Lecture 20: The Last 13,000 Years of Human History PDF

Lecture 20: The last 13,000 years of human history P.S Cooking ape… ● 1 other interesting from Wrangham ● About living enzymes. Enzymes are part of digestive system. ● Thousands of products out there that say they contain living enzymes which are essential for your health or digestion etc… ● But the...

Lecture 20: The last 13,000 years of human history P.S Cooking ape… ● 1 other interesting from Wrangham ● About living enzymes. Enzymes are part of digestive system. ● Thousands of products out there that say they contain living enzymes which are essential for your health or digestion etc… ● But these are all fake. ● Reason: Living enzymes in the body yes but not those that you ‘eat’. If you drink living enzymes, your stomach acid will destroy it. ● The idea that you benefit by ingesting living enzymes is fake. Guns, germs and steel by Jared Diamond, bird expert ● This book addresses a very profound and interesting question: “Why is it that after human beings have evolved and spread over most of the surface of the earth, for thousand of years, all the people in the world were all the same? We were all caveman.” o Deep history perspective ● There was a great era of equality. We were equally dirty and smelly and equally caveman. ● But go forward a few thousands of years, the world is extremely unequal. People from certain parts of the globe went to other parts and easily conquered those people. There were certain parts of the world with very huge population and other parts with very small population. Areas with huge amounts of technologies and wealth and cities and big buildings, while other parts, people still live in grass huts, like their ancestors had hundreds, thousands of years before. ● Why is that? That is the question that Jared Diamond asked and answered. Something that historians, archaeologist, anthropologists should have answered before him, but did not. ● Richard Wrangham is not a palaeontologist but a bird expert, yet he is making a big argument about human evolution and palaeontologists (people who study fossil bones) don’t like it because it seems like he is taking all the credits but Wrangham was probably right. (Mr Vestiges too, sort of basically right too) Is Jared Diamond basically right too? (leave it up to you to decide whether he is or not) ● “A brief history of humankind, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, historian” derived from this book Eurasian colonisation (most recent era of human colonisation) ● With very great differences in wealth and resources and industrialisation o Some say that this is due to European colonisation (myth as this does not explain as this is a much older pattern than colonisation) *Racist view ▪ We often associate colonisation with something those nasty European people did in the last 2-300 years -- sailing around the world and conquered huge chunks of Africa or the New World – Australia, large chunks of SEA, India, little bits of China, all over the world. o Some say this is due to the races of people who live at the different parts of the world ● In this lecture we are looking at the history of 13000 years. Human beings, populations, groups, and societies have moved around a lot in those 13000 years ago. Basically, almost no aboriginal people. Almost all people (99%) in the world are there because they got there much later and displaced the people who were there before. They were probably the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th or 20th, etc., replacements of people washing in and pushing away the people who were there before ● The original habitants of Singapore – orang asli (kind of like the aboriginal Australians) who were probably the original inhabitants, if not homo erectus. ● So basically, there had been waves and waves of human expansion that displaced the people who were there before. What happened since Homo Sapiens (humans) appeared. Arose in Africa 200,000 years ago. o Mitochondrial Eve 🡪 all mitochondrial DNAs descended from one woman and probably lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa. o 60,000 years ago, a great leap forward. Striking difference in the things we make, perhaps brain achieved innovation ▪ Artefacts that humans made suddenly became more artistic and complicated (mutation? We don’t know) ▪ First painting of cave art, 44,000 years ago until recently ● Cave painting from Lascaux in France. 16,000 years old. (fertility painting?) by Neanderthals ● Don’t assume just on cave, like wood etc (less stable, erodes) ▪ There are Neanderthals paintings too (pre-human, identical to us) Hunter-gatherers ● All human beings have been hunter-gatherers ● Everyone was on the same footing. ● They spend large amount of time snoozing and lounging around. o Everyone was equal, had the same population density etc ● If everyone were hunter gatherers, why do people become unequal? ● Hunter gatherers today are people in the modern world than in ancient times (be aware when you study them) o They used to live in the whole globe vs now when theres marginal areas not taken over o Hunter gatherers today are different from our ancestor o But only source to study to understand our ancestors Domesticating plants ● Jared’s argument ● The first change from hunter gatherer’s lifestyle came with the domestication of plants and animals, which sounded like somebody just started doing, but in reality, it must have been a very slow process, over many centuries. ● Domesticated products are bigger and have more sugar content. o Eg: Corn became small to big ● Domestication of plants was the key because it led to stable food source. Led to a bigger food source as well. Gathering of plants and fruits had a limit (constraints) – very little surplus or reserve can be generated, very little to store because they had to move (hunters gatherers very seldom can stay at the same place for long). ● With the gradual rise of domestication, large amounts of food crops (i.e. grain) were collected and stored, it was far more than you can eat. ● Lots of food available all year round. Logically, they had more babies. (Those naughty farmers) o They have to stay there and harvest those crops because of the more mouths to feed ▪ Thus they stopped moving and travelling. Cannot go thousands of miles with their families and babies. ● Population of hunter gatherers are extremely limited because of the amount of food, because they had to keep mobile and breast-feeding mothers tend to reproduce less often (lactational amenorrhea). o Hunter gatherers had a very low birth rate from other reasons as well. Hence hunter/gatherers had very limited population density ● With the rise of food production that was completely changed. The world that we start to live in now has emerged -- Denser population (lots of people) living in one area. ● Farming is not progress from hunting, just different. ● From God’s eye view – certain parts of the world, people grew plants and kept animals and had towns/cities and had lots and lots more people than hunter gatherers. What happens when farmers and hunter gatherers run into each other? Sometimes they trade but usually they fight. The hunter gatherers may be savvier/with ninja like stealth as compared to farmers which were slower, sick etc. But farmers were larger in numbers and they swarmed over the hunter gatherers. The range of growers, famers, herders constantly expand century over century, they grew at the expense of hunter gatherers. ● This story is usually told as one of progress that we used to be cavemen and hunter gatherers, but then we domesticated pants and animals and that we had surplus of food and that we developed lots of technologies, it is progress. But is it? ● Farming has a lot of drawbacks. Tough life. Not as healthy as hunting due to the lifestyle Fertile crescent ● As far as we know, this process has begun in what is called the fertile crescent, between 7000 -10,000 B.C. This area is now called the Middle East. ● This part of the world has high number of plants that were easier to domesticate (and watered with rivers) compared to rest of the world. ● They eventually created technology for agriculture farming and the culture began to spread. ● Different agriculture products come from different part of the world that could be domesticated ● If we had seen pictures of Middle East, we may be surprised that this could be such an agricultural epicentre, but we have to realise that we have changed the environment very aggressively. It used to be lush forests, green paradise until human beings screwed it all up as we often do. ● As populations grew, they built towns/cities/kingdoms/empires etc. All the time they were farming and clearing forests. And clearing forests (and sometimes making irrigation canals) could eventually lead to erosion and erosion destroyed the fertility of large tracts of that part of the world and is now a desert. We made it a desert and it is never going back; it is an irreversible process. ● The oldest civilisation empires that we had ever heard of are from this part of the world because it is where food production began. Farming spread outwards from middle east (fertile cresent) 3500 BC left and 9000 BC right Places that domestication started independently of each other (origin of food production) 🡺 West Africa? 🡺 Fertile crescent 🡺 Sahel? 🡺 Ethiopia? 🡺 China 🡺 New guinea? 🡺 Mesoamerica 🡺 Andes and Amazonia? 🡺 Eastern united states The question Diamond ask: Why these places? Why not just everywhere? Why didn’t we do this domestication everywhere. ● Food we eat today comes from very different origins o Different parts of the world in the past have different food origins ● His answer: it depended on the native species available in the area. Only certain species have the properties necessary to be domesticated. E.g. wheat and rice. ● Other things like Oak trees, cannot be domesticated. Due to oak tree genetics and take very long to mature. In fact, they still have not been. The acorns are really nasty tasting. Every once in a while, a genetic mutant produces acorns that do not taste so nasty and do not have those terrible toxins in them and we can just eat them but they are not cultivated because genetics does not work that way, the offspring will not be this way. ● There are many species in the world but not all can be domesticated. ● Turns out human beings in the past domesticate almost anything that can be domesticated. Still the same domesticated stuff today even with modern technology today. Loads of trial and error. ● The grains of rice now much bigger than ancestor species. Same for wheat and corn. ● Another argument: Once the domesticates were available, they spread in certain direction more easily. Plants can be more readily transported along the same longitude because the day length is the same, the climate tends to be the same along the same longitude, so you can plant the same plant along the line and it will still grow fine. But if you go far North or South, you will go beyond what the plant is suited to. ● This is one of Diamond’s argument why agricultural revolution spread more rapidly in Eurasia than it did in other parts of the world because the plants could be transported along the same longitude. (same weather conditions) It took a thousand of years for domesticated plants to get from Mexico to central America. Tomatoes and potatoes that come from the Andes never made it to Mexico. o Thus Eurasia plants spread more rapidl than America and Asia Domesticated animals ● Hunter-gatherers chased down animals, killed them and ate them or found dead ones and ate them. ● Animals are domesticated in a similar process as plants. ● Domesticated wolves before we domesticated any plants. o Become dogs today o Common ancestor 🡪 gray wolf ● Probably first by fencing in herds of animals and keeping them for a while and gradually kill them as you needed them, but over time some species came to be domesticated. But same as the plants, NOT all the species can be domesticated due to their behaviour. Those that are domesticated in ancient times basically constitute to those that we ate today still. There are no new domesticated animals, except for hamsters -- since the 1930s. All the classic ones known around the world are domesticated since ancient times, from different parts of the world. ● Through the same process, (refer to slide18) these other animals can be domesticated but with a difference - with dogs, we had to get over this impossible social instinct/structure of this animals that basically wolves are not possible to be kept as pets. With other animals, they are herd animals with a different kind of social structure, they follow the dominant animal. Human beings took advantage of that. Once caught by humans – the animals imprint on the human and treat human as the dominant one. They assume humans are boss, so they put up with us. In their wild ancestral species – they all followed the dominant animal, they only had one boss. Once the humans killed off the dominant one and took over, they became the dominant one. And humans can keep the animals and they would not kill you. ● The first animal we domesticated is dog. Domesticated by hunter gatherers. ● Dogs descend from Gray Wolf. Wolves are packed animals. Social structures work in certain way. Struggle for dominance. They try to climb the ladder. Dogs are wolf without these dominances. ● Gradual process of domesticating animal. We created domestic dogs perhaps unconsciously. Kept those that are more docile. (initially with wolf pup)🡪 neather dog ● Through the same process, other animals become domesticated. With dogs, we have to overcome its social instincts but with other animals, they are herd animals with a different kind of social culture, they follow the dominant animal. These animals were prepared to follow the dominant member of their herd. When they are caught by human, they accept human as the dominant animal. They assume we are boss. ● Darwin was the first to describe the parallel between domestication & evolution by natural selection in the natural world ● Tame vs Domesticated 🡪 tame means can live with humans without hurting us while domesticated means changed or altered by humans o Zoo 🡪 tame, biologically identical to their relatives // Chicken 🡪 never existed in the wild, man-made o *Note Wild jungle foal is ancestors of chicken, they are wild and not domesticated ● Artificial selection also indirectly changed some wolfs into dogs ● Process is artificial selection 🡪 select wolfs that are more submissive to us o By killing their parents as well o If they become too dangerous, then kill them off o Create dogs that are happy to be the underdog What do domesticated animals provide? ● Domesticated animals are evolved animals from our ancestors ● What were they used for? Initially for food, milk etc. Until somebody found out they can use their power. Like ploughing. Until industrial revolution, thousands of years later, they are the most powerful force on earth. Ploughing – the principal thing these animals do. ● 1) Domesticated animals provided far more energy than those that are not domesticated o But comparing their earlier ancestors, humans only created what they needed and continued off doing other things (narrower diet) unlike earlier ancestors where they hunted a lot of food 🡪 that’s why humans are less healthy than hunter gatherers o The farmers had a worse diet and more impoverished than hunter gatherers – hunter gatherers ate a far wider variety of substances (several hundred kinds of plants, roots insects, animals, etc.) which were healthier o As such, farmers were shorter as compared to hunter-gatherers. o Farmers also had poor teeth due to more sugar from cultivated plants. Another thing that developed is diseases as they lived in larger communities in close proximities. o Hunter-gatherers live in cleaner environment as they move around, away from filth o Displaced hunter gatherers ● They provided sources of material, meat/bone/leather/intestines/antlers. Various parts of their bodies make all kinds of different things. Even their intestines can be used to make violin strings. Animals were used as material, food then as transport then power. ● Provided transport – this probably came last. someone figured out that you can ride on the backs of horses. Some groups figured it out somewhere from Asia and horses had not spread far beyond the area where these original people had them. When these first mounted warriors in the world started raiding villages in the other side of the valley/region, they were the most powerful military forces on Earth. It was just a man on a horse, no saddle, etc, and that was already beyond anything anyone had seen. ● Ancient Greek mythology creature – Centaur. Half horse half man. The Greeks first saw these rampaging warriors on a horse from the East and thought they were some kind of monsters. And this is how they drew it. ● Much much later that the chariots were invented (link horses to a small vehicle with wheels). This was the major military technology for many many centuries. In fact, the Egyptians and armies at that time, their power was primarily of chariots -- can sit/stand at the back and shoot arrows at the enemies. ● The descendants of the first people who started to domesticate certain kinds of animals, particularly goats and cows, began to use dairy products as food. They began to drink their milk, make cheese and other products, things that did not exist in human diet before. Eventually more and more of the population began to benefit from this Result of domestications… ● As a result of domestication only happening in certain parts of the world, it allowed big population (1. population growth) to exist in one place. The first towns were a result of this. Domestication also allowed for domestication. ● In Hunter gatherers society, there was almost no specialisation. Everyone had the same CV and job description. Everyone had to gather food to live. ● But with the rise of agriculture and food production, suddenly there were massive surpluses. There was a large part of the population who were not involved in making food and could do other things. Hence, all these specialisms arose after food production. o 2. Specialist o Ruling elites of the small number of vast population of farmers not involved in food production ▪ Governance and taxes o So, standing armies existed for the first time (soldiers and specialists) in this towns. There were people who eventually became merchants/kings/priests, weave basket, make tools/clothing etc. ● One of the forms of specialisation is the development of other technologies that were not possible if they were hunter-gatherer. Nothing was ever close discovered or created by hunter-gatherers. ● The ability to smelt metals to burn rocks in the fire until some nice useful stuff drips out is a very bizarre discovery. ● Smelting of metals – from soft things like copper to mixing things to create bronze, much later to make iron etc. ● Wealth was created (surplus of food). Difference of wealth emerged. Rulers, kings, governments, taxes, armies etc. created o Societies were becoming more complex o Able to build Pyramids and Ziggurats due to workers and improvement in technologies And so much follows from that… Writing ● Writing evolved somewhat later than that. The original writing in different parts of the world is very similar. Many of these innovations evolved in one place and then spread widely to regions around them, rather than being independently invented in lots and lots of places. ● Why do so many of the Asian writing systems look so similar? They look like Chinese. Because people on this half of the world invented writing systems that looked kind of the same or do they share a common origin? ● In the middle east there were various writing systems (2-3 Egyptian systems) and eventually there was the alphabets system which was then spread more widely. ● In the Middle East, the writing system started off as a way of recording trade. o For example the cuneiform tablets that were the earliest surviving form of writing from the Sumerians, about 7000 years ago, 4000 BCE, on clay tablets – Their writing consisted of a little wooden tool called a wedge-stylus and you will simply make a series of dents/poke marks in the wet clay and that was writing. o Even that evolved. Originally, they would simply hand each other, for transactions, little clay tokens. Let’s say you sold me a sheep, and I need a record to show that I did not steal it, there will be a receipt/record of three little squares made of clay. To show that the deal is done, it will be wrapped out in another piece of clay like an enveloped and be squeezed together and inside, there were three little cubes. The deal is then done. Imagine if you unwrap that piece of wet clay and looked at it, three cubes had been pressed on clay when you fold it up, when you pull it off you would probably have three little dents, in the shape of squares pressed onto the clay. o Eventually, people got tired of making these 3D objects to represent a sale, and simply made do with a flat sheet of clay with a mark imprinted on it. This was the advent of writing in the Middle East as a record of transaction. It evolved from using 3 dimensional objects used as token and then into symbols for the tokens and the symbols became more and more abstract and gradually got simpler and simpler. o Evolved from cube objects to symbols etc.… o Evolution of cuneiform script ▪ 1. Shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BCE ▪ 2. Shows the rotated pictogram as written around 2800 BCE ▪ 3. Shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from 2600 BCE ▪ 4. Sign as written in clay, same as step 3 ▪ 5. Represents the late 3rd millennium ▪ 6. Represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite ▪ 7. Is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium until script’s extinction ● The Phoenician alphabet, 1200-150 BCE, people that lived in the Mediterranean (another writing system) o Ancestor of our English alphabet (roman alphabet) ● Diagrams o All different places where writing independently emerged. Proved by rapid diffusion. Writings also emerge independently in China, Egypt etc… ● Writing in china began with religious interpretations. ● In this diagram from Diamond’s book, he points out all the different places where writing independently emerged. ● Writing emerged completely independently in Sumer (oldest source of writing)/China/probably in Egypt and Mesoamerica. o PEOPLE INVITED WRITING ON THEIR OWN ● How Chinese writing emerged? Instead of being a record of financial transaction, writing in China began as a record of religious interpretation. So, the king would have a kind of divination process conducted whereby a priest would consult the Gods to find out if the King is going to have a good year next year or if the King’s head concubine is going to bear a son, some sort of important questions like that. So, they would put poker in the fire until it got red hot and they would get the scapula bone of an ox or the belly plate from a turtle (a plastron) and take the red hot poker and stick on the bone or plastron and it would crack and make a pattern of cracks then the priest will then read the will of the God. So, they did that for a long time, with time they began to annotate these cracks, maybe by drawing an ‘X’, etc, they began to make to make little marks. Then over the years/centuries, the marks became more sophisticated, and they began to draw little pictures. So, these pictographs are the origins of Chinese writing. Scapulimancy – divination based on the cracks of the scapula. Diffusion of metallurgy o Humans started to be able to make metals o New technologies spread in certain directions, amber route o Bronze age/ Iron age Superb advanced technology to expand 🡪 boat and navigation skills Proto Indo-European expansion from 6000 years ago ● *Language also helps us to know what existed and what not, eg: don’t have word for gun so we have to create the word on our own ● Different populations had swept over the globe again and again, and almost nobody is aboriginal in where they live now. Here is an example that is particularly famous, which is the Proto Indo Europeans – a group of people whom we have discovered first through linguistics then through archaeology, because there are so many surviving languages in these days that bear traces of being commonly descended from an original source. o Swept over the globe 🡪 indo European because of the advanced technology o It was first discovered by an Englishman, Sir William Jones, who was part of the colonial administration in India at the end of the 18th century. He was the first to observe that the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and other languages had striking similarities in their words that cannot be a coincidence. He first proposed that these languages were all descended from an ancestor that eventually became to be called as Proto Indo European or Indo European. There was this place where this language emerges, and we o o o know little bit of them from the vocabulary that is descended to the daughter languages. Some went to India and some went to Europe For example, we know they were herders because they had words with ‘sheep’ which was descended to all the daughter languages. So, all the European languages today are descended from Indo-European. So, the word for sheep is related although the current English word of sheep has a different origin, the proto Indo-European root is still preserved in the word for female sheep which is Ewe. Waves and waves of people came to Europe and displaced the people who used to live in Europe. There were various people in Europe before the Indo-Europeans came to Europe and basically washed over the continent, and just a few rugged pockets of the previous people survived. One of those pockets is at the border of Spain and France. They are called the Basques. They were a different people with a different language. They are a tiny fragment that survived from the pre-Indo-European time. ▪ A subsequent wave and the celts/Kelts experienced the same thing survived only on the edge of Britain, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. ▪ So, we all have been colonised and have been colonisers. ▪ 2 groups of people in Europe that did not get displaced: Language date back before European expansion, Finland and Basque Austronesian expansion from 1600 BCE. It is now believed through genetic evidence that many of the SEA came from Taiwan. ● Ancestors of Malays come from Taiwan ● The original people (aboriginal Australian looking people) were displaced because they were hunter gatherers, and these Austronesians people coming down were people who had domesticated animals/plants. They had a larger population and had more complicated technologies and they displaced those people and only a tiny pocket of people survived in remote places like in the middle of the forest. ● The Austronesians did not get to Australia and did not take over New Guinea because New Guinea was a gigantic forest, not suitable for them. ● These people (Austronesian) slowly colonised the islands of the Pacific and they are what we call the Polynesians. The Polynesians are related to the Malays and the Malays are descended from these people. ● The furthest place they reached was Madagascar. ● Old world: Africa, Europe, Asia ● New World: North/South America and Oceania And so, by 1500 CE there were very different societies in the world… ● By 1500, the world was very different from it was 13000 years ago. ● (Before 1500) We were all hunter gatherers, population densities/technology level/power were all the same. o EQUAL ● By 1500, there were big countries with powerful armies/navies/weapons made of metal. There was gunpowder and sailing ships by this time but there were other parts of the world where people were still hunter gatherers around. (due to differences in environment) o NOT EQUAL ANYMORE ● Diamond argues that– some people advanced/changed (a neutral term) in certain ways not because of the races (not because some races were cleverer than others, his book is against the racial explanation for these differences). 🡪 Jared Diamond maybe thought if he presented his theory as an anti-racist theory then his theory would be more accepted by people. ● In previous centuries (Victorian era) they would probably think it was due to superiority of certain races. Maybe when they got to Hawaii and people over there had primitive technologies as compared to their own, then maybe they did think it is because of race. Or maybe when they got to Australia, and people there were all hunter gatherers, then they would explain by race. But not nowadays, nobody would propose that it got to do with the intelligence of people/races. People would go for anti-racist theories. Population-weighted map of the world, c. 1500 CE ● A map of the world shrunk according to population. ● NA & SA and Africa, Australia are very thin 🡪 not heavily populated o [red box] Human population – Americans are really squeezed 🡪 small population. (Aztecs and Incans too) ● Europe, Asia, India 🡪 heavily populated o [red oval] The old world: Eurasian/African continents were much larger and denser larger – places where there were long term food production and many more species of plants and animals that were domesticated. ● From these times onward, things change. ● Europeans with guns, steels, armours and conquered the other side. Epidemic diseases (important) ● Hunters/gatherers who have small population density do not develop crowd diseases. It will simply kill them all and disease will die along with it ● People in the Old World developed diseases o Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague ● Dense population & proximity to animals increases the impact of diseases o Disease could reach a city and keep spreading even if it deadly as there are always new people to impact o People who immunity survive and give offspring 🡪 evolved adaptations and disease became less virulent to them o Domestic Animals could transmit disease too ● The people who didn’t die have children and as decades went by people became more immune, resistance to these disease o Humans have evolved resistance 🡪 a form of natural selection ● Europeans have the disease (horrible) but resistant 🡪 spread to south America then spread the diseases and a lot died o Story (myth): travelled on a ship called Mayflower said to North America to set up a state 🡪 reason was because a plague of diseases have wiped everyone on the land off ● The story told earlier (Spaniards conquering the Incan empire) was slightly misleading. The Spaniards did go in and destroyed an army of tens and thousands but there was one thing that they did not know about. Before the Spaniards even heard of the Incas and before they got there, there were unbelievably horrible diseases that spread to the Incan Empire and had decimated thousands of people, including the original emperor. There then had been a power struggle between other various figures to become the new emperor. So, their empire was greatly smashed and weakened by these wars and by the decimation of their population by some mysterious inexplicable disease that come from nowhere– smallpox, that it came from the Spaniards but nobody knew that in those days. ● So, when the Spaniards met the Incan emperor and the tens of thousands of men in his army, most of them were sick and their entire country was had shattered by the greatest plague in the history of the American continent. ● So, when the founders of the USA sailed over from England, they found this beautiful land which was green and fields of corn growing by itself, which was empty. What they did not know was that the people who used to live there were all killed by the nasty European diseases. These diseases spread and the human beings in the new world had no resistance. ● Differential technology, as well as difference in germ resistance between one group and the other. Why weren’t the Spaniards completely killed off instead by some Incan/Aztec/American disease? ● Diamond’s answer (does not originate from him) – The diseases that existed in the old world were because of humans living in close proximity to their domesticated animals ● ● ● ● ● – most of these big crowd diseases were probably derived from the animals. Living with the animals together in the houses. Epidemic crowd diseases may arise from time to time, but it can only survive if there is a large population and this was only possible for farming – these epidemic diseases hence only emerged in vast populations. The diseases would die out if there were not enough people it could spread to. These big crowd diseases had to continue spreading to the village/town/country next door. They will not go extinct if there was a vast population around. This was the case in Eurasia (old world). All these nasty diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague) all emerged in this part of the world only because of the association of people with animal and its extremely high populations. And gradually over time these people developed immunities. Because every few years when the disease came around, some survived through natural immunity. So, the proportion of those descended from people with natural immunity is always higher. So even though the diseases kept on going because they are evolving too and kept on changing, the people in the old-world area had a lot of resistance. So, when they (diseases) encounter other people from a completely unconnected part of the world, they had no resistance at all. The death rate is like 99% sometimes. o Killed majority of new world due to crowd disease So, having more technology in the world made it easier Black death 🡪 the only time our population went down ● Picture of the black death. ● The plague that used to sweep through Europe for centuries, it would come back again and again. ● Nowadays, people think that it was the bubonic plague spread from flea bites, but it was contested. ● Black death was a really nasty one, probably because it came from Asia and reached the Europeans, and they had no immunity. It took a few centuries of this epidemic going around and it eventually faded away and didn’t come back ● It was the only time we know of that the population of human beings stopped increasing as the black death killed a large population of people in the world. Nothing else stopped population growth, even the world war, covid-19 etc., it just kept on increasing. What about Australia? ● When Europeans reached Australia, they found that it was populated by humans and these humans have the most primitive technology that was ever found. They did not even have the bow and arrow or boats. They had never domesticated anything, never had a town/city/empire/kings/wars etc. The Australians lived as hunter gatherers for 40,000 years. This was very different from China or Europe. Why? ● Diamond – these people are the same as anyone else but there was nothing in Australia they could domesticate. Even now, with modern day technology, nobody had domesticated anything there. None of the plants and animals from Australia had proved suitable for domestication, except for one – Macadamia nuts. ● Marsupials have been quickly killed off ● Cannot fault the native Australians for failing to domesticate macadamia nuts and building an empire on macadamia nuts, because it was not enough to give up their perfectly successful and productive hunter gatherer lifestyle. After all, they lived in really challenging places and lived great and fine. o When the Europeans got there, even though they had guns and modern technologies they died, they starved to death or died from dehydration when the Australian aborigines they met stopped helping them. They could not make it across this landscape because they did not have the know-how to make it across the landscape. ● There is no question about them being just as intelligent as anyone else. There was simply nothing else they could do. What else could they have done other than being hunter gatherers when there was nothing they could domesticate? VS. places where there were animals that could be domesticated, and they were, and we have apparently exhausted all the plants and animals that are suitable. They have been found by now, there could be some that we have not tried yet, but basically, they have all been found and they are only in certain parts of the world and those parts of the world furnished these societies and went out and were very nasty to the other ones. ● The question Diamond ask: Why not the other way round? Why not people conquering Europe? ● Alien powerful technology possessed by Europeans. Is that the reason? ● Why was there a difference in this technology? It ultimately goes back to societies who were food-producing (North-south, cannot spread food) and produced large populations and can produce specialists and then could evolve over centuries, technologies that could actually grow over hundreds of years. For example, to make a knife out of steel took thousands of years before technology could evolve to that level. The ability for technology to evolve so far from the original discovery is again something that happened in the context of societies that had so much food where you can have specialists who lived generation after generation being metal-workers or specialists in some other areas. ● Diamond’s case – the reason it was some rather than others was because of those plants and animals that made it possible were only in some places and not in others. Sinagpore and Malaya 🡺 Different parts of the world had different resources where plants and animals can use and modify o Society hence changes 🡺 World become unequal goes back to geography and biogeography 🡺 Singapore and Malaya so successful because govt changed the way of life and eliminated diseases Why not China the one invading? ● Why not the Chinese that goes around colonising other countries? Why not china ships arriving in Europe instead of European ships reaching China? ● When Diamond gets to another explanation in his book, it was far less convincing. Which is on the level of this continent vs. that continent, nobody could have come up with a better argument than he is, but when you ask why is it Europe and not China? – ● ● ● ● his explanation was not very convincing. His broad level explanations do not work, it is the same land mass now. Everywhere else in the fertile crescent was ruined by farming and became a desert and all these great empires run out. The empire is moving this way: Sumerians 🡪 Persians 🡪 Greeks 🡪 Romans 🡪 Europeans. Why this order? Diamond’s case of exhausting and destroying the environment was generally right. The Greeks landscape was really barren then it was originally because of farming. He said that Europe was not a place that would get exhausted in the same way because of its many mountain ranges and many rivers. Its farming sources will get continually renewed and get fertile and some places have been farmed for 5000 years. Egypt is the same. Diamond says: Europe was always politically fractured because of its mountains and so was never united – unlike China that was mostly united under a single authority because it has far fewer barriers. This is the reason for the differential success between China and Europe. o Arms race for weapon and technology (in Europe) whereas in china there is only one emperor who says we are going to do this or that and this or that will happen – JVW does not believe this is convincing. o From Wiki: (for Europe) Threats posed by immediate neighbours ensured governments that suppressed economic and technological progress soon corrected their mistakes or were out-competed relatively quickly 🡪 reason of why being politically divided was good The only convincing story that Diamond has is that China had big fleets of wooden ships (biggest wooden ships ever made), and these ships went to Africa. It was one decision by one decision making power in the empire, who said that this ship building thing would stop, and it was stopped. And within 20 years, the technology and know-how had died out and it could never come back and China with a sea-ferrying power never returned after that. In Europe, no one can make a decision that could change the arms race of all these little powers. Diamond’s theory can only work if you consider the broadest picture of all: why human history developed in this basic way, from a period of hunter gatherers to the present, or why the Australians were not the superpower that conquered everyone else – it was because they had nothing to build on. But why should it be one bit of the land mass where all the factors were, and not the other bit (Europe vs. China), Diamond’s explanation did not work there. Criticisms of Diamond’s work: • Historians are the people most negative of Diamond’s book. Academic porn. • Should be geographical enable-lism, not geographical determinism. • Critics assumes that he said geography makes something happen • But what diamond is trying to say is geography makes something possible or impossible • The materials to human beings in different parts of the world enabled some things to happen or not. Diamond did not say it determined it. • He also combined a very unusual range of studies and evidence from archaeology to archaeobotanical to historical linguistic. • The book was rather repetitive.