10 Fascinating GeoHistory Updates

Q1 2025

1. Israel & Palestine update

2. Syria’s future

3. What’s more important in history, big trends or big men?

4. Muslims should ban this

5. This map explains so much history

6. How the chronometer built civilizations

7. How work from home is changing geography

8. A new civilization was discovered

9. How Indo-Europeans spread

10. AI lives of the past

Middle East: Israel & Palestine

The Israel-Palestine Ceasefire Did Not Last Indeed

I said in this article that the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire wouldn’t last, because the value to Israel from the ceasefire was going to drop quickly after the first few months. And indeed, on March 18th, Israel broke it.

What can we expect in the coming weeks?

The only leverage that Hamas has is live hostages. They are their only lifeline. They know this, and that’s why they didn’t give up all the remaining ones.¹ On the other side, this time Israel wants to end Hamas, and I don’t think Netanyahu will back down until somebody replaces him—the next elections are 1.5 years away.

So my guess is that Hamas will continue dangling the hostage carrot, while Israel will continue destroying Hamas—and anything or anyone that gets in the way.

Israel and Palestine won’t get calmer in 2025.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority is trying to fend off the political threat of Hamas:

Gazan Opinion

I assume that Gazans are not dumb and they see Hamas as weak, holding a much weaker negotiating power against Israel than they thought. According to these survey results, only 7% of Gazans want Hamas to lead a Gazan government (about 25% want some sort of involvement).

According to the same source, 80% of Gazans would support a two-state solution.

If this were true, it would be huge progress. It’s unclear whether they’re true: Public opinion in Gaza is very hard to measure.

Even if it were true, it would unfortunately come a bit late, now that Israel believes that such a state would be a threat to its integrity and has more negotiating power than it has held in ages.

Education Is Still a Problem

I still think the upbringing little Palestinians receive is not conducive to any sort of peace in the long term. This is sad and has to stop.

Source

Syria’s Future

In What Is Happening in Syria?, we explored how the country’s civil war was ending and what the prospects were for its future. One of the easiest predictions was that different groups in Syria would continue fighting each other, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen.

The main group in power used to be the Alawites. Now, they’ve been replaced by Sunnis. Accordingly, since March 6th, Sunni fighters have rampaged through the heartlands of the Alawites.

The fighters have torched homes and killed indiscriminately: in villages near the city of Latakia, they filmed themselves wearing masks and climbing on the backs of men, making them bark like dogs before shooting them dead. Eyewitnesses describe streets strewn with bodies and rows of burnt-out homes. Hundreds of thousands have fled to the hills and woods along the coast. One Alawite in the city of Jableh says he and others hid in petrified silence as Sunni jihadists went door to door looking for people to execute.—The Economist

Meanwhile, in the south, there are sporadic episodes of tension between the Sunni and the Druze. Neighboring Israel, which has some Druze population that is considered fully Israeli, is hoping for an excuse to intervene to “protect the Druze” and carve out some Syrian land in the process.

In the northeast, the Syrian central government made a deal that supposedly recognizes the Kurds’ ethnic difference from the Sunnis and incorporates them into the central government, but the deadline for this incorporation is the end of the year. Many things can happen in the meantime.

Inside the Head of Sharaa

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new militaristic and radical Sunni president of Syria, is in a tough situation:

• If he pushes to centralize the government, each group will push back, and civil war might start again.

• If he doesn’t, each regional group can stabilize and entrench their power, potentially leading to the country splitting.

• Because he used to be part of ISIS, foreign powers are not lifting sanctions against Syria, making it hard to relieve the country’s poverty.

• His radical Sunni background and support makes it hard for him to turn around and organize a secular country that accepts all minorities equally.

I assume if he truly is a radical Sunni Muslim, his optimal course of action would be to play the conciliatory leader, entrench his power in the regions he already controls, get concessions from the regional groups to centralize their power in return for some sort of recognition, get foreign countries to lift their sanctions and send some aid, recruit back some of the Syrians that fled the country in the last decade, and to only start acting on his hidden agenda once his power is much stronger. In other words, play the nice leader.

Big History vs Great Man Theory

If you follow Uncharted Territories, you know that I tend to use Big History to explain the world: I mix disciplines to try to unearth the big drivers of history. This is the opposite of the Great Man Theory of history, where history is explained by specific individuals having an outsized impact.

Although I do believe that the vast majority of history can be explained through big trends, it doesn’t mean that specific individuals or random events can’t have a huge influence. I put it best in The Global Chessboard: The big trends determine the board, but how the game is played depends on specific humans. I do think that the chessboard and its rules dramatically constrain the type of actions that can be taken (it’s only chess as opposed to anything else). But within that set of rules, specific humans can make a big difference.

We are witnessing it today, when specific individuals like Putin, Trump, and more importantly Musk, or even Sam Altman, are having an outsized impact on the trajectory of humanity.

Inbreeding

One of the times when this was even more true than today was the end of the European Middle Ages, when the continent was starting to have an outsized impact on the world, and yet it was controlled by a few families like the Habsburgs, the Tudors, the Medicis, the Borgias…

That’s why I liked this paper that considered how much the cognitive abilities of European monarchs impacted their states’ performance: a lot.

The study is very clever. It asks: When a state was led by an inbred monarch (the offspring of close relatives), did its performance suffer? And the answer is yes.

Why does this work? European monarchs were selected kind of randomly among children (the first male). But also, European monarchs tended to be so inbred, and inbreeding is so bad for cognition, that you can approximate how dumb a monarch would be by how inbred he was.² Then, you can compare the inbreeding (~intelligence) with state performance. If inbred monarchs have states that underperform, you can conclude that the performance of a state depended in part on the intelligence of its leader.

Inbred rulers fared significantly worse along all three measures of state performance: A one-standard deviation (std) increase in the coefficient of inbreeding led to a reduction of 0.25 std in broad State Performance, a 5% loss in territory, and a 4% loss in urban population.

Less inbred, capable rulers tended to improve their states' finances, commerce, law and order, and general living conditions. They also reduced involvement in international wars, but when they did, won a larger proportion of battles, leading to an expansion of their territory (+16%) into urbanized areas (+14% population). This suggests that capable rulers chose conflicts “wisely,” resulting in expansions into valuable, densely populated territories.

They also found that checks and balances worked as intended: Things like advisory councils or parliaments eliminated the penalty of inbreeding in state performance.

Don’t do that

Cousin Marriage Around the World

An interesting question becomes: Where is there a lot of inbreeding in the world today? The more there is, the more you could expect those regions to underperform. According to Wikipedia:

Note that grey means no data. We don’t know what’s going on in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

You could wonder: Where are there birth defects around the world? According to this map:

This map says basically the same thing

That’s nearly a 10% birth defect rate in countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan! Oh my!

I don’t know about you, but if I were an Islamic leader, the first thing I would do is inform people about this. I don’t even think a ban is needed (although it would be welcome):

A small survey in Saudi Arabia found that participants were 50% less likely to view marrying a cousin positively when warned of the problems. “We wouldn’t have married if we had known,” says Ahmed.—The Economist

The Christian Church’s Ban on Kinship

Europe was luckier in this regard. Before the year 1000, the Christian Church had already banned marriages up to 7th degree cousins. Everybody flouted this rule, but apparently it was mostly monarchs who were seriously inbred. Most of the population was not.

Why did the Church ban kin marriage? I’m not sure. Leviticus does ban marriage with close relatives (up to aunts and uncles), and later religious leaders simply extended the logic (If this is a sin, a bit less of the same thing is still a sin). According to several books,³ the Church saw kin clans as alternate power centers, and decided to fight them by simply banning kin marriage.⁴

Luckily, this was good for genetics (even though aristocrats didn’t follow the rules). More importantly, it might have had good unintended consequences. Books like The WEIRDest People in the World (which I have not yet read) defend that the lack of kin marriages destroyed tribe rule, made Europeans more individualistic, made them more prone to find kinship from interests rather than blood, made them more likely to create guilds and nations… For example, this paper says that countries with longer historical exposure to the medieval Western Church or less intensive kinship (e.g., lower rates of cousin marriage) are:

• More individualistic

• More independent

• Less conforming

• Less obedient

• More inclined toward trust and cooperation with strangers

• Fairer to strangers

Lots of thoughts spring from this, like:

• If true, the Church had a huge impact on European development. Is this true in other aspects, too?

• Is this impact at the genetic level (inbreeding leads to developmental disabilities and lower IQ), the cultural level (like the elimination of clans), both? How much of each?

• If trends like this one could affect the intellect of European monarchs so much, we’re back to square one: Is this Big Man Theory or Big History?

A Snapshot of the World

I love this map:

Source

You know when you go to the museum and you look at a painting and you don’t understand anything, but then somebody explains it to you, and suddenly it makes complete sense? Well let me write what I see here, hopefully it will help you better understand the world.

Eurasian Axis

Nearly all commerce goes from Spain/North Africa/Britain to China. As Jared Diamond explained, the two fundamental reasons for this are that:

1. These areas are at the same latitude (so climates don’t change that much, which means that plants and animals could easily be shared and travel across this distance).

2. There are no insurmountable barriers that split these areas from the rest.

That meant more travel, more trade, and more wealth and knowledge generated throughout the region.

Date: 1340

The date is important here. It’s in the late European Middle Ages, one century after the Mongols connected this whole area in one big empire. Before them, trade across this region was harder, as there were lots of bandits.

This is also around the time of the Black Death, caused by the bubonic plague. By then, it had already decimated China, and it was about to decimate Europe. It would have been impossible before this time, because the world was not as united. It was the commercial union that caused its wide spread. This, in turn, would have huge consequences: By killing 25-50% of the population, people became scarce, so highly valuable. This gave them negotiation power, so nobles, the Church, and traders gave them substantially more benefits and higher salaries than before. Among other things, it’s believed that this helped end the feudal system.

African Slaves

Note the lines that cross the Sahara and the east coast of Africa? Those are Arab traders—mostly of gold and slaves. Before Europeans entered the slave trade, Muslims had been doing it for centuries.