[HN Gopher] A quantitative test of Diamond's axis of orientation...
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A quantitative test of Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis
Author : gradus_ad
Score : 65 points
Date : 2024-02-15 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| bradrn wrote:
| Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.34
| lettergram wrote:
| One thing that's clear and matches what I have read --
|
| (1) europe is surrounded by a large body of water (Mediterranean
| in south, Baltic & English Channel to north), enabling fast
| travel.
|
| (2) Europe is extremely isolated geographically. Mountains,
| rivers & oceans isolated many cultural groups.
|
| (3) the isolated nature of Europe, combined with access to mass
| transit (once sailing become prevalent) enabled technological
| expansion and competition.
|
| (4) combined with massive competition from isolated cultures,
| once sailing was achieved, Africa and the Americas enabled
| massive raw resource inflows - creating growth and abundance
|
| Eurasia in contrast consolidated around just a handful of
| cultures and often had an abundance of food and limited fast
| travel (via rivers & oceans) throughout history. This makes for
| less completion and although the stability enabled technological
| advancement and massive works. It also limited variation in ideas
| ajross wrote:
| Point #2 is exactly the opposite of Diamond's hypothesis. The
| contention is that the broad east/west alignment of all the
| major population centers in Eurasia meant that trade of ideas
| and technologies was _easier_ than the north /south travel
| required to reach other cultures.
|
| The point here being that going across latitudes is harder
| because you're moving through many climates and water bodies
| with different equipment and technology requirements to pass
| through them. A single caravan might get to Persia using the
| same pack animals and equipment with which it left Tibet, but
| that's not possible if you're trying to get to Kenya or
| Australia.
| nurbl wrote:
| It's been a long time since I read the book, but I do think
| he made the point that part of what gave Europe a military
| edge was the fact of lots of natural geographical borders
| like rivers and mountains, giving rise to lots of small
| kingdoms instead of one big one. So there were constant
| conflicts, driving innovation.
|
| And the thing about latitudes I think applies more to
| mobility of things like crops than to human travel, since you
| need to cross climate zones.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I'm curious how that's different from the Native Americans
| who, regardless of their Nobel savage portrayal in media,
| were constantly at war with each other yet failed to
| develop any weapons nearly powerful enough to repel the
| Europeans.
| nurbl wrote:
| As I remember it, a major thesis of the book (which I
| recommend, it's a fun read!) is that Europeans had the
| benefit of several, mainly geographical factors. This was
| just one of them.
| sampo wrote:
| > trade of ideas and technologies was _easier_ than the north
| /south travel required to reach other cultures
|
| It was mostly about the exchange of domesticated animals and
| crop plants. You can start using crop plants you got from
| your neighbors, if the plants stay in the same climate zone,
| so east-west movement.
| ajross wrote:
| That was a stronger variant of the same hypothesis. And
| indeed it explains the nearly uniform agriculture/husbandry
| recipes in Eurasia. But it doesn't explain why at the dawn
| of the renaissance all these cultures were producing
| similar crucible steel (from India) or making gunpowder
| (China).
|
| Obviously the book goes farther still, I wasn't trying to
| summarize the whole thing. The "germs" angle matters too,
| the pervasive Eurasian trade networks meant that acquired
| immunity could be traded like technology, leading to a
| Eurasian "fortress of disease" that prevented immigration
| but did nothing to deter colonialism.
| shakow wrote:
| > Europe is extremely isolated geographically.
|
| Is it? The great plains from Germany to the Urals and the
| Pontic Steppe have both been crossed one way or the others by
| many population groups among the millenia.
| ben_w wrote:
| On the other hand, the Alps were a great defensive barrier
| for Rome (until they weren't). My guess is that all the
| mountainous regions had a similar effect until sufficient
| industry was available to make them easily passable.
| shakow wrote:
| But every continents has mountains. Still, if you take
| France as an example of one of the most "protected"
| European countries (far in the West, surrounded by
| mountains and seas for most of its borders), you can still
| see so many migration waves: - first
| arrival of hominids evolving into Neandertal; - Cro-
| Magnon arriving from the Middle-East; - Bell-beaker
| culture, probably from the Pontic stepp; - Celts
| (maybe from the West, probably from the East); -
| Romans; - the crucible of Northern, Germanic and
| steppe populations (Franks, Saxons, Goths, Wisigoths,
| Alamans, ...) that were the Great Invasions; - Celts
| again in Brittany; - Northern-African incursions and
| the whole Mediterranean melting pot on the southern
| seashores; - All the 20th century immigration waves
| (Poles, White Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Algerians,
| Moroccans, ...); - and probably many others I
| forgot/don't know about.
|
| And even in Antiquity/Middle-Age Italy, you have Gauls and
| Celts in the North (after all, Northern Italy was Cisalpine
| *Gaul*, not Northern Italia), many Italic populations
| (Sabines, Etruscans, Umbrian, ...), a lot of Greek people
| in the South, then the Romans; after them all the
| aforementioned Eastern populations, then the Vikings
| demesnes, then Germanic incursions and settlements, etc.
| cedilla wrote:
| These are just-so-stories that don't really hold up when you
| look closely. Yes, Europe has the Mediterranean that is
| advantageous for travel. But other places also have bodies of
| water, usually more navigable than the channel and less pirate-
| infested than the Mediterranean. Important European trade
| routes didn't really rely on those large bodies of waters.
| Europe isn't isolated at all, except for maybe the Alps and
| only in the winter. Other continents also feature loads and
| loads of different cultures.
|
| Really, what you say is an example for why thinking about human
| development in this way is flawed from the beginning. There are
| no single factors responsible for the course of history.
| Whenever you try to identify some, your view becomes so myopic
| that it ends in these arbitrary Diamond hypotheses that require
| endless explanations for all the obvious exceptions.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I reject this. There are macro affects that are identifiable.
| There may be micros and contrarian examples. But that doesn't
| affect that macro elements influence in that circumstance.
|
| But it's not like the mountains, lack of fast travel etc
| haven't defended while holding back Afghanistan for 3000
| years. You can argue there are a million other issues there
| as well but that doesn't contradict that macro point.
|
| I think you are lost in an attempt to be contrarian where it
| isn't really warranted.
|
| But if you want to argue with me about that ask any soldier.
| cedilla wrote:
| Trying to make a point about Afghanistan as an entity
| across 3000 years is exactly the kind of sillyness these
| analysis leads to.
|
| Yes, there are macros, but the point is that there are
| hundreds of them, they are all interconnected. If you pick
| just one you either make wrong implications (like the silk
| road region Afghanistan being isolated or lacking fast
| travel) or extremely trivial (like mountains being
| advantageous tageous for defenders in war)
| jandrese wrote:
| I think it is more that for best growth you need to be
| accessible for trade over long distances, but not so accessible
| to armies that want to pillage all the lands. This was the
| problem China had, any time civilization gets going you have
| some damn warlord just running around wrecking it all. But even
| when they do consolidate power the empire is too big to
| centrally manage and has to be extremely oppressive to prevent
| the next warlord from repeating the same trick. This stifles
| the economy and retards the growth of technology.
| dosinga wrote:
| re 1) Europe is surrounded by a large body of water -> that is
| true for many continents. In fact being surrounded by water is
| what defines a continent. Arguably Europe less so since it and
| Asia are part of the same land mass. re 2) Is it? European
| rivers are relatively small, the alps not that high and yeah
| the atlantic is wide, but that's oceans for you
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The money quote: "Our findings point out that geography, like
| genetics and ecology, matters, but it is not destiny."
|
| That is, yes to some degree, but not as strongly as Diamond
| claimed.
| csomar wrote:
| Doesn't geography affect genetics and ecology though?
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| The Horde didn't let that stop them, nor the Romans, not the
| Spaniards. Certainly there were bottlenecks, but there's
| instances of insane trade networks for instance Indus Valley
| artifacts turning up in the EU region and South American bird
| feathers in the Eastern US. Certainly there's some leakage
| here and there. And indeed it's known to anthropology that
| there are many systems to obviate inbreeding in tribal
| societies, Aboriginals come to mind.
|
| Graeber's proposition, if memory serves, was that while many
| of the programmatic approaches are true, human volition
| ultimately decides. I bring that up because the more I think
| about it the more evident it becomes, it's not just
| technology but just about anything.
|
| And that was also true of his assertions on the sharing and
| adoption of technology - for instance North American native
| tribes refused to adopt the _obviously_ superior instruments
| of their neighbors for cultural reasons.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > The Horde didn't let that stop them
|
| Apologies for my historical ignorance, but who are The
| Horde? I mean, I assume you don't mean the ones from
| Warcraft, in which case I do know them.
| lesuorac wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Horde
| elliotec wrote:
| They're likely referring to the Mongol empire.
| mjhay wrote:
| The Mongols and the various steppe nomad invaders before
| them depended on the continuity of the Eurasian steppe
| though. The long, flat, grassy expanse from Ukraine to
| Manchuria not only supported their livestock and culture,
| but functioned as a massive superhighway that allowed them
| to maintain such big empires. I'm skeptical of a lot of
| Diamond's bigger claims, but the steppe was what allowed so
| many expert horse archers to repeatedly conquer big parts
| of Eurasia over millennia.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The Mongols were absolutely not tied to the steppe. The
| middle east, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, China, and Korea
| are all famously mountainous and all of them quickly came
| under mongol rule. Heck, large parts of Mongolia itself
| are rugged. They were already well adapted to mountains
| long before they ever left Central Asia.
| mjhay wrote:
| Of course they weren't tied to the steppe. They could
| leave it. However, they needed to steppe to form these
| huge empires, and conquer settled cultures in the first
| place. This is due number of related reasons that are
| fundamentally about the unique steppe environment:
|
| 1) Large herds of horses consume monumental amounts of
| grass, especially when they are on the move during
| military campaigns. The steppe is suited for continuous
| occupation by these herds in a way that most of Europe or
| the ME isn't. The Mongol's forays into non-steppe areas
| were limited by available grass.
|
| https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-
| logistic...
|
| 2) Related to this, abundant grass was why they had a
| horse-oriented culture and economy, and why horses were
| ridden by common people, and not just the elites - as in
| most all other areas.
|
| 3) While parts of Mongolia are mountainous and the
| Mongols and other steppe groups ventured into them,
| horses don't do well with very rugged terrain. Horses
| can't make it up many or most hiking trails in the
| American West, for example - they can't be too steep or
| have significant obstacles. In addition, again there is
| less grass in such areas.
|
| To sum up, the Mongols and other riders needed the steppe
| for the abundant grass. The flatness of the Eurasian
| steppe also allowed for incredibly fast travel, which is
| why the Mongols, Turks, and others were able to have
| continuous cultures and empires from Europe to China.
|
| Whenever the steppe conquerors conquered and ruled from
| non-steppe areas, they could not maintain massive cavalry
| (unless they were receiving reinforcements from the
| steppe). This leads to the treadmill of conquest and
| abandonment of the horse-oriented culture that made their
| conquests possible in the first place. That happened with
| the Iranians, Mongols, and various Turkic groups, among
| others.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You're missing my point here, which is that mountainous
| areas weren't some peripheral interstitial zone they
| would occasionally mount expeditions to with a lot of
| preparation and care. Rather, they were a core part of
| the Mongolian homeland and critical to the economic
| system of central asia. Mongolian horses were extremely
| important to that success, with good adaptations for the
| harsh environments and much better foraging than almost
| anyone else's. It allowed the Mongols to mount lightning
| fast campaigns across terrain no one else could, in
| conditions thought impossible. This was enabled by the
| incredible depth of experience with adverse, arid, and
| mountainous terrain possessed by Mongol commanders. If
| you want a specific example, look up the campaigns
| against Qara-Khitai, which famously included an
| expedition of ~30,000 over the Pamir mountains into
| Afghanistan in the dead of winter.
| hwillis wrote:
| I think this is a better quote:
|
| > Our analyses uncovered significant variation within
| continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural
| transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique
| that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially
| reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results
| indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank
| lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...]
| at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any
| clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find
| no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which
| most societies around the world transitioned into an
| agriculturalist mode of subsistence.
|
| Diamond's central claims are about Eurasian/European dominance,
| not a general claim about natural resources being advantages.
| The latter is, y'know, pretty obvious.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Seems like they are splitting the difference a little. It has
| 'some' impact, but not 'as great as supposed by Diamond'?
|
| It was a big theme of the Diamond book, but don't think he said
| it was 'Everything'. I remember it being more of a proposed
| theory, and he does focus on Geography a lot. But maybe I'm
| splitting hairs, since it was such a big theme of his book, it
| might be the only thing people remember.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You're missing a lot of context surrounding the book. Academics
| have always acknowledged that geography impacts societies to
| _some_ degree. There would have been no point in writing GG &S
| if that was the only argument.
|
| Diamond's actual argument is that it's a major, possibly
| primary factor. He then went on a speaking tour where he told
| anyone who was dismissive of his grand narrative that they
| should stop waffling about how complex the factors influence
| societies are and make their own grand narrative instead.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Lot of comments here are really debating what the word "Some"
| means.
|
| Geography has "Some" impact to "Some" degree.
|
| At what point does "Some" become a "Major" influence.
|
| It was a major theme of the book, so if this current study
| indicates it was not 'major', only 'some'. Guess that is
| still valuable re-quantification.
|
| Think all the methods used in the study are pretty valuable.
| Whether we agree or not with Diamond, I think this current
| study is good to quantify it.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Our analyses uncovered significant variation within
| continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural
| transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique
| that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially
| reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results
| indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank
| lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...]
| at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any
| clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find
| no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which
| most societies around the world transitioned into an
| agriculturalist mode of subsistence.
|
| Pretty unambiguous
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Guess I only read the summary, where they are more guarded.
|
| ""Environmental heterogeneity along Eurasia's major corridors
| of cultural transmission was not significantly lower than
| observed in other continents. One of the authors, Russell
| Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
| Anthropology, summarizes the results by saying, "Our findings
| point out that geography, like genetics and ecology, matters,
| but it is not destiny."
|
| Senior author of the study, Carlos Botero from the University
| of Texas at Austin, concludes with a word of caution, "We do
| not claim, by any means, to have a definitive answer on
| whether the wheels of history turned at different speeds in
| different parts of the world.""
| cubefox wrote:
| So the study didn't yield any major interesting results, or am I
| missing something?
| Gimpei wrote:
| You're kind of missing something. The interesting result is
| that they didn't find evidence for Diamond's theory, which
| isn't so surprising to me. The world is a very complicated
| place and mono causality is, almost surely, never the case.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "didn't find evidence".
|
| I thought they did, it just wasn't very pronounced. There was
| impact, but not to the degree the Diamond book theorized.
|
| "didn't" makes it sound a lot more definitive than the paper
| said.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Our analyses uncovered significant variation within
| continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural
| transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique
| that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially
| reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results
| indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank
| lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...]
| at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any
| clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find
| no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which
| most societies around the world transitioned into an
| agriculturalist mode of subsistence.
| vonnik wrote:
| This paper is a nothing burger.
|
| Diamond's analysis was not single factor.
|
| But if we stick with geography, how many isthmuses create
| bottlenecks for migration annd exchange across Eurasia?
|
| Look at the Middle East, which touches the Nile, the
| Mediterranean, the Black, Caspian and Red Seas, and the Tigris
| and Euphrates. How much of it is within 100 miles of temperate
| and navigable water?Now look at North America.
|
| It was easier to convert energy to motion over long distances in
| a denser network of trade at the nexus of Eurasia.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Diamond's analysis was not single factor.
|
| Figure 4 of the paper shows 7 different factors, including
| sophisticated proxies like literally analyzing connecting
| paths.
| Depurator wrote:
| Isn't it quite naive to use a calculation of the path of least
| resistance to account for travel costs which the whole argument
| relies upon? Early civilizations would settle close to rivers and
| travel on th rivers and along the coasts. It seems like this
| model does not take this into account.
|
| So when they calculate differences in environmental barriers
| across continents, it seems important to take water ways into
| account, which would lead to eurasia having an upper hand over at
| least NA and Africa. I'm not saying that Diamonds original
| argument holds, and its great that they try to test the
| hypothesis.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Early civilizations would settle close to rivers and travel
| on th rivers and along the coasts. It seems like this model
| does not take this into account.
|
| https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%...
|
| The path cost is dependent on the aridity of the path. They
| also used examples that specifically contradict your assertion-
| For instance they looked at an agricultural origin in Ethiopia
| which should have had easy access all the way to Egypt because
| of the Nile river. Why didn't culture spread from there instead
| of from Mesopotamia or Egypt, where those civilizations are at
| the _end_ of their rivers and don 't get any travel benefit?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, "In line with Diamond's thinking, the team found that
| environmental factors and topographic and travel costs hinder the
| spread of a wide array of cultural traits, including some that
| directly relate to social development (e.g., dominant mode of
| subsistence, domestic animal type, political complexity traits).
| However, their findings showed that contrary to Diamond's
| expectations, Eurasia is about as ecologically heterogeneous as
| other regions of our world."
|
| Interesting work, but I'm not sure that it is all that counter to
| Diamond's expectations, that Eurasia is as ecologically
| heterogeneous. The thesis was that, because temperate regions
| connect to temperate regions (as opposed to the N-S orientation
| in the Americas where the two temperate regions are separated by
| tropical ones), stuff like domesticated animals or crops could
| spread more easily. It wasn't that Eurasia was ecologically
| homogeneous, it was that temperate regions connect to each other,
| tropical regions connect to each other, etc.
| hwillis wrote:
| You're misinterpreting what the paper means when it says
| homogeneous. They're using it to describe the exact thing you
| are: the corridors and connections between areas, specifically
| places where domestication originated. They found, contrary to
| Diamond's assertions, that the locations of many of the places
| agriculture originated were actually cut off by very hostile
| terrain. Like how the fertile crescent is surrounded by
| deserts, but Diamond incorrectly uses it as an example of a
| place where it should have been easy to pass agriculture to
| surrounding areas.
|
| > Our second set of analyses compared the distribution of
| ecological barriers to cultural transmission between 16
| important areas of the globe: centres of agricultural origin.
| While the first set of analyses tests a key ecological
| assumption in Diamond's theory (ecological biases in cultural
| spread), it is this second set of analyses that tackles (and
| casts doubt upon) Diamond's overarching message: Eurasia
| benefitted from a more homogenous environment along its major
| corridors of cultural transmission. One of his most prominent
| arguments in this regard was that agriculture spread very
| rapidly out of the Fertile Crescent. Contrary to that view, we
| found that this particular region can actually experience
| stronger environmental barriers within the corridors of
| agricultural spread than those observed in other centres of
| agricultural origin. This trend is particularly observable when
| considering aridity turnover at both close- and long-range, as
| well as close-range topographic costs. The likely reason for
| this discrepancy is that even though the Fertile Crescent has
| access to a larger area of contiguous landmass at similar
| latitudes than many of its peers (Diamond's main argument), it
| is nevertheless more ecologically atypical for its
| surroundings. Most notably, the Fertile Crescent is nourished
| by rivers but surrounded by large deserts, and these strong
| gradients in access to water are further compounded by nearby
| changes in prevailing winds and elevation (Figure S15). These
| findings remind us that dramatic changes in habitat and climate
| can occur even within small spatial scales. In contrast to the
| Fertile Crescent (and other Eurasian areas), South Tropical
| China, the Lower-Middle Yangtze and the Chinese plateau stand
| out as having low aridity related costs compared with most
| centres of agriculture origin. South Tropical China also shows
| low to mid-range temperature turnover values. Both aridity and
| temperature regimes would have been important for the spread of
| rice agriculture (d'Alpoim Guedes & Butler, Reference d'Alpoim
| Guedes and Butler2014; Gutaker et al., Reference Gutaker,
| Groen, Bellis, Choi, Pires and Purugganan2020), although
| archaeological evidence shows that human-directed water
| management systems were developed early and were part of the
| success of rice as a crop in these regions (Fuller & Qin,
| Reference Fuller and Qin2009). Thus, humans were working
| towards hijacking the conditions that were set for their crops
| by the local environment, a finding that strengthens the need
| to consider cultural factors when understanding crop
| domestication. Our results show that close-range topographic
| travel costs are not trivial in South Tropical China, and the
| Lower-Middle Yangtze and the Chinese plateau show one of the
| highest barrier levels along this axis. Thus overall, we do not
| find a consensus of universal low environmental barriers to
| cultural spread in Eurasian areas, as hypothesised based on
| Eurasia's East-West dominant continental axis.
| perrygeo wrote:
| > ecological barriers... close-range topographic travel costs
|
| I don't find this analysis very compelling. Sure there is
| local heterogeneity everywhere at every scale. But the
| important question is why would humans cross those barriers
| in the first place? Clearly there is a cost and some were
| willing to pay it. What's the reward on the other side?
|
| In Eurasia, crossing the desert surrounding the Fertile
| Cresent would have lead to a myriad of diverse habitats, with
| optionality in all directions. In North America, crossing the
| high desert of Mexico from the north puts you into a narrow
| strip of jungle with no option to go anywhere but through it
| - a dead end. This is not an insignificant difference!
|
| So while the ecosystems are locally homogeneous as the paper
| describes, it doesn't touch the core of Diamond's thesis -
| that the unique geography of the continents afforded entirely
| different travel opportunities - the reason why humans
| decided to cross those barriers in the first place.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Crossing the high deserts of Mexico from the north puts you
| in one of the most agriculturally productive and
| ecologically diverse regions in the world: Mesoamerica. You
| have to go pretty far south to find what you're talking
| about. A lot of people, crops, and animals crossed that gap
| over the millennia too. Maize for instance, or the coati
| whose native range runs from Arizona to Brazil.
| hwillis wrote:
| its open source. If you want to rerun it with a logarithmic
| cost function, go ahead.
| sojuz151 wrote:
| My biggest problem is that this hypothesis does not explain why
| farming started so much later in the Americas than in Eurasia.
| From Wikipedia "approximate centres of origin of agriculture and
| its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the
| Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the Papua New
| Guinea Highlands (9,000-6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000-4,000
| BP), Northern South America (5,000-4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa
| (5,000-4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America
| (4,000-3,000 BP). " and American civilisation were about 4
| thousand years behind Eurasia when it come to technology.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| They be getting fat on that Buffalo. No need to farm. Just,
| hunting, smoking, party times.
|
| Edit: or seriously some, maybe there wasn't a drive to need it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Do we even have a clear sense of how densely-populated North
| America was 7000 years ago? Were there just not enough people?
| Was the climate suitable? Was it harder to domesticate American
| plants for agriculture than Eurasian plants? Etc. I feel like
| there are a lot of possible factors that could cause farming to
| develop late, which are unrelated to the validity or non-
| validity of the hypothesis.
| perrygeo wrote:
| The Cucurbita pepo squash was domesticated 10k years ago in the
| Americas. So there was absolutely small-scale "agriculture"
| throughout the Americas, roughly on the same timeline as Asia.
| In fact, they were experts at it (see the Three Sisters - one
| of the most brilliant sustainable agricultural technologies
| ever invented with no rival in Eurasia).
|
| So Americans knew of advanced planting techniques but didn't
| deploy them at scale for another 6k years. Why? The population
| had not yet risen to the density that necessitated full-scale,
| crop-dependent communities. Far from being behind the
| technology curve, I'd interpret this as wise governance and
| population management to avoid resorting to a lifestyle that
| some viewed as a low-class labor. Why break your back toiling
| in the field when you can eat buffalo and fish?
| numeromancer wrote:
| A detailed criticism of Diamond's hypothesis:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFECyeihuZY
| Log_out_ wrote:
| This sounds not very thorough. The cultural movement vector
| accelerators are quite visible. The mediterranen coas allowed
| several cultures to create trade networks.
|
| And the eastern steppes allowed military raid alliances to put
| military evolutionary pressure on kingdom and empires.
|
| The self sufficient battle sponge like structure of central
| Europe promoted constant cultural competition (unlike nowadays).
|
| The model they used must be flawed.
| beefman wrote:
| This is such a weird idea. It's not the whole of Asia that
| developed earlier, but Europe. Which has predominately a North-
| South axis. But that is not even correct. Civilization forms on
| coastlines. Europe's coast is also predominately North-South. So
| is the Nile's. So is China's, where the vast majority of Chinese
| live. But the Mediterranean's isn't. So it doesn't matter,
| because it obviously doesn't.
|
| Diamond's book is full of nonsense like this.
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