So, "In line with Diamond's thinking, the team found that environmental factors and topographic and travel costs hinder the spread of a wide array of cultural traits, including some that directly relate to social development (e.g., dominant mode of subsistence, domestic animal type, political complexity traits). However, their findings showed that contrary to Diamond's expectations, Eurasia is about as ecologically heterogeneous as other regions of our world."
Interesting work, but I'm not sure that it is all that counter to Diamond's expectations, that Eurasia is as ecologically heterogeneous. The thesis was that, because temperate regions connect to temperate regions (as opposed to the N-S orientation in the Americas where the two temperate regions are separated by tropical ones), stuff like domesticated animals or crops could spread more easily. It wasn't that Eurasia was ecologically homogeneous, it was that temperate regions connect to each other, tropical regions connect to each other, etc.
You're misinterpreting what the paper means when it says homogeneous. They're using it to describe the exact thing you are: the corridors and connections between areas, specifically places where domestication originated. They found, contrary to Diamond's assertions, that the locations of many of the places agriculture originated were actually cut off by very hostile terrain. Like how the fertile crescent is surrounded by deserts, but Diamond incorrectly uses it as an example of a place where it should have been easy to pass agriculture to surrounding areas.
> Our second set of analyses compared the distribution of ecological barriers to cultural transmission between 16 important areas of the globe: centres of agricultural origin. While the first set of analyses tests a key ecological assumption in Diamond's theory (ecological biases in cultural spread), it is this second set of analyses that tackles (and casts doubt upon) Diamond's overarching message: Eurasia benefitted from a more homogenous environment along its major corridors of cultural transmission. One of his most prominent arguments in this regard was that agriculture spread very rapidly out of the Fertile Crescent. Contrary to that view, we found that this particular region can actually experience stronger environmental barriers within the corridors of agricultural spread than those observed in other centres of agricultural origin. This trend is particularly observable when considering aridity turnover at both close- and long-range, as well as close-range topographic costs. The likely reason for this discrepancy is that even though the Fertile Crescent has access to a larger area of contiguous landmass at similar latitudes than many of its peers (Diamond's main argument), it is nevertheless more ecologically atypical for its surroundings. Most notably, the Fertile Crescent is nourished by rivers but surrounded by large deserts, and these strong gradients in access to water are further compounded by nearby changes in prevailing winds and elevation (Figure S15). These findings remind us that dramatic changes in habitat and climate can occur even within small spatial scales. In contrast to the Fertile Crescent (and other Eurasian areas), South Tropical China, the Lower-Middle Yangtze and the Chinese plateau stand out as having low aridity related costs compared with most centres of agriculture origin. South Tropical China also shows low to mid-range temperature turnover values. Both aridity and temperature regimes would have been important for the spread of rice agriculture (d'Alpoim Guedes & Butler, Reference d'Alpoim Guedes and Butler2014; Gutaker et al., Reference Gutaker, Groen, Bellis, Choi, Pires and Purugganan2020), although archaeological evidence shows that human-directed water management systems were developed early and were part of the success of rice as a crop in these regions (Fuller & Qin, Reference Fuller and Qin2009). Thus, humans were working towards hijacking the conditions that were set for their crops by the local environment, a finding that strengthens the need to consider cultural factors when understanding crop domestication. Our results show that close-range topographic travel costs are not trivial in South Tropical China, and the Lower-Middle Yangtze and the Chinese plateau show one of the highest barrier levels along this axis. Thus overall, we do not find a consensus of universal low environmental barriers to cultural spread in Eurasian areas, as hypothesised based on Eurasia's East–West dominant continental axis.
I don't find this analysis very compelling. Sure there is local heterogeneity everywhere at every scale. But the important question is why would humans cross those barriers in the first place? Clearly there is a cost and some were willing to pay it. What's the reward on the other side?
In Eurasia, crossing the desert surrounding the Fertile Cresent would have lead to a myriad of diverse habitats, with optionality in all directions. In North America, crossing the high desert of Mexico from the north puts you into a narrow strip of jungle with no option to go anywhere but through it - a dead end. This is not an insignificant difference!
So while the ecosystems are locally homogeneous as the paper describes, it doesn't touch the core of Diamond's thesis - that the unique geography of the continents afforded entirely different travel opportunities - the reason why humans decided to cross those barriers in the first place.
Crossing the high deserts of Mexico from the north puts you in one of the most agriculturally productive and ecologically diverse regions in the world: Mesoamerica. You have to go pretty far south to find what you're talking about. A lot of people, crops, and animals crossed that gap over the millennia too. Maize for instance, or the coati whose native range runs from Arizona to Brazil.
One thing that’s clear and matches what I have read —
(1) europe is surrounded by a large body of water (Mediterranean in south, Baltic & English Channel to north), enabling fast travel.
(2) Europe is extremely isolated geographically. Mountains, rivers & oceans isolated many cultural groups.
(3) the isolated nature of Europe, combined with access to mass transit (once sailing become prevalent) enabled technological expansion and competition.
(4) combined with massive competition from isolated cultures, once sailing was achieved, Africa and the Americas enabled massive raw resource inflows - creating growth and abundance
Eurasia in contrast consolidated around just a handful of cultures and often had an abundance of food and limited fast travel (via rivers & oceans) throughout history. This makes for less completion and although the stability enabled technological advancement and massive works. It also limited variation in ideas
These are just-so-stories that don't really hold up when you look closely. Yes, Europe has the Mediterranean that is advantageous for travel. But other places also have bodies of water, usually more navigable than the channel and less pirate-infested than the Mediterranean. Important European trade routes didn't really rely on those large bodies of waters. Europe isn't isolated at all, except for maybe the Alps and only in the winter. Other continents also feature loads and loads of different cultures.
Really, what you say is an example for why thinking about human development in this way is flawed from the beginning. There are no single factors responsible for the course of history. Whenever you try to identify some, your view becomes so myopic that it ends in these arbitrary Diamond hypotheses that require endless explanations for all the obvious exceptions.
I reject this. There are macro affects that are identifiable. There may be micros and contrarian examples. But that doesn’t affect that macro elements influence in that circumstance.
But it’s not like the mountains, lack of fast travel etc haven’t defended while holding back Afghanistan for 3000 years. You can argue there are a million other issues there as well but that doesn’t contradict that macro point.
I think you are lost in an attempt to be contrarian where it isn’t really warranted.
But if you want to argue with me about that ask any soldier.
Trying to make a point about Afghanistan as an entity across 3000 years is exactly the kind of sillyness these analysis leads to.
Yes, there are macros, but the point is that there are hundreds of them, they are all interconnected. If you pick just one you either make wrong implications (like the silk road region Afghanistan being isolated or lacking fast travel) or extremely trivial (like mountains being advantageous tageous for defenders in war)
Point #2 is exactly the opposite of Diamond's hypothesis. The contention is that the broad east/west alignment of all the major population centers in Eurasia meant that trade of ideas and technologies was easier than the north/south travel required to reach other cultures.
The point here being that going across latitudes is harder because you're moving through many climates and water bodies with different equipment and technology requirements to pass through them. A single caravan might get to Persia using the same pack animals and equipment with which it left Tibet, but that's not possible if you're trying to get to Kenya or Australia.
It's been a long time since I read the book, but I do think he made the point that part of what gave Europe a military edge was the fact of lots of natural geographical borders like rivers and mountains, giving rise to lots of small kingdoms instead of one big one. So there were constant conflicts, driving innovation.
And the thing about latitudes I think applies more to mobility of things like crops than to human travel, since you need to cross climate zones.
I’m curious how that’s different from the Native Americans who, regardless of their Nobel savage portrayal in media, were constantly at war with each other yet failed to develop any weapons nearly powerful enough to repel the Europeans.
As I remember it, a major thesis of the book (which I recommend, it's a fun read!) is that Europeans had the benefit of several, mainly geographical factors. This was just one of them.
> trade of ideas and technologies was easier than the north/south travel required to reach other cultures
It was mostly about the exchange of domesticated animals and crop plants. You can start using crop plants you got from your neighbors, if the plants stay in the same climate zone, so east-west movement.
That was a stronger variant of the same hypothesis. And indeed it explains the nearly uniform agriculture/husbandry recipes in Eurasia. But it doesn't explain why at the dawn of the renaissance all these cultures were producing similar crucible steel (from India) or making gunpowder (China).
Obviously the book goes farther still, I wasn't trying to summarize the whole thing. The "germs" angle matters too, the pervasive Eurasian trade networks meant that acquired immunity could be traded like technology, leading to a Eurasian "fortress of disease" that prevented immigration but did nothing to deter colonialism.
I think it is more that for best growth you need to be accessible for trade over long distances, but not so accessible to armies that want to pillage all the lands. This was the problem China had, any time civilization gets going you have some damn warlord just running around wrecking it all. But even when they do consolidate power the empire is too big to centrally manage and has to be extremely oppressive to prevent the next warlord from repeating the same trick. This stifles the economy and retards the growth of technology.
Is it? The great plains from Germany to the Urals and the Pontic Steppe have both been crossed one way or the others by many population groups among the millenia.
On the other hand, the Alps were a great defensive barrier for Rome (until they weren't). My guess is that all the mountainous regions had a similar effect until sufficient industry was available to make them easily passable.
But every continents has mountains. Still, if you take France as an example of one of the most “protected” European countries (far in the West, surrounded by mountains and seas for most of its borders), you can still see so many migration waves:
- first arrival of hominids evolving into Neandertal;
- Cro-Magnon arriving from the Middle-East;
- Bell-beaker culture, probably from the Pontic stepp;
- Celts (maybe from the West, probably from the East);
- Romans;
- the crucible of Northern, Germanic and steppe populations (Franks, Saxons, Goths, Wisigoths, Alamans, ...) that were the Great Invasions;
- Celts again in Brittany;
- Northern-African incursions and the whole Mediterranean melting pot on the southern seashores;
- All the 20th century immigration waves (Poles, White Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Algerians, Moroccans, ...);
- and probably many others I forgot/don't know about.
And even in Antiquity/Middle-Age Italy, you have Gauls and Celts in the North (after all, Northern Italy was Cisalpine *Gaul*, not Northern Italia), many Italic populations (Sabines, Etruscans, Umbrian, ...), a lot of Greek people in the South, then the Romans; after them all the aforementioned Eastern populations, then the Vikings demesnes, then Germanic incursions and settlements, etc.
re 1) Europe is surrounded by a large body of water -> that is true for many continents. In fact being surrounded by water is what defines a continent. Arguably Europe less so since it and Asia are part of the same land mass.
re 2) Is it? European rivers are relatively small, the alps not that high and yeah the atlantic is wide, but that's oceans for you
Isn't it quite naive to use a calculation of the path of least resistance to account for travel costs which the whole argument relies upon? Early civilizations would settle close to rivers and travel on th rivers and along the coasts. It seems like this model does not take this into account.
So when they calculate differences in environmental barriers across continents, it seems important to take water ways into account, which would lead to eurasia having an upper hand over at least NA and Africa. I'm not saying that Diamonds original argument holds, and its great that they try to test the hypothesis.
> Early civilizations would settle close to rivers and travel on th rivers and along the coasts. It seems like this model does not take this into account.
The path cost is dependent on the aridity of the path. They also used examples that specifically contradict your assertion- For instance they looked at an agricultural origin in Ethiopia which should have had easy access all the way to Egypt because of the Nile river. Why didn't culture spread from there instead of from Mesopotamia or Egypt, where those civilizations are at the end of their rivers and don't get any travel benefit?
But if we stick with geography, how many isthmuses create bottlenecks for migration annd exchange across Eurasia?
Look at the Middle East, which touches the Nile, the Mediterranean, the Black, Caspian and Red Seas, and the Tigris and Euphrates. How much of it is within 100 miles of temperate and navigable water?Now look at North America.
It was easier to convert energy to motion over long distances in a denser network of trade at the nexus of Eurasia.
My biggest problem is that this hypothesis does not explain why farming started so much later in the Americas than in Eurasia. From Wikipedia "approximate centres of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the Papua New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP). " and American civilisation were about 4 thousand years behind Eurasia when it come to technology.
The Cucurbita pepo squash was domesticated 10k years ago in the Americas. So there was absolutely small-scale "agriculture" throughout the Americas, roughly on the same timeline as Asia. In fact, they were experts at it (see the Three Sisters - one of the most brilliant sustainable agricultural technologies ever invented with no rival in Eurasia).
So Americans knew of advanced planting techniques but didn't deploy them at scale for another 6k years. Why? The population had not yet risen to the density that necessitated full-scale, crop-dependent communities. Far from being behind the technology curve, I'd interpret this as wise governance and population management to avoid resorting to a lifestyle that some viewed as a low-class labor. Why break your back toiling in the field when you can eat buffalo and fish?
Do we even have a clear sense of how densely-populated North America was 7000 years ago? Were there just not enough people? Was the climate suitable? Was it harder to domesticate American plants for agriculture than Eurasian plants? Etc. I feel like there are a lot of possible factors that could cause farming to develop late, which are unrelated to the validity or non-validity of the hypothesis.
> Our analyses uncovered significant variation within continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...] at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which most societies around the world transitioned into an agriculturalist mode of subsistence.
Diamond's central claims are about Eurasian/European dominance, not a general claim about natural resources being advantages. The latter is, y'know, pretty obvious.
The Horde didn't let that stop them, nor the Romans, not the Spaniards. Certainly there were bottlenecks, but there's instances of insane trade networks for instance Indus Valley artifacts turning up in the EU region and South American bird feathers in the Eastern US. Certainly there's some leakage here and there. And indeed it's known to anthropology that there are many systems to obviate inbreeding in tribal societies, Aboriginals come to mind.
Graeber's proposition, if memory serves, was that while many of the programmatic approaches are true, human volition ultimately decides. I bring that up because the more I think about it the more evident it becomes, it's not just technology but just about anything.
And that was also true of his assertions on the sharing and adoption of technology - for instance North American native tribes refused to adopt the obviously superior instruments of their neighbors for cultural reasons.
The Mongols and the various steppe nomad invaders before them depended on the continuity of the Eurasian steppe though. The long, flat, grassy expanse from Ukraine to Manchuria not only supported their livestock and culture, but functioned as a massive superhighway that allowed them to maintain such big empires. I'm skeptical of a lot of Diamond's bigger claims, but the steppe was what allowed so many expert horse archers to repeatedly conquer big parts of Eurasia over millennia.
The Mongols were absolutely not tied to the steppe. The middle east, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, China, and Korea are all famously mountainous and all of them quickly came under mongol rule. Heck, large parts of Mongolia itself are rugged. They were already well adapted to mountains long before they ever left Central Asia.
Of course they weren't tied to the steppe. They could leave it. However, they needed to steppe to form these huge empires, and conquer settled cultures in the first place. This is due number of related reasons that are fundamentally about the unique steppe environment:
1) Large herds of horses consume monumental amounts of grass, especially when they are on the move during military campaigns. The steppe is suited for continuous occupation by these herds in a way that most of Europe or the ME isn't. The Mongol's forays into non-steppe areas were limited by available grass.
2) Related to this, abundant grass was why they had a horse-oriented culture and economy, and why horses were ridden by common people, and not just the elites - as in most all other areas.
3) While parts of Mongolia are mountainous and the Mongols and other steppe groups ventured into them, horses don't do well with very rugged terrain. Horses can't make it up many or most hiking trails in the American West, for example - they can't be too steep or have significant obstacles. In addition, again there is less grass in such areas.
To sum up, the Mongols and other riders needed the steppe for the abundant grass. The flatness of the Eurasian steppe also allowed for incredibly fast travel, which is why the Mongols, Turks, and others were able to have continuous cultures and empires from Europe to China.
Whenever the steppe conquerors conquered and ruled from non-steppe areas, they could not maintain massive cavalry (unless they were receiving reinforcements from the steppe). This leads to the treadmill of conquest and abandonment of the horse-oriented culture that made their conquests possible in the first place. That happened with the Iranians, Mongols, and various Turkic groups, among others.
You're missing my point here, which is that mountainous areas weren't some peripheral interstitial zone they would occasionally mount expeditions to with a lot of preparation and care. Rather, they were a core part of the Mongolian homeland and critical to the economic system of central asia. Mongolian horses were extremely important to that success, with good adaptations for the harsh environments and much better foraging than almost anyone else's. It allowed the Mongols to mount lightning fast campaigns across terrain no one else could, in conditions thought impossible. This was enabled by the incredible depth of experience with adverse, arid, and mountainous terrain possessed by Mongol commanders. If you want a specific example, look up the campaigns against Qara-Khitai, which famously included an expedition of ~30,000 over the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan in the dead of winter.
This sounds not very thorough. The cultural movement vector accelerators are quite visible. The mediterranen coas allowed several cultures to create trade networks.
And the eastern steppes allowed military raid alliances to put military evolutionary pressure on kingdom and empires.
The self sufficient battle sponge like structure of central Europe promoted constant cultural competition (unlike nowadays).
This is such a weird idea. It's not the whole of Asia that developed earlier, but Europe. Which has predominately a North-South axis. But that is not even correct. Civilization forms on coastlines. Europe's coast is also predominately North-South. So is the Nile's. So is China's, where the vast majority of Chinese live. But the Mediterranean's isn't. So it doesn't matter, because it obviously doesn't.
Seems like they are splitting the difference a little. It has 'some' impact, but not 'as great as supposed by Diamond'?
It was a big theme of the Diamond book, but don't think he said it was 'Everything'. I remember it being more of a proposed theory, and he does focus on Geography a lot. But maybe I'm splitting hairs, since it was such a big theme of his book, it might be the only thing people remember.
You're missing a lot of context surrounding the book. Academics have always acknowledged that geography impacts societies to some degree. There would have been no point in writing GG&S if that was the only argument.
Diamond's actual argument is that it's a major, possibly primary factor. He then went on a speaking tour where he told anyone who was dismissive of his grand narrative that they should stop waffling about how complex the factors influence societies are and make their own grand narrative instead.
> Our analyses uncovered significant variation within continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...] at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which most societies around the world transitioned into an agriculturalist mode of subsistence.
Guess I only read the summary, where they are more guarded.
""Environmental heterogeneity along Eurasia's major corridors of cultural transmission was not significantly lower than observed in other continents. One of the authors, Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, summarizes the results by saying, "Our findings point out that geography, like genetics and ecology, matters, but it is not destiny."
Senior author of the study, Carlos Botero from the University of Texas at Austin, concludes with a word of caution, "We do not claim, by any means, to have a definitive answer on whether the wheels of history turned at different speeds in different parts of the world.""
You’re kind of missing something. The interesting result is that they didn’t find evidence for Diamond’s theory, which isn’t so surprising to me. The world is a very complicated place and mono causality is, almost surely, never the case.
Diamond's premise is that Europe's geographical layout gave it superior advantages to the rest of the planet.
The paper found that Europe's layout is in fact not significantly better or even different from many other places on earth where early humans developed. They even found that in many cases civilization flourished in direct opposition to those qualities, like in southeast asia where mountainous terrain was compensated with rice terraces.
They also confirmed that the things Diamond said about having interconnected similar areas etc being important to cultural spread were generally right, just that they aren't actually correlated very closely with europe/asia in particular. Diamond was right about them (they're very agreeable statements, and not unique to him) but they don't support his thesis.
Though I still don't quite understand what is the original question here. I have not read Diamond's book, so I don't know what he is exactly trying to explain. The phys.org source talks about "Eurasian political and military dominance".
First, the focus on Asia (in addition to Europe) is strange. The renaissance, the industrial revolution, the demographic transition, secularism, constitutional democracy, institutionalized science etc all started in Europe and not in Asia. So apparently Diamond tries to explain the current political dominance of (some parts of) Asia. But then he would need to also take into account the US, not just Europe and Asia. So I don't really understand what we are trying to explain here.
One important point that hardly anybody dares to mention is that people of East Asian and European descent have significantly higher IQs than people from other geographic areas. Personal IQ is highly correlated with measures of life success, like income, highest education degree etc. Moreover, national IQ is substantially correlated with per capita GDP. We also know from twin studies that adults have similar IQ to their biological parents, not their adoptive parents. This suggests IQ causes both personal and national success, and isn't just correlated with it.
So arguably the task should not be to explain some sort of "Eurasian" dominance, since this dominance can likely be explained sufficiently with IQ as a proximate cause. The open question is rather why people of East Asian and European descent have a higher average IQ. Or why modernity began in Western Europe, not Asia, despite East Asians today having higher IQs than Europeans (excluding people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, which have higher IQs than both gentile Europeans and East Asians).
You've taken a wild leap from narrow psychometric observations to characterizing all of humanity, induced wholly from the observation that "children's IQ is closer to that of biological parents than to adoptive parents" (itself a complicated and tenuous finding). There is far more variation within large cohorts of humanity than between them. No, I don't think you can explain any kind of "Eurasian" dominance this way.
I don't blame you if you'd rather not look at the research too closely, it kind of feels like an infohazard. But it's a good source to bookmark and to perhaps come back later.
That's speculation by "Rational Wiki", a far from rational and highly politically biased group that defames everything and everyone as "racist" that doesn't fit their world view. This has in the past included attacks against highly respected people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander. They do not focus on evidence-based arguments, as real rationalists would. They don't calmly post peer-reviewed studies like Paolo Shirasi. Their Modus operandi is a) doxxing and b) to slander people with the label "racist".
But reality is what it is. It doesn't care whether someone labels a hypothesis as racist or not. The only way to grapple with reality is to find out what it is.
I don't read RationalWiki pages for analysis, just for the receipts they have, which was the point of that link. You've cited a pseudonymous racial supremacist.
I cited someone who posted empirical evidence from a lot of peer-reviewed studies. Slapping the defamatory label "racial supremacist" to anyone who cites evidence one doesn't like doesn't change anything. Apart from that, a "supremacist" usually refers to someone who thinks his group is the best one, but we have no indication that he is Ashkenazi Jewish or even East Asian.
> Our analyses uncovered significant variation within continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...] at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which most societies around the world transitioned into an agriculturalist mode of subsistence.
Interesting work, but I'm not sure that it is all that counter to Diamond's expectations, that Eurasia is as ecologically heterogeneous. The thesis was that, because temperate regions connect to temperate regions (as opposed to the N-S orientation in the Americas where the two temperate regions are separated by tropical ones), stuff like domesticated animals or crops could spread more easily. It wasn't that Eurasia was ecologically homogeneous, it was that temperate regions connect to each other, tropical regions connect to each other, etc.