Larger cultures… to a point. Switzerland’s linguistic map isn’t what one would call homogeneous. And it’s a federation: they’re homogeneous when it comes to direct democracy, but each canton (some of them quite small in both size and population) sets up things which in pretty much every other country would be set up at the national level, such as immigration laws.
Snowthx and Nava, interesting points. I don’t know much about Neolithic, Bronze Age, or even classical era Alpine cultures, but I’m guessing that a diverse set of populations were either wiped out or deeply assimilated by surrounding powers rather early on, to a degree that didn’t happen in the Caucasus. If this is so, I’ll guess that this is mainly due to the Alps being quite close to a republic-then-empire (the Roman one), and that empire having advanced engineering (roads, etc.) and organized military for its time.
The nearest equivalent for the Caucasus would be the Persian empire, whose heartland was rather more distant to those mountains, and which I think wasn’t quite as advanced as the Romans in the ways I mentioned.
Still, it’s interesting that the Alps are rather exceptional, as a mountainous area without much in the way of remnant ethnia. (Even the Pyrenees have the Basques, for example). In southern Mexico, for example, linguistic diversity and “indigeneity” correspond mainly to mountainous areas (e.g., the sierras of Oaxaca and Chiapas, vs. the plains of Veracruz and Tabasco)…but not always (the Yucatan is flat, but much of it is indigenous…though this also fits the rule, in that the linguistic diversity is low – just one variety of Maya over a large area).
The Alps are more like, say, the Rocky Mountains of the US. If there were diverse ethnic groups there before the arrival of Europeans, I’m not aware of them…but, in any case, such diversity was pretty well eliminated by settlers and in battle, by 1850 or so. (California’s coastal ranges, on the other hand, harbored an astounding ethnic diversity…but this, too, was all but eliminated by around 1880.)
Nothin’ of nothin’, I got confused and deconfused myself.
In the sense that it gave its name to several plants and plant families of the region, including the Colchicum crocuses that the drug is derived from.