibilities and settled on a lush green forest, to be precise, a rain forest. It is said that the rain forests are one of the most diverse places both when it comes to plants and also animals/ insects. This would be a positive thing for us because it would provide our civilization with a great amount of food already there, it could avoid the need to farm, and to storage large amounts of food. This doesnt mean that we decided it wouldn't farm. There are many things that can go wrong with the forest's food so farming would be something needed, not in a large amount but more of a small amount in which way the civilization wouldn't have to be dependent upon the environment's production patterns and possible tragedies/disasters.

All in all, we used this type of critical thinking to come up with our civilization. While in this process, i wondered, Would it be as simple a thing to just die out and fail as a civilization if those settling in the area, who planned to grow later as a civilization, made the wrong decision or forgot to factor something in while choosing a place? Did this happen often, or where there some that found ways to overcome their mistakes?