In what way has biological determinism been validated, and the points raised in Mismeasure countered? That determinism included cranial measurements, etc.
Guns looks at eight points, including ecosystems in light of staple crops and policies, etc., employed to either encourage, for example, exploration or otherwise (e.g., fragmented European states where people could move from one place to another to seek funding, and China, where long-range sea exploration was banned). How are these even mainstream stories or even singular, linear narratives?
Diamond, Harari, Fukuyama, Pinker etc. assume a simple linear evolutionary progression from small, simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands → agricultural revolution → cities, hierarchy, kings, armies. This is basically the same fairy tale that Rousseau told in the 18th century, and it’s been repeated ever since.
Modern archaeology and anthropology have shown that it’s flat wrong.
For a fuller discussion, I suggest you read the free sample of Dawn of Everything on Amazon. It’s a substantial chunk consisting of the first two chapters of the book, and it goes into all this in detail. You can read it online (Look Inside) or download the Kindle sample.
“Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring . . . It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.”
―William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic
Well, that was the point of Mismeasure: to discredit biological determinism.
Guns doesn’t give a “simple lineral evolutionary progression.” Rather, it explains how multiple factors, especially environmental ones, affect the use of technology, etc.