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Most facets of Western European society and culture are borrowed (or stolen) from other peoples “Peoples who were operating in the Stone Age/as Hunter-gatherer societies before invasion by industrialized societies routinely master industrial era toolMost facets of Western European society and culture are borrowed (or stolen) from other peoples “Peoples who were operating in the Stone Age/as Hunter-gatherer societies before invasion by industrialized societies routinely master industrial era tools when given the opportunity to do so” Some facets of cognition (eg ability to form a mental map) seem more advanced - cognition very much does what you need it to 😂 Evolutionary argument for why Western Europeans maybe are stupider - what we’ve survived has been mostly disease (and not so much war or predators or environment) vs eg the New Guineans that have survived are the ones who are best at conquering their envt/smarter than rivals etc + childhood development argument Note - political systems come first, then irrigation etc (not the reverse). Impt to get progression of early settled societies specifically right otherwise you Mia-assume things
“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among their respective environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” - he summarized it for us 😂 Subject matter is history but approach is science (esp. historical sciences)
One argument for differences in distribution of large animals: in Africa & Eurasia large mammals had been evolving with humans for generations, but animals in Australia & Americas hadn’t encountered humans until modern humans arrived. Perhaps humans caused mass extinctions in both places (America’s used to have many large mammals! E.g. lions, elephants, sloths, etc.) The dates line up, there is debate, but would be a little weird/inconsistent that all the animals should die of “climate changes” when they’d lived through 3-4 major ones already. And that they should go extinct across all environments at once.
Polynesia as a “medium sized experiment” w/ Maori invading and slaughtering Moriori on Chatham Islands (coming from NZ...continental fragment) as small exit within it
Maori and Moriori had only been developing as separate societies for a few centuries- they had come from the same ancestral Maori peoples who were farmers - one interesting thing: they both came from a people that *had already* developed farming. Moriori abandoned that b/c it wasn’t suitable, Maori elaborated. Huge effect of envt on course of society
Polynesian island had vastly diverse geography, ecology, geology, topography that all influenced how societies developed
Conscription of labor - Easter island 30 ton stone statues - smaller than pyramids only because there were fewer people
Perhaps can be extrapolated to humans globally?
Still very difficult to come up with simple explanations for the inequalities that arose among peoples...you could come up with a reasonable explanation for why any of them would have amassed wealth, technology, and power.
Africa - head start, 5M more years of separate proto human existence & likely where all modern humans originated & migrated from around 100,000 years ago (they would wipe out advances that happened elsewhere). Plus genetic diversity...couldn’t that mean they one more variably creative?
BUT what does head start mean?
Interesting discussion of quite how *fast* spread of modern humans across the Americas happened (~1000 years to get to Patagonia) - so time to fill up a continent is relatively brief so then it’s not that much of a head start
Head start in adapting to local conditions? Yes for the most extreme (high Arctic...9000 years after North America). Everywhere else very rapid tho. Maori discovered all worthwhile stone sources on Nz within less than a century & only a few centuries to spread and differentiate into vastly diverse societies
Greater area? Environmental diversity? (Americas over Africa perhaps)
Eurasia - largest continent. Second longest occupation. Much closer to Africa if you don’t count proto humans. Upper Paleolithic flowering of art and tools?
Australia/New Guinea - desert, isolated, occupied much later...wouldn’t development be slow? It’s not tho! Earliest watercraft, creating cave paintings at least as early as cro magnons in Europe. New envts of Indonesia- rapid adaptation and expansion. “Hitherto undocumented golden age of human population explosions.” Did these cycles of expansion, colonization and adaptation contribute to humans “great leap forward” ~50000 years ago? Then, it filtered back to Eurasia and Africa...
Really can’t make a prediction b/c there is a strong case for any of them.
Biggest popn shift of modern times = colonization of new world by Europeans
Atacualpa’s capture at Cajamarca Only eyewitness documentation come from Spaniards...
Writing gives body of knowledge about foreign peoples without having personally encountered them
Guns, germs, steel are proximate causes But what are ultimate causes?
One acre can feed many more (10-100X as many) herders/farmers than hunter gatherers Animals -> plant advantage -> animal advantages
Shorter birth interval (half) Store surplus Bureaucracy
Trend toward food production is an evolution not a snap decision
What drove the trend? It’s not an obvious evolution... Wouldn’t have been a goal as they didn’t know (farming not obviously easier or more productive) Many Hunter gatherer societies (in envts similar to places where food production arose) chose not to adopt. Eg Cali & PNE is US (plus they traded w/ farmers) Hunter gatherering isn’t necessarily mobile (really only seen as the norm cause modern Hunter gatherers are on the worst/least productive land) Hunter gatherers may intensively manage the land (aboriginals with deformed swamps eg or yams in NZ)
Factors that drive evolution are many and not obviously the same everywhere. Food production may have originally been an extra emergency larder What food is nutritive? Tastes good? Is culturally appropriate? Brings me prestige? What lifestyle is approved/disapproved?
Why overall trend? Change in food availability (push) or climate that makes farming more attractive (pull) E.g. large game goes extinct, weather is better for food production Better knowledge base makes transition easier Positive feedback loop btwn increased food production & increased population Competitive advantage (thru numbers) of food producers
Wild almonds are lethal... Some wild trees can’t synthesize amygdilin Why didn’t we domesticate oaks or hickory? Perhaps “slow growth and fast squirrels”
Obvious wheat (Mediterranean climate, annual, big seeds, hermaphroditic selfers with potential to cross pollinate, high protein content) Vs. corn (teosinte = tiny, totally not obvious)
Even more important: domesticable large mammals
Big 13(?) - of these almost all were in Eurasia...why? Anna Karenina principle: “all happy marriages are alike, but all unhappy marriages are unique” -> you have to meet LOTS of criteria all at once to form a happy marriage between humans and a candidate for domestication - diet: conversion from food biomass to animal biomass is vastly inefficient. Takes about 10000 lbs of corn to make a 1000 lb cow (no large carnivores have been domesticated) - ability to breed in captivity (some animals hate to be watched...e.g. cheetah w/ long ranging courtship chase or South American wild camel with amazing wool) - temperament: some animals are way meaner than others (you’d be crazy to try to keep an adult grizzly or hippo) - this is even true of wild different variants of domesticated animals like zebras vs horses (they bite and don’t let go, causing more injuries to zoo keepers yearly than lions) - skittishness: some animals bolt at the drop of a pin...it would be ridiculous to try to herd them or keep them in pens cause they’d be constantly throwing themselves at the walls - features of social structure - dominance hierarchy: every animal knows it’s place, so it’s easy for humans to take the top of the hierarchy and have animals follow, plus they don’t fight amongst each other - overlapping territories: you have to be able to pen animals from different herds together without them killing each other - herds: they don’t mind being crowded together - sheer numbers: Eurasia is ecologically most diverse, didn’t have mass extinctions 13000 years ago (maybe b/c animals had been cohabitating with early humans who were worse hunters for longer than Americas or Australia-New Zealand), and in general had more Anna Karenina animals for all above reasons - Certainly not down to cultural differences - rapid and skillful adoption when domesticates arrive - global human penchant for keeping pets - failure to domesticate any other large mammals (w/ economic value) after 4500 years ago
Orientation of continent’s axes & local topology -> different rates of spread of food production -> differences in shape/trajectory of societies -> differences in spread of certain technologies like writing/wheels
- E/W way better than N/S because of stark differences in amt of light, temperature, weather based on latitude but not longitude - Getting suitable crops to somewhere that might be a “bread basket” could be impossible b/c they’d have to cross places totally unsuitable - Local barriers like differences in altitude & climate also play a role
Wow. The main use of ancient writing was ”to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (referring to Sumerian cuneiform)
Developmental trajectory of alphabetic forms of writing seems to have been the opposite
Not a coincidence that writing evolves independently only in the societies that were the first to evolve food production in their respective hemispheres (Mesopotamia, China, Mexico)
Note: it’s not just popn density needed for development of diseases & writing but *time* as a dense (& in the case of writing stratified) society (that is writing that’s truly original —-most civilizations around the world were borrowing from neighbors! Either thru value diffusion or thru direct [blueprint] copying)
It’s interesting...in the cause & effect relationships among increased food production, increased population size/density & increasingly complex societal organization he’s arguing autocatalysis...this would suggest that for every environment humans find themselves inhabiting there’s essentially an “equilibrium” state that the specific population would reach. Equilibrium could of course be shunted based on interconnectedness among populations, although there would (by the argument he’s making) be a limit to how far that shunt could take a given population. It would be set ultimately by the environment it inhabits — ie, equilibrium is fundamentally & most importantly influenced by raw environmental material that is by nature eventually exhaustible. This seems a difficult if not impossible theory to prove at a general level (I could imagine specific cases at the margins), but is at least intuitive
HUMANS ARE LIKE ANTS Smallest populations can’t sustain themselves indefinitely in isolation Small populations don’t develop modern technologies...more
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