A bunch of topless African tribeswomen would look at GGW, laugh and wonder, “What’s so great about those?”
Ain’t it weird that African women’s bare breasts aren’t censored on TV? At least on American TV, as I know breasts are not censored in Europe at all. Not that it isn’t a bad thing, as they aren’t modest or ashamed, nor should they be. But still…
I thought one of his most fascinating points was a description of the truly scarce number of plants that can be used as farm crops and animals that are available for domestication.
The book raises ideas I’d never thought about before.
I think a better comparison would be, “How many hours has Kid Rock worked at the office?”
The people you are describing are the rich people of the stone age. They are the very few blessed to live in an area of warm climate and plentiful flora and fauna.
I think you’d find a different situation if you asked, say, a peasant in ancient China.
I don’t have numbers to share, but I think that on balance, there has been an improvement. You might ask yourself how often it happens that someone beats up a 1b coach so they can get on TV – honestly, I doubt it’s more than once or twice a year.
On the other hand, one can speculate how often the police beat up some black guy a la Rodney King. Again, I have no numbers to share, but based upon my common sense, I would speculate that in the past, it happened very regularly; that it still happens, but probably less today. In part because of fear of being caught on tape. Just MHO of course.
One advantage of technology - at least of an agrarian society over that of hunting and gathering - is that farming can support a larger number of people per acre. You can then support a population large enough to dedicate some people to technological advances in blacksmithing, literacy, and so forth.
Another very enthusiatic recommendation of Diamond’s book.
And to Reeder for a good OP.
Regards,
Shodan
Exactly. Farming didn’t crop up because someone looked around and thought, hey, wouldn’t it be a great idea if we raised our own food. It came about because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t cutting it. Early farming communities tended to have more health problems and live a shorter life than their neighboring hunter-gatherer folk. This probably means that they weren’t doing it because it was an improvement, but because they needed to in order to prevent starvation.
Well, I worked about 40-50 hours in a nice air-conditioned office (pretty key in this heat). I took a subway there. The heaviest thing I had to lift was my lunch from the corner deli (I had a panini). I wasn’t attacked by any saber-toothed tigers or lions are anything which was nice. No one in my family died of dysentary or plague or in childbirth or evil spells or anything and that was nice. Speant some time watching DVDs and playing on the computer. Not as fun as sitting around a grass hut with a dirt floor but it will due. Oh and I took a big shit today. I only mention it because it was nice not having to walk half a mile away from my appartment to dig a hole downstream so it wouldn’t pollute the water supply.
Let’s not have any bullshit romantic illusions that living the primitive life of a caveman was a utopian paradise.
Lets not forget the fact that one of the greatest outcomes of the western lifestyle is that we can essentially pay a very large proportion of our population to just sit on their ass and think for the sake of thinking. I would not trade the pursuit of knowledge for living a lifestyle of ignorant bliss.
And as I said in another thread, the image of the noble savage is an understandably attractive one (after all, its a logical extension of “it was better in the good old days”) but has little basis on fact.
I always understood Diamond’s theory was that all peoples had equal intelligence. It was the need for innovation and the good fortune of being in the right place with the right raw materials at the right time to impliment these innovations that drove civilizations foward.
I would agree. The tribal groups on TV might look all content but they haven’t known any other life, just like your average city person. Saying that these tribe people are living in utopia is a little misleading.
And, just doing a rough exam on my income I can say that if I just ate vegetables and a little meat, had no amenities and walked to work I could get by with less than 15 hours of work a week (at my current job). I might not want to live like that but I can (including very low rent housing and no utilities like a phone).
The 40 hour work week isn’t just to “get by” for most people. It’s to let people have phones, cars, computers with high speed internet, airconditioning, cable TV and various other things including eating mcdonalds every weekend. Those 40 hours are mostly spent making money for leasure activities.
I think that many people are mis-casting Diamond’s thesis; The question of innate intelligence is a very minor issue. The stated purpose of the book was to ask why was it that European culture dominates those of others? How come the world wasn’t “discovered” and colonized by, say, the Aztecs, or Micronesians? The pat answer has always been that European culture (and/or race) was inherently “superior.”
What Diamond is saying is that a confluence of environmental, geographic, and cultural factors made Europe the winners. Change things around a bit, and our coins might read “in Quetzalcoatl we trust.”
And while DinoBoy’s comments have already been addressed, let me ask if he can recall from his anthro course what the life expectancy and infant mortality rates were for these peoples.
Another related thing that Diamond says is that although the agrarian folk might have actually been less well-nourished and healthy individually, there were many more of them. The h-g lifestyle will not support a dense population, but the agrarian one will. A few dozen poorly-nourished farmers can eventually overcome one incredibly healthy hunter-gatherer.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book, but since this isn’t Café I think it’s no unreasonable for me to comment based on the reviews and Powerpoint versions of the book I have read.
This is exactly my take on it also. Certainly an interesting theory that bears closer scrutiny (any day now), however there are certain aspects about this theory I can’t really get to grips with.
I think it’s fair to assume that ancient man of Europe and the middle-east did not stumble into a heaven of useful animals and plants, but that they were in fact created by those same men.
I remember reading in Darwin’s Origin of the Species, a passage about why there are so many more useful plants in some areas of the world that in others; it all boiled down to the people of those area having carefully cultivated wild species to become useful – they were not there to start with.
It has been said that the original wild or just domesticated horse has slight resemblance to a modern horse, that it looked more like a wild donkey. For one, it was much apparently stubborn and feisty and smaller - properly barely able to carry a grown man. E.g. not at all an obvious candidate for a domestication effort. The reason it turned out to be such a useful animal is because of long and meticulous breeding. Is there any reason to assume animals from other continents could not likewise have been domesticated to the same effect?
I have noticed how Diamond is seen as something of a shining star around these parts, but personally, for explanation of European dominance, I would lean more towards the concept of freedom as expounded by Victor Davis Hanson (Why the West has Won). A concept, which has always seemed so much more present in Europe (even in her darkest hour) than all surrounding civilizations. Probably Hanson is not considered so hot by the majority of posters here. 
Ouch, seems I took a few to the jaw while I was out…
I did not propose to eliminate any of our modern conveniences, nor romanticize about a simple lifestyle by stating what I did. I think we all understand the pros and cons technology brings to a society.
My point was simply that there are cultures around today (or rather recently) which can attain the same basic needs through less overall work-time. And yes, these cultures generally consider themselves happy, however; they live shorter lifespans, know nothing of our technology and so on… of course, all of this is relative.
Another point I would like to make is that we today (in first world countries) create the interesting situation of our need for superfluous items (read; not nessesary for survival) with modern technology (which I am all for by the way, so sheath your swords). So are our opinions on a “better society” slightly skewed to reflect this improvement in technology only? This is neither bad nor good, however, it is simply not the only issue, or maybe it is and I’m the dope.
You really should read the whole book. You’d probably enjoy it and it would give you a lot to think about, whether you ultimately agree or not.
On the issue of more useful animals and plants in Eurasia than in other continents, one point to keep in mind. In the years since Europeans re-discovered Africa, there is not one additional large mammal that has been domesticated. Not one. All the large animals are simply too intractible or too dangerous.
In the Americas, there is also no native equivalent of wheat and other grains. The closest is maize, which the residents did improve and cultivate from a very primitive ancestor. Surely had there been others they would have used those, too. Maize (corn) is not nearly as nutritious as the many other grains that grow in many parts of Eurasia. It’s also harder to cultivate and harvest. Tough luck for the inhabitants. In contrast, there are wild grains even today in some parts of Eurasia that can be harvested with little difficulty, and it is a relatively small step to cultivation of more usable varieties.
There is an issue explained regarding the east-west axis of Eurasia vs. the north-south axis of the Americas, and the relative isolation of sub-Saharan Africa. There is a very wide area of common temperate geography across Eurasia which has no equivalent in the Americas. Llamas and other mammals never spread to North America, which had no especially large potential draft animals at all at the time it was first visited by Europeans.
The European and Asian populations simply had a much larger base of raw material to work with. There is nothing remotely like a wild donkey in the Americas. As I mentioned earlier, nobody has been able to truly domesticate any of the native African animals, although some residents of that continent have been very adept at herding imported European cattle.
Finally, I don’t know why you seem offended that many of the children of less industrialized parts of the world appeared to be more intelligent. His point in the book was that these peoples had to be alert, curious, logical and attentive to every detail of their world in order to survive. Children had to learn these details and learn them pretty fast. In contrast, many of us, while we are technologically adept and literate, can actually survive adequately and raise large numbers of children without really trying all that hard. Children in our society can be relatively passive observers, and lets face it, a lot of what we have now is handed to us on a metaphorical silver platter.
God, I LOVE this place…
He does mention that as a possibility, but then goes on to explain why he doesn’t think that fits the facts.
In part, it’s how you define “useful domestic animal” or “useful plants”. Domestic animals (outside of pets) need to be of a certain size and temperment to be domesticated in the first place. North and South America and Australia, for instance, at a certain point had a massive die-off of “mega-fauna” that might have made suitable beasts of burden or labor equivalent to horses, donkeys, yaks, etc. (In fact, horses originated in North America, but died out here while surviving in Europe). North American had NO megafauna suitable as a riding animal, nor did Australia. South America had llamas and alpacas, which were used as pack animals (and still are) but are not strong enough to carry a full-grown human any significant distance. Afro-Euro-Asia, by contrast, had horses, donkeys, camels, and elephants for riding, hauling, and carrying. There have even been instances of zebras broken to harness and ostriches being ridden. I once read an account of someone riding a rhino (although it was noted that you went where the rhino wanted to go, the animal not being open to direction). The old world had many more potential domesticates. Even where a domestic animal need not be large, they require certain traint, like being a social animal. Like dogs, for instance. Which, by the way, were a common domesticed animal in the Americas prior to European contact.
People in the Americas certainly knew about domestic animals - they had dogs in the north and dogs and llamas/alpacas along with guinea pigs in the south - the rest of the wildlife simply are not suited to domestication. In the North, native life such as raccoons might be kept as pets, but they aren’t useful in the same way as sheep, cattle, horses, and dogs are. Skunks, porcupines, oppossums, bears… none are suited to being domestic, or easily controlled, or particularly useful. Wolverines are notoriously nasty tempered, and polar bears will stalk and eat humans - they do not take orders from them.
Dogs, it may be noted, were bred to a wide range of purposes in the Americas. There were breeds for hauling (such as the Huskies), guarding, and even specifically for eating.
So even though the Native Americans knew about domestication they simply had few animals suitable to domestication.
Same for plants. The only grain to come out of the Americas was maize. The fact it’s been so heavily modified from its presumed ancestor, teosinte, that it can no longer reproduce on its own and existed in many varities prior to the arrival of Europeans shows that the people of the Americas were certainly capable of domesticating and selective breeding of plants. But no other grains were bred in the Americas. “Wild rice” exists in the Great Lakes region of North America, but while that was harvested and protected it was not bred. There were one or two other grasses utilized for seed in times of famine, but they were abandoned with the advent of grains from the old world. Contrast that with the wheat, barley, and rye of the old world in the middle east, rice and wheat in Asia, and sorghum and millet in Africa. And, oh yes, teff in the horn of Africa. And buckwheat/kasha, wherever that came from in the old world. Again, the old world had a greater variety of suitable grains.
By the way, there are dozens of cultivated varieties of potato in the Andes, and multitudes of tomato, pepper, and squash varieties from Central America. Squash, for instance, were specialized for flesh or edible seed production, or for use as containers.
The point being that the people of the ancient Americas certainly knew about domesticating plants and animals, it was a lack of suitable-for-domesticating animals and plants that limited their choices, not lack of intelligence or knowledge. What they did have they made extensive use of and dozens of varieties. To illustrate again - once horses were re-introduced to the Americas the natives eagerly adopted them, in some tribes before they even met Europeans. Once a suitable animal showed up, they domesticated it.
It might be said that the Old World domesticated a greater variety of species, but in the New World a fewer number of species were bred to mulitiple purposes.
You need to have a species of a suitable size for a task before you can even begin to think of domesticating it. And then it has to be an animal amenable to taking orders from humans. Elephants, oddly enough, will work with humans. Can’t really say they’re domesticated, though - an adult male elephant is a very dangerous animal at times, and it was always much easier to capture new work animals from the wild than to attempt a breeding program. American Bison, however, although smaller, are very ill-tempered and difficult to work with - many buffalo raised for meat production are actually crossed with domestic cattle to make them easier to handle. Even so, working with them is dangerous even with modern animal control methods like steel fencing and gates and tranquilizer guns.
The quotes are taken out of context from a larger discussion. It’s in connection with a discussion that, because H-G societies rely on finding food they are compelled to be more aware of their environments if they want to eat dinner. Also, in many of these societies there are not police or law as we know it - murder does happen and you have to defend yourself. As a result, these folks are, in some ways more alert and aware of their surrondings, and folks with memory or intelligence problems are at a severe disadvantage as far as survival. Agriculture allows folks to live without having to be professional botanists, and allows the survival of those less alert and savvy than among H-G’s. Which isn’t that different than saying our modern civilization allows the survival of disabled and chornically ill folks that would die quickly in an H-G society.
It’s also taken out of context from his points that the children and grandchildren of New Guinea Highlanders who knew only stone tools and had no writing, no formal education, or many of trappings of civilization are just as capable as those of European descent of reading, writing, learning advanced math, driving cars, flying airplanes, and so forth. They also, with each passing generation of assimilation, acquire the chronic ills of modern society.
It’s part of a larger discussion of how raw intelligence can not account for the technological differences, nor some sort of “racial” physical difference. These H-G people and their immediate descendants are just as mentally capable as their agrisociety descended neighbors.
But I’ll stop here since I don’t think the Dope would appreciate me quoting an entire chapter out of a book.