I agree. And I think he overlooks the real reasons animals like the bison wouldn’t have been domesticated by postulating that they must be undomesticable. I think the real reason is that you won’t domesticate any animals unless you’re already a sedentary farmer, as I said above. (Well, except for dogs, but even then not as a food animal. Dogs have been used that way, but not by hunter-gatherers.) The prime potentially domesticable but not domesticated animals in the Americas - bison, moose, elk, caribou - almost all range in areas that supported only hunter-gatherers, not sedentary farmers. There’d be a slight overlap with bison and some corn farming in the southwest US, I believe, and with the moose and some corn farming in the northeast, but corn was fairly new to both areas. In the southeast US where corn had a firmer foothold, your best candidate for domestication would be the whitetail deer, which is ridiculously flighty and not very social, both of which are going to make it tough to domesticate.
That said, I suspect there really are some species that are flat out undomesticable. Pity, though, because cataphract rhinos would have made mincemeat of medieval European cavalry.
The point you are still missing is that we were discussing why Europe ultimately dominated the Fertile Crescent, not why Europe dominated the Middle East. The two terms are “Europe” and “Fertile Crescent”. The definition of the Middle East is quite irrelevant.
Hence while Turkey/Ottoman Empire was an indisputably ME great power until the modern era it isn’t relevant because the Ottoman Empire wasn’t a Fertile Crescent Power, it was merely a power that conquered the Fertile Crescent. France and England also conquered the Fertile Crescent but that doesn’t make them Fertile Crescent powers either. Indeed the fact that foreigners like the Ottomans and the French could conquer the Fertile Crescent proves my point: that there was no great power in the region by that time.
Really the term ‘superpower’ is a bit meaningless in this era, which is why I said the European were a power. By that I mean that they had the capacity to defend and maintain their own culture and enforce it upon their neighbours. They also had the ability to travel freely and disseminate their own culture to anyone who would listen. Compare that to, for example, the Israelites under Roman rule. The Jews may have existed at that time but they were not a power.
And yes, Alexander’s empire fragmented, but it remained for the most part unambiguously Greek, and the Greeks continued to rule most of his empire, including Egypt, right up until Antony started shagging the Greek queen Cleopatra. So the Greek cultural influence remained.
The Greeks themselves may have, at various times between Alexander and the Roman ‘subjugation’, been les powerful than some ME cultures, but never significantly so, and while Greece was still forcibly projecting her military and cultural influence into the ME the reverse wasn’t true. After the Persians the ME never invaded Greece until after the Roman Empire had collapsed.
I think the thing here is to make sure that you understand what point your are trying to make and what you actually mean by ‘dominance’ and ‘power’ when you say that Europe only dominated or came to power in the last 500 years. I really can’t see any way that I could justify saying that Hellenistic Greece or Imperial Rome were not powerful or dominant using my standard of those words. Perhaps you can, but you haven’t explained it very well so far.
I’ll accept that for the most part, but…
First off I never claimed that Rome had global dominance. That term never had any meaning in that era. After all they never dominated the Aztecs or China or even the Indus valley. What we are looking at here is when Europe rose to appoint where we could say that it produced, to quote you, “a great power” and when Europe has “really taken off”. And by my standards Rome and Hellenistic Greece were both indisputably great powers and both had indisputably taken off.
However I’m still struggling with what you mean when you talk about dominance and taking off in these contexts. To me Rome dominated Israel, not the other way around. To me Rome had taken off and produced new social orders, governments, arts etc. while Israel was still largely stagnated in the same culture it had in the late bronze age. You doubtless have other standards of judging when a culture has taken off and when it is dominant, but I’d need you to explain them to understand
Hell, the US 2002 was the most powerful military force in the history of the world, and that brooks no argument. They conquered parts of the Middle East, and are having great difficulty them. Does that entitle me to say that the US was not a dominant cultural and military force in 2002? Or to claim that the US hadn’t taken off sometime in the preceeding 300 years? That’s hard to swallow, yet it seems to be the inevitable conclusion from your line of reasoning.
That makes sense broadly, but I can see a few flaws there. Reindeer almost by definition live in areas that can’t be readily cultivated, yet they have a long history of domestication. Conversely eland, warthogs and peccaries all overlap strongly with agriculture in other parts of the world. So it’s not just the overlap of agriculture and potential domesticates.
I’m thinking that some domesticated animals were domesticated by following the herds. That gradually progressed to closer and closer contact and protecting the herds form other predators to the point where the herds became more accustomed to people and kills were made by pushing individuals away form the group. Reindeer are still very much treated like this today, with herds acting much like wild reindeer except that they can be protected and guided and occasionally killed. That gradual transition from prey to herd would also have the effect of selecting against the most flighty, aggressive and intelligent animals without ever needing to turn a profit from the essentially undomesticable form.
Exactly why nobody domesticated reindeer in Canada remains a mystery. It may well be for cultural reasons. And it irks me greatly that Diamond refuses to even acknowledge that humans have different cultures and that some may be ‘superior’ in aiding survival. The only time he even gives a nod to this is when talking about technology adoption within Europe when it was already a largely homogenous culture. If the people of America simply had a culture that prevented them herding bison or caribou then there it ends. It needn’t require any complex biological answer. Just as we don’t need any biological answer for why the people of Australia, the desert continent, won’t eat camel meat. I can only imagine the Diamond of 6005 trying to give a biological explanation of why Australians in arid regions never domesticated camels when the people of other arid regions did. Of course the answer is simply that the culture won’t prmit it. It makes no sense, but there you have it.
And as I say, it’s irksome that Diamond never even allows for such a possibility.
No, there are clearly other things going on. Reindeer differ from caribou in that the neighbours had cereal production and large domesticated animals, for example. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be pretty shocked if reindeer domestication predates the introduction of other food production into Scandinavia. Food production hasn’t been introduced anywhere near caribou ranges to this day, because it’s next to impossible to conduct agriculture on the tundra. Caribou and reindeer might be the same animal, but the environments they inhabit are very different.
As for the large African animals, you’ve got a lot more evolutionary effort invested by those species on avoiding human predation.
Hell, I’m just speculating, but I think I’m doing a better job of WAGing than Diamond did.
I think you’re doing abetter job too. At least you haven’t just ingnored the fact that reinder were never domesticated in America by Indians despite having been easily domesticated in America by Europeans.
I wonder if the reason why reindeer exist in more hospitable climes in Scandanavia isn’t purely because they have been domesticated? Since they aapparently cna;t compete with more moderate climate deer in the Americas you have to wonder how they managed that in Europe, or if they did.
The problem with saying that African pigs had evolved to be better at dodging people than Asian pigs is that South American pigs would have been much worse. At least Asian pigs had hundreds of thousands of years of contact with H. erectus hunters. American pigs lacked even that.
I suspect that the real answer is a very, very complex mix of environemntal, biological, technological and cultural factors. No one factor can explain it all and it sure isn’t the simple “these animals can’t be domesticated” answer that Diamond gives.
I should comment on this, too. Diamond clearly does think that there can be cultural explanations for adoption/lack of adoption of various things, but he repeatedly then asks what the explanation for the cultural differences is. And to a large extent I agree that that’s the appropriate response to a cultural explanation. There’s a fair bit of Darwinian sort of selection going on with regards to cultural practices when you have a population comprised of a myriad of tiny bands of people and no political organization. Cultural taboos on practices that will promote your band’s population growth relative to that of other bands are rather unlikely to survive in the long run. Cultural explanations for why Australian aborigines won’t eat camel meat (They won’t? Didn’t know that.) are perfectly adequate now, but if we could somehow engineer a situation where camels are introduced to Australia but the place wasn’t overrun with Europeans, I bet you any amount of money that within a few centuries camels are being eaten. Food’s too damn scarce in the desert to overlook a concentration of calories like that if you don’t have government assistance to fall back on.
My point is that agriculture spread first from the Fertile Crescent, then into more broadly what would be defined as the Middle East today, and then through Europe, Asia, Africa. I suppose it is fine to state the Fertile Crescent, but I do not see how the Middle East, which describes a geographic region, is somehow not applicable to the discussion. Agriculture very specifically may have started in the Fertile Crescent. It then expanded, to my knowledge, to the Middle East before it expanded to Europe. You will note that I did not merely mention a questioning of why the Europe dominated the Middle East, but other areas as well in the Eurasian landmass.
Until the last 500 years or so, they did not appear to have that ability to any greater extent than any other area of the Eurasian landmass (or even the Australian or American landmass, for that matter). It was basically ebb and flow, with nowhere near the level of dominance that Europe has had in the last 500 years.
I disagree here to some degree. To state that Cleopatra was “Greek” in that she actually had any connection with the Greek political structure beyond genetics is somewhat of a stretch I think. Likewise, I do not think the Greek roots took hold elsewhere quite as strongly as you imply. In any event, to my admittedly shaky memory, the "right up until Anthony started shagging the “Greek” queen is a total of about 3-400 years.
Well, that’s a bit unfair, because it’s a binary give and take. While Greece was projecting into the Middle East, it would have been hard for the Persians to project back into Greece. At roughly the same time elsewhere, Asian horsemen were invading Europe.
They were powerful, but they were not dominant, in that in no way would they have been capable of subjugating to any extent the rest of the world as they have in the last 500 years.
Certainly part of that may have been due to increased technology, but China and other areas have had greater technology than Europe at many points in the past. My point is that Diamond (greatly simplified) says that its the shape of the Eurasian landmass that caused European dominance, in an effort to dispute Eurocentric “It’s something special about European” types. But he does not adequately explain why it was Europe, and not the Fertile Crescent or the Middle East (take your choice :)), or China, or Asian Russia, that dominated, or how Europe was able to dominate the other parts of the Eurasian landmass.
The 500 years comes in because when someone tried to explain Diamond’s theory that while the Fertile Crescent was really great at the start, and gave a “head start” which is so important to Diamond, that the “head start” was not sufficient to let the Fertile Crescent dominate Europe (as it apparently let Europe dominate everyone else), and in fact was not really such a great advantage, because after awhile, the Fertile Crescent’s (and apparently Asia’s and North Africa’s) advantages were worse than Europe. Bringing my point of, “Those advantages were good enough to allow a basic back and forth of power for 10,500 years, but then really sucked for the last 500, allowing European domination.” For it has been truly only in the last 500 years that Europe has become the global power, having at least some level of control over every other continent. That doesn’t make sense to me.
So far as I know, there aren’t any areas of Scandinavia that can touch the Canadian high arctic for climate. You have to go way further east to get away from the influence of the Gulf Stream before it gets similarly frigid. I don’t know that much about reindeer ranges, though. I think I might just have to look it up. As for competing with moderate climate deer, I just don’t know. Ours are mostly different species than you find in Europe, though, so it’s not exactly the same competition.
True. I suspect that there is something to the point, though, given that the largest number of large mammals that haven’t been domesticated is in Africa. Lots of megafauna, not a single domestication. I really doubt it’s a coincidence.
Maybe I read a different book than you do, but I distinctly remember Diamond acknowledging that individual cultural idiosyncracies may have had effects on progress. I also remember that he specifically points out that “cultural differences” as a answer in of itself is not very satisfying because left unanswered is the question of why cultures differ from one another. Which gets us back to the book’s central theme: geography. Unless you think cultures evolve independent from environment, I don’t understand why this would be an unreasonable hypothesis.
But why come up with an oversimplistic answer that really answers nothing, when there is a much more compelling explanation? I find it much more plausible that indigenous Americans didn’t domesticate bison simply because the gatherer-hunter lifestyle was comfortable enough that it made the labor-intensive task of farming buffalo meat not very worthwhile. That makes more sense to me than the pat answer of “culture”.
I’m confused. Are you saying that Australians failed to domesticate camels because of cultural inhibition? If so, I’m thinking the far more likely explanation is simply that camels are not native to Australia.
Yes, but as I pointed out in my original answer to those very question ME agricultural is almost exclusively tied to the floodplains because of the issue of rainfall and fragile soils. That made the ME both ideally suited to early agriculture and civilisations because production and population was strongly seasonal and centralised and thus controllable. It also made it uniquely unable to take advantage of later cultural advances based on a dispersed agriculture and population.
After a period of around 4000 years European cultures managed to adopt agricultural and cultural practices that enabled them to abandon the city state and this made them far more stable and powerful. Once that occurred they began to overtake the Middle Eastern regions which were still forced to rely on either floodplain agriculture or subsistence agriculture.
Now you are discussing two totallyseparte things.
For the first one. Yoo claim that Alexander’s Greece or Julius Caesar’s Rome did not have the ability to enforce their culture upon their neighbours to a greater extent than any other area of the Eurasian landmass. To me seems patently ridiculous. What other area of the Eurasian landmass managed such massive conquests? What other areas made their language the lingua franca for thousands of square miles and millions of people as the Greeks and Romans did? By what possible standards were Australian Aborigines or even Tibetans able to project and enforce there culture to the same degree as the Romans and Greeks?
Yes, but that’s the point. European Greek influence lasted 400 years and by then the major power in the region was Roman. Rome is also a European culture. It hardly weakens my point to say that the European culture dominated until another European culture supplanted it.
It’s not unfair because that is my whole point. The Greeks dominated the ME from that time on. We are talking about why Europe overtook the ME, not why Asia overtook Eastern Europe so the issue of who else was coming into Europe in areas that the European and ME powers neither knew nor cared about is largely irrelevant.
What I am trying to establish is that from Alexander’s time onwards Europe has dominated the ME. It hasn’t just occurred in the last 500 years as you claim, but the last 3000 years. Doubtless there were Asians who invaded parts of the ME during that time but that doesn’t mean that European civilisations weren’t able to project their influence, it just means that some parts of Europe were better at it or (more truthfully) that some parts of Europe weren’t yet civilised.
You seem to be trying to argue that unless all nations in Europe as currently defined can claim to have held at bay every enemy on every front then it couldn’t claim to be dominant. By this argument you are still wrong to claim that Europe only become a power in the last 500 years. Japan invaded Russia a mere 60 years ago and as you aid the Asian Ottomans did so before that. So Europe has never been dominant by your argument. Asking why Europe dominated when Europe never did is abit pointless isn’t it?
Once again it seems that you have some standards for dominance that you haven’t shared.
Is that what you mean by dominance. Well by this argument the ME was never dominant, ever. SO what did you mean when you said that the ME had a headstart and was then overtaken? I really don’t get what you mean by that. The ME could never at any time in history subjugate the rest of the world the way that Europe has been able to in the last 500 years. So why do we need to try to explain why the headstart?
The thing is that Europe dominated in the last 500 years because of inventions. The inventions came because Europe has the ability to produce agriculture broad scale, not just on floodplains. That enabled European states to compete with one another and it enabled the states a large degree of freedom. to experiment with governments. It’s not compulsory to have centralised government in Europe, whereas that is an inevitable consequence of floodplain farming. So Europe could trial government types, technologies and military strategies and the dispersed population provided a perfect evolutionary ground to weed out the weaker ideas and perfect the good ones.
That explains why the ME could never have and still hasn’t kept up with Europe.
But as Diamond also points out, China is very homogenous. It allows for, even demands, a centralised government and unified culture because of the lack of natural barriers. China was briefly technologically superior but it stagnated because it was never subjected to competition.
I don’t se those as valid criticisms. Maybe he doesn’t flesh those ideas out as much as you’d like, but he does explain them. And the book is already quite long, even for a popular science book, and has a huge scope.
Briefly Diamond never says that Eurasia dominated because of the shape. He says that it’s a combination of shape and workable agricultural options and geographic fragmentation and several other points.
He addresses the reason why it wasn’t the fertile crescent with the reason I put forward above, that floodplain agricultural is productive and easy but inherently limiting.
He addresses why it isn’t China by pointing out that China is too homogeneous and lacking geographical boundaries to allow competition. On government can easily rule all of China and never need to fight any other significant enemy.
As I say, maybe he could have fleshed them out more and he has in various other publications, speeches and so forth, but it’s not fair to say that he never explains those things.
But Diamond doesn’t like the concept of the headstart. In fact he argues against it in many places. Ashe said, North America had more potential domesticates than Europe when people arrived, Australia had few predators and diseases and so forth. Those head starts had no positive impact.
Instead Diamond argues strongly that some regions have exploitable resources and some don’t. It’s not about a headstart, it’s about what is there when it’s needed. When the ME needed easily cultivated, fertile moist soil that would allow and demand excess food production they had it. Europe did not. When Europe needed resources to enable construction of diverse governments that could improve one another via natural selection and competition they had them. Neither side had a head start, they simply had appropriate resources at that point.
I think that’s because you are conflating two unrelated issues.
The first is the idea that there has been aback and forth for 10, 500 years. All civilisations were ME for about 2000 years. The greatest powers were exclusively ME for a further 4000 years. Then the Europeans rose to prominence 1500 years ago and stayed there ever since. There is no back and forth and never has been. There simply was no European power before the Persian Greek wars. There has been no true ME power since.
If you are willing to allow that the Ottomans were as much European Turks as ME Persians then no explanation is required. If you contend that the Ottomans were ME and not European then their Empire ended only in WWI, so your claim that Europe has been singularly powerful for 500 years is clearly not true. Europe was only dominant for 20 years at best, between the fall of the Ottomans and the rise of the USA.
Once again here we run into this problem that you can’t define or explain what you mean by the terms you use.
The second issue that you tack onto that confusion is the idea that Europeans have had some sort o unique control for 500 years. You say that ‘control’ means the type of unambiguous unilateral power projected to all continents that Europe has had since the invention of firearms. Yet you say that power went back and forth for 10, 000 years. But there were never times before the invention of firearms when anyone unambiguous unilateral power projected to all continents. So how could power have gone back and forth. By your standard of power it never even existed 10, 00o years ago or even 1000 years ago. It seems like you want to use one standard of power before the Reformation to allow the ME to once have had power, and then switch to a totally different standard post reformation so you can argue that only Europe had power. You can’t do that.
You say that there was a constant back and forth for 10, 000 years, yet ignoring the Ottomans and other Turkish predecessors there hasn’t been any ability of ME people to unilaterally control the world since the Persian wars 15000 years back. But if we include the Ottomans and other Turkish predecessors then ME people had power until less than 100 years ago, which makes claims that Europeans were uniquely powerful for the last 500 years nonsensical.
SlyFrog at this stage you really do need ot define what yo mean.
When you talk about power do you mean the unambiguous unilateral power of post-firearms Europe, or the more general power exercised by Rome or Egypt in their heydays?
When you talk about the ME do you include the Ottomans in that so that ME Empires remained powerful until 1918, or do you believe that the Ottomans were partly European and so not included?
I’m going to try to explain again why I think this whole “Why Europe and not China?” thing is misguided.
The Fertile Crescent didn’t have a headstart in the sense you’re thinking. Yes, it was the site of several of the critical inventions, but because of the ease of diffusion along Eurasia’s east-west axis, those practices spread across the continent rather quickly. By classical times there was really no sense in which the Near East was more advanced than southern Europe. The fact that the Near East had been that advanced for longer is hardly relevant. How long an inventor’s forbears have been advanced is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what pool of knowledge an inventor can draw from. The level of contact between Europe and western Asia was such that there was no significant difference between the two with regards to the knowledge base. Oh, sure, there was regional variation. But it ebbs and flows all over the place. First Greece is at the forefront of primitive scientific thought, then when the Western Empire falls this shifts eastward and eventually becomes focused in Muslem domains under the Caliphate. Spain and Levant lead the way. And then the Crusaders bring ideas back home with them, and we get the Rennaissance. (I don’t know enough about India and China to include them in this, but I presume there are similar stories there. Certainly at times they were at the technological forefront.) Back and forth, with the centres shifting due to various local cultural effects, but constantly spreading back and forth. Why did pre-Socratic thought begin flowering around the Aegean and not further east or west? Why did Rome rule the known world for 500 years instead of Carthage or Ptolemaic Egypt or the Seleucid Empire? Why did scientific thought flower in Moorish Spain and the Near East under the Caliphate rather than in Christian Europe? Why did the Rennaissance take off in Italy and the Netherlands and not in Ireland or Poland? All these questions have answers that lie in cultural peculiarities and historical happenstance and random distribution of military geniuses. None of them are questions which Diamond’s theory can even address. They’re simply too specific. Likewise, it’s just too specific to ask why Europe…no, strike that, why Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, and France colonized most of the globe, rather than China. After all, Italy, Germany, Serbia, and Greece didn’t embark on global colonization sprees either. Why Spain and not Italy? It’s not like there was any significant difference between the technology available to each in 1492, and yet the Americas speak Spanish (and English, Portuegese, and French), not Italian (or German, Croatian, Greek, Czech, Polish, or Arabic). It makes no more sense to ask Diamond “Why (part of) Europe and not China?” than it does to ask him “Why Spain and not Italy?” Over the past several millenia, China has been “ahead” of Europe as often as not. Half the time the question you want to ask would have been reversed. Why China and not Europe?
The only reason your question looks like it should be answerable in Diamond’s terms is because of the massive impact the events following the wave of European exploration in the 16th Century. But this was just another of the local surges ahead, no different in kind from the previous empire-building adventures throughout history. It was just that this time transportation technology enabled the current empire-builders to reach the entire globe, with consequences still felt to this day. But just because the consequences have been far-reaching doesn’t make it any more explainable in the very broad terms of Diamond. Diamond’s theory, when it comes down to it, is something like “He who has the best food production system will win in the long run.” Hell, anyone who’s ever played Civilization could have told him that! But while being this simple, it’s also reasonably profound, because he goes on to point out that your available food production turns out to depend on what the pool of potential domesticates in the entire area capable of influencing yours looks like. And Eurasia turned out not only to have almost all the best domesticates, but then went and shared them across the entire continent, so that everyone everywhere on the continent had all of them, and not just a couple. But after that, it was a giant lottery as to which area would be the first to build a global empire rather than a merely local one. Turns out Spain bought the winning ticket by funding an Italian guy to go on a misguided exploration mission (Columbus thought erroneously the world was a lot smaller than it was, and if he hadn’t run into the Americas would have starved to death long before he made it to Asia.)
As I said, he gives a nod to it when talking about Europe. He also mentions it when stating that cultures reflect environmental constraints, which is almost excatly the opposite of what I am suggesting.
And it’s turtles all the way down.
We know that cultural differences exists. Jews never produced any pig breeds for obvious reasons. But it’s not more satisfying to say that environmental factors shape “cultural differences” as an answer in of itself because left unanswered is the question of why environmental factors shape culture.
And so ad infinitum. By that standard of satisfactory no answer is satisfying. It’s like a child endlessly asking “Why” to every explanation given.
It’s not unreasonable. What I do find unreasonable is the implication that cultures are only shaped by environment. Diamond implies that no culture anywhere, ever simply developed a taboo because some shaman ate the wrong mushroom or because someone wanted an excuse to persecute their neighbour. Everything has to have a geographical explanation according to Diamond, and that contradicts my experience of humans. Often people do dumb shit coz they ant to.
Well if it’s so plausible then explain why there were so many farming societies and so few HG societies living within the Buffalo’s range?
The majority of Indians apparently didn’t find their lifestyle comfortable enough to live without farming. Doesn’t that make a nonsense of your claim that the buffalo wasn’t domesticated because no one wanted to abandon the HG lifestyle?
Also explain plausibly why at least two disparate groups of people found their HG lifestyle uncomfortable enough to domesticate cattle and at least one Indian group domesticated llamas?
This isn’t an environmental answer, nor is it plausible. It’s ad hoc reasoning that doesn’t mesh with the facts.
You realise that Australians have massive herds of domestic sheep, goats and cattle and that these aren’t native to the continent, don’t you? Australians have recently discovered the use of these things called “ships”, kinda like big canoes. And using them they can bring to their shores all sorts of critters that aren’t native. Hell at one point they did introduce camels, and there are even a few small feral herds. So the idea that there are essentially no domesticated camels on the continent obviously can’t be explained because they are non native.
The reason why nobody grazes camels in Australia is the same reason nobody grazes food horses in America. It’s culturally improper to eat them. Nothing to do with geography. Purely cultural.
Nonsense, dear boy! Like I said, you just need faster and smarter dogs, and the need to control wild animals is a marvelous selective crucible that has given us blue tick hounds (controlling ornery and semi-tame ones has given us the various shepherds), but the dogs are only an aide to you, the trainer. Your real tools are hunger (thus the bribery with donuts), creating a false herd (most useful on young animals), and a means to select for the qualities you want (AKA: turning the ones that aren’t docile into hamburger). This is not like a wing or an eye, which has no useful intermediate forms (a call-out to my homies in the evolutionist community! ). If a pack of dogs can drive an adult bear where you want it they can do it with a calf, no matter how wild, but if the calf refuses to become tamer you kill it before it gets dangerous and try again.
I am not denying that people were one of the causes of the mass extinctions. I was responding to the (inaccurate) paraphrasing that said that people were THE cause of the extinctions in North America. There were many pressures on animals adapted to the far north 10,000 years ago and a new and wasteful predator was a particularly dangerous one.
But this thread is humming along without me. Maybe they’ll have the book for me at the library.
I don’t remember that quote exactly but, IIRC, he was talking about an “observer” who hails from the conventional school of thought and had not read his book. He then very shortly goes on to claim that his thesis will demonstrate exactly what those not very straightforward factors were which should allow an observer to accurately predict europe. The whole “could have made a strong case for any of the continents” thing is what gives it away because his book is precisely the opposite.
I have defined it. At first I thought you were genuine in being confused by what I wrote, now I think that you are stubbornly trying to resist the point and are not confused at all. Therefore, this will be my last effort.
Until the last 500 years, there was nothing near the total dominance that Europe as a whole gained (wherein it effectively held sway over every world landmass). Every example that you give (such as Greece in the Middle East) was both: a) far more incomplete than you make out and often for a relatively a short period of time; and b) countered by both Middle Eastern or Asian control of other parts of Europe and often immediately followed by a push back from the other direction (e.g. Moor control of Spain). You tend to discard counterexamples (well yeah, China was huge, but they didn’t have competitors, and didn’t have boundries, so they don’t count).
Yet something “popped” in the last 500 years that changed that dynamic. It is that “pop” that Diamond is attempting to explain, as a big part of the purpose of his book is to explain why European dominance is caused by geography and resources, and not something innate to the Europeans. I think you came closest to trying to answer the question as to why there seemed to be back and forth for 10,500 years of Diamond’s book, and a European explosion in the last 500 years, when you discussed agriculture allowing a boom of inventions, etc. Yet I do not think that explanation is sufficient, or necessarily accurate. I think it is a gloss.
Your answer basically amounts to, “The question is too specific, and not within the scope of Diamond’s work,” along with a bit of, “We knew it would be some group in the Eurasian landmass that would dominate, but it was a toss up as to who.” That I can respect. It’s an answer, but it does not try to suggest that Diamond effectively answers the question, which he does not.
And I think you’ll find that upon reading Diamond, he hasn’t got this wrong. The problem with this thread is that on one side you have people trying to offer (in good faith) partly remembered paraphrases of Diamond and on the other you have people saying, “Aha! Diamond’s an idiot.” This is really getting us nowhere.
No, it does not. Not even close. Not even Johannesburg falls in that band, to be honest. Only the northernmost tip of SA is in the “tropics”, and some of the rest is “subtropical”, but Cape Town isn’t.
Well, yeah, and your point is…what? Taming is the first step on the way toward domestication and needs to be repeated, to a greater or lesser extent, with every generation. Even with dogs, the most domesticated animals of all; a puppy raised by a feral mother will not lope up to you and say, “Hey, acsenray, whadya say?” Gorsnak and I were dioscussing domestication and disagree on the process, timetable, and intermediate steps.
But while being this simple, it’s also reasonably profound, because he goes on to point out that your available food production turns out to depend on what the pool of potential domesticates in the entire area capable of influencing yours looks like. And Eurasia turned out not only to have almost all the best domesticates, but then went and shared them across the entire continent, so that everyone everywhere on the continent had all of them, and not just a couple. But after that, it was a giant lottery as to which area would be the first to build a global empire rather than a merely local one. Turns out Spain bought the winning ticket by funding an Italian guy to go on a misguided exploration mission (Columbus thought erroneously the world was a lot smaller than it was, and if he hadn’t run into the Americas would have starved to death long before he made it to Asia.)
Like I said, you just need faster and smarter dogs, and the need to control wild animals is a marvelous selective crucible that has given us blue tick hounds (controlling ornery and semi-tame ones has given us the various shepherds), but the dogs are only an aide to you, the trainer. Your real tools are hunger (thus the bribery with donuts), creating a false herd (most useful on young animals), and a means to select for the qualities you want (AKA: turning the ones that aren’t docile into hamburger). This is not like a wing or an eye, which has no useful intermediate forms (a call-out to my homies in the evolutionist community!