Originally a biologist, Jared Diamond now attempts to account for the fact that the people of the remote New Guinea highlands subsist on hunting and foraging, while civilization has made so many rapid advances elsewhere. It's a big job and he pulls it off pretty well.
The idea of multiple effects of climate, land, disease, and technology have been known for a long time. The anthropologist Marvin Harris called it "techno-environmental determinism. What Diamond appears to have done is fill in the blanks with details and give us a diachronic view of the impact of these variable. I viewed the program as a cultural anthropologist myself, but I haven't had an archaeological thought in years, so much of it was new to me.
In the absence of space to lay out the entire development of history, I'll limit myself to an example or two. The tribes of New Guinea didn't have airplanes and wrist watches because they were too busy keeping alive by finding and processing food. By sheer luck, the humans of the Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Eurphrates Rivers in the Middle East, found themselves in a natural milieu that made the domestication of plants and animals possible. It was a mild climate and a fruitful soil that made it possible for vast fields of wheat and barley to be grown. This provided a food surplus which in turn made possible craft specialists like astronomers who didn't have to farm for a living.
And it wasn't just the land and climate. Diamond actually went to the trouble of counting all the animals that had been domesticated ("tamed") in the prehistoric world. There were about fourteen. All but one -- the llama of South America -- occurred naturally in the land connecting Europe to Asia. They provided beasts of burden among their other services and made possible plowed fields and larger crops. Jared doesn't count dogs, properly so, because they came much earlier, about 20,000 years ago. Oddly, he doesn't count cats either, although they began providing Egyptians with living mouse traps in the grain storage houses, only about 4,000 years ago. Of course neither cats nor dogs are going to help you plow a field, and you can't ride astride either of them. Pigs were domesticated in the Middle East too, which was surprising because, after all, pigs love mud and how much mud can there be in, say, Turkey? I'd always thought they'd been domesticated in the Far East -- and so they were, independently.
And here's where Diamond gets me. I don't know if it was his idea or not but it was news to me that the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent over-exploited their resources, exhausting the land and diminishing their water supply. But the practice of crop farming then diffused from the Middle East both westward and eastward along the same lines of latitude because, again, like Goldilocks' porridge it was just right, excepting sharp differences in altitude.
I wrote a book on environmental influences too but it was much broader and less organized that Diamond's work. I wouldn't have had the patience to actually count the number of domesticated beasts of burden, for instance, although I knew the general layout. His approach is limited to history/archaeology and doesn't deal with subjects like crowding or minutiae like the influence of carpets in psychiatric facilities. He also makes the assumption that all people everywhere are equally adaptable and smart, whereas I'm just not sure that there aren't small but important differences in neurobiology. Not to knock Diamond. The guy has applied himself assiduously to his topic and deserves some kind of prize.
End of Part 1. Part 2 will deal with the Conquest of the New World or with imperialism generally, so I gather.
The idea of multiple effects of climate, land, disease, and technology have been known for a long time. The anthropologist Marvin Harris called it "techno-environmental determinism. What Diamond appears to have done is fill in the blanks with details and give us a diachronic view of the impact of these variable. I viewed the program as a cultural anthropologist myself, but I haven't had an archaeological thought in years, so much of it was new to me.
In the absence of space to lay out the entire development of history, I'll limit myself to an example or two. The tribes of New Guinea didn't have airplanes and wrist watches because they were too busy keeping alive by finding and processing food. By sheer luck, the humans of the Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Eurphrates Rivers in the Middle East, found themselves in a natural milieu that made the domestication of plants and animals possible. It was a mild climate and a fruitful soil that made it possible for vast fields of wheat and barley to be grown. This provided a food surplus which in turn made possible craft specialists like astronomers who didn't have to farm for a living.
And it wasn't just the land and climate. Diamond actually went to the trouble of counting all the animals that had been domesticated ("tamed") in the prehistoric world. There were about fourteen. All but one -- the llama of South America -- occurred naturally in the land connecting Europe to Asia. They provided beasts of burden among their other services and made possible plowed fields and larger crops. Jared doesn't count dogs, properly so, because they came much earlier, about 20,000 years ago. Oddly, he doesn't count cats either, although they began providing Egyptians with living mouse traps in the grain storage houses, only about 4,000 years ago. Of course neither cats nor dogs are going to help you plow a field, and you can't ride astride either of them. Pigs were domesticated in the Middle East too, which was surprising because, after all, pigs love mud and how much mud can there be in, say, Turkey? I'd always thought they'd been domesticated in the Far East -- and so they were, independently.
And here's where Diamond gets me. I don't know if it was his idea or not but it was news to me that the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent over-exploited their resources, exhausting the land and diminishing their water supply. But the practice of crop farming then diffused from the Middle East both westward and eastward along the same lines of latitude because, again, like Goldilocks' porridge it was just right, excepting sharp differences in altitude.
I wrote a book on environmental influences too but it was much broader and less organized that Diamond's work. I wouldn't have had the patience to actually count the number of domesticated beasts of burden, for instance, although I knew the general layout. His approach is limited to history/archaeology and doesn't deal with subjects like crowding or minutiae like the influence of carpets in psychiatric facilities. He also makes the assumption that all people everywhere are equally adaptable and smart, whereas I'm just not sure that there aren't small but important differences in neurobiology. Not to knock Diamond. The guy has applied himself assiduously to his topic and deserves some kind of prize.
End of Part 1. Part 2 will deal with the Conquest of the New World or with imperialism generally, so I gather.
