May 5, 2022·edited May 5, 2022Liked by Tomas Pueyo
I think you've missed some nuances of geography that we miss because they're not obvious to modern people.
When it comes to travel, in the age of sailing ships the shortest route wasn't always the quickest route. Instead the quickest routes were dictated by the prevailing winds which meant it was far quicker to cross the South Atlantic by heading southwest across the ocean before tacking southeast than the alternative of creeping down the west coast of Africa. Although counterintuitive, with this understanding it becomes inevitable that the Portuguese would make landfall in Brazil in their quest to find the quickest route around Africa.
The influence of the technology of sailing and its constraints on the exploration of the world by European navigators is covered well in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 by Alfred W. Crosby (1986).
The importance of disease in the delayed scramble for Africa is definitely paramount. But whilst dealing with the proximate causes in the form of malaria and yellow fever you haven't asked the more interesting question of why it was that disease resisted the invaders in Africa and tropical Asia but not in the Americas and Australia. A discussion of this topic is also covered in the above book, and in more depth in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years (1998). I think this deeper historical perspective has been missing from some of your analyses. I noticed its absence when you rightly pointed out the strategic geographical blessings of North America in the context of an interconnected globe, but didn't ask why those same features weren't advantages for Native Americans in their resistance to European colonialism.
You're right that it's easiest to go from Europe to America via the South Atlantic, but that's true because it's easiest to go from Africa to South America due to the Trade Winds. But you first had to go to Africa—hence Spain's Canary Islands. The fact that Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope before America was discovered suggests this was a doable trip, even if the wind was not a tailwind. In fact it was one of the salient points of caravels that they could sail crosswind (and even upwind).
I agree that I don't go deeper in the ultimate cause of malaria. I did read GGS, and understand why there were more lethal germs in Eurasia than America. If I remember correctly, the very long same-latitude extension in an east-west axis spread microbes across that axis (they could spread without adapting to new latitudes). That, added to the density of population and cohabitation with domesticated animals, led to more disease and more natural selection against them in Eurasia than in America.
I don't recall the reason why Africa had more than America though. There was little animal domestication in sub-saharan Africa. Population density was probably higher than in America (but not than in the Mexico area). The east-west axis in central Africa is wider than in America, but isn't especially vast. So that might not explain it. Maybe parasites didn't have time to evolve to humans in America?
If you can share resources on this, I'd be grateful.
I thought I had mentioned why North-American natives didn't benefit from the features that make modern US powerful, but I can't find it, so you must be right! I take note of it. In your opinion, what are they?
There's a lot to unpack here, so I'll break up the discussion for legibility. On the first question of the winds you're right that you discussed the role of winds in the North Atlantic in your article on the Caribbean. However, this was a discussion of how the geography of the North Atlantic structured the Spanish Empire once it had arisen. This is very interesting, but I don't think you exhausted the full dimensions of how the geography of the oceans structured the history of the Age of Exploration which is what is covered (amongst other things) in Alfred Crosby's work.
In brief summary, the Portuguese discovered early on that, due to the North Atlantic Gyre, the intuitive way of travelling by going out and back the same way, didn't really work. Instead, it was necessary to go out one way and back a different way in what they referred to as a Volta do Mar
This understanding was already well entrenched by the early 1400s, well before the discovery of the Americas. It was necessary to master the exploration of their near environment including the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries.
If this were just a quirk of the North Atlantic then it wouldn't have any global significance, but importantly it provided a good model of how most, but importantly not all, of the world's oceans worked.
When the Portuguese sailed south of the equator, they were quick to notice that the winds of the South Atlantic are like a mirror image of the North Atlantic which means that a Volta do Mar can be used there also.
This knowledge explains how the early navigators were able to make some spectacular voyages of discovery into the unknown with some important examples being:
Bartolomeu Dias' decision in 1488 to head southwest into the open ocean from the coast of Namibia to thereby round Africa into the Indian Ocean. Notably, he discovered the Cape of Good Hope not on his outward voyage, but on his return.
Vasco da Gama's decision on the next Portuguese expedition in 1497, not to follow Dias' route but instead to head out into the open ocean from Sierra Leone (north of the equator!) sailing far out to sea for three months before returning to the African coast at St Helena Bay in the Western Cape.
Pedro Cabral's decision in 1500 a mere 7 months after da Gama's successful return, not to follow da Gama's route but instead to head southwest from the Cape Verde's thereby accidentally discovering Brazil.
This shows that whilst the caravel definitely assisted the Portuguese in their slow advance down the coast of Africa prior to 1488, they quickly abandoned that route for longer expeditions, informed by their understanding of how the winds worked.
It is in this context that the Portuguese discovery of Brazil was inevitable, and also that Salvador and later Rio de Janeiro were critical nodes on the Portuguese trade network. It was an accident of the Tordesillas treaty that Portugal had some claim to Brazil but the Portuguese would have wanted Brazil regardless, and indeed pushed their claim well west of the Tordesillas line.
On the Spanish side, we have the following related evidence of the same knowledge at play.
Following his first crossing of the North Atlantic Christopher Columbus knew not to attempt to return the way he came, but rather to head north so that the first successful transatlantic crossing was followed up by a successful return.
Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, being the first European expedition to reach the South Pacific from the east was able to apply an intuitive understanding to how the winds in an unknown ocean might work and use that to cross the Pacific. Whilst Magellan didn't survive, it is nonetheless a marvel that the first expedition to make it that far could make it all the way back to Europe.
Lest all this sound like trivial details of history, it is important to understand that the near sea environment of the other great Eurasian civilisations was completely different. In the Indian Ocean, insular South East Asia and the South China Sea the winds are dominated by the monsoon. For hundreds of years, navigators in these oceans used the alternation of the monsoon to travel out and back the same way by waiting for the change of the monsoon to change the direction of travel. This makes these oceans a poor test bed for exploration under sail and indeed there is no evidence (pseudohistory notwithstanding) that oceangoing fleets from China or India ever left this domain.
So, taken together, this means that, of the civilisations of Eurasia it was the nations of the Atlantic littoral that were presented with a perfect environment for learning about the oceans and how to explore them. In particular the best sited of all was Portugal with its near access. Spain also had good access through the Port of Cadiz, but with its longer coastline Portugal could employ the strategy of the Volta do Mar with greater security since it was less likely to end up in hostile waters on its return.
Once the age of exploration was underway it led to a complete reorientation of the power structure of Europe away from the nations of the Mediterranean to those of the Atlantic littoral with Portugal, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands all becoming major players.
You're welcome. I've been enjoying your articles for a while. I'm sure it won't surprise you that I started with your seminal article that cut through all the noise around Covid. So it's probably about time that I give something back.
I just channeled other people’s research and added my touch. Progress is a collaboration thing, and I definitely see this newsletter as something that gets better the more readers like you participate. So thanks!
May 6, 2022·edited May 6, 2022Liked by Tomas Pueyo
Exactly, East Africa is within the monsoonal Indian Ocean. There was widespread trade communication between East Africa, India, South East Asia and southern China prior to the Portuguese arrival in 1497. The Ming treasure fleets operated within that monsoonal world. My reference to pseudohistory was an oblique one to the fanciful works of Gavin Menzies.
On the second point of disease, you're right that Jared Diamond devotes most of GGS to differential effects of geography on historical development after the commencement of the agricultural revolution so perhaps I shouldn't necessarily credit him with the following ideas.
Prior to the agricultural revolution the different parts of the world had widely varying human histories. At one extreme, humans evolved in Africa so the evolutionary timescale for adaptation to the environment in Africa is very long. Outside of Africa, hominins also have a long history in Eurasia, particularly in the tropics of the order of millions of years. As you head north in Eurasia the time of residence of us and our relatives grows shorter with increasing latitude as the occupation of high latitudes required much more cultural adaptation for an essentially tropical species. At the other extreme, humans have only been in Australia for around 60,000 years, in the Americas for around 13,000 years and in New Zealand for only around 800.
Biological evolution is slow so these different residence times spanning several orders of magnitude are important. That longer residence time has meant a lot more evolutionary time to accumulate pathogens and parasites. The headline organism is malaria which has been around for millions of years in Africa
In addition, Africa is home to a whole suite of parasites of humans with quite complex life cycles often dependent on the interaction of multiple interacting species as vectors, primary hosts and so on. Some of these parasites such as Guinea worm and African trypanosomiasis have been restricted to Africa as without the right vector or secondary host they cannot colonise new areas.
Evolutionary theory predicts that over time parasites and their hosts will coevolve to a stable state where the host can tolerate the parasites. There is evidence that this has happened in the case of malaria with selection for the sickle cell gene a story that is well known, but there are other genetically determined polymorphisms elsewhere in malaria's historic range
Human populations colonising new areas could leave some of their pathogens and parasites behind and experience ecological release. However, over time this meant that there was no longer selection for resistance to these parasites which left them vulnerable if they were ever to encounter them again.
So, in short, I believe that the answer to why Africa was so hostile to invaders is to be found in its much deeper human evolutionary history.
There are interesting corollaries to this. The crowd diseases of Eurasia born of domestication and urbanisation weren't the only diseases that European colonisation inflicted on the Americas and other areas where they were unknown. In bringing African slaves to the Americas, colonialism also inadvertently brought some of those diseases to the American tropics, most notably malaria and yellow fever. Thus, through the slave trade Europeans made the American tropics more dangerous to themselves and this is visible today in the demographics of the Americas where it isn't the descendants of the colonisers but the descendants of those slaves who form the majority of the population in the Caribbean and much of Brazil.
You did discuss North America* in The Global Chessboard which is what I was referring to below in replying to Phillip. I will try to restate my point there a bit more clearly.
* I'm somewhat relieved to hear you say you couldn't find something in Uncharted Territories. My mental map of it is now a bit stretched, so the search technique you suggested does come in handy.
In answer to your last question, I believe that Native Americans did have the advantages of geography in North America. However they were outweighed by the differences of geographic history that are outlined in GGS namely fewer crowd diseases, lack of animal domesticates, slower pace of cultural evolution due to the predominant north south axis of North America leading to technological disadvantage and so on. In being colonised by a Eurasian civilisation and maintaining connections to Eurasia, North America has become part of a larger whole and so most of these disadvantages no longer apply. North America is now exposed to the same crowd diseases as Eurasia and so cannot become immunologically naive and vulnerable; plants, animals and technology can flow into and out of it just as easily as they do across the axis of Eurasia. As an isolated continent, North America was at a disadvantage when that isolation ended, but as an easily defensible part of an interconnected world it is strong.
"As you head north in Eurasia the time of residence of us and our relatives grows shorter with increasing latitude as the occupation of high latitudes required much more cultural adaptation for an essentially tropical species. At the other extreme, humans have only been in Australia for around 60,000 years, in the Americas for around 13,000 years and in New Zealand for only around 800"
See my comment on the North American geography article.
I repeat my point: what determines the pace of social and technological advancement is conflict and challenge (both from nature and from other humans once they became the primary source of threat) just as biological evolution requires selection pressure.
Compared to North America, Europe had a much longer period where humans had to learn to survive in adverse conditions and then to fight amongst themselves for scarce resources once population densities rose.
May 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022Liked by Tomas Pueyo
This is a recycled argument from the age of European imperialism that there was something about the European environment that somehow made Europeans advance further whilst life in the tropics was easy. I don't find it compelling. As Tomas noted when you presented the argument previously, there were plenty of civilisations spread throughout the tropics from the Maya in the west to Angkor in the east.
Moreover if adversity were the most important driver of technological change then the prediction would be that the most developed societies would be in the most extreme environments for human survival, the high arctic, the Sahara desert etc. This simply doesn't match the evidence.
My argument which you have quoted above wasn't about the pace of technological change of humans, but rather the accumulation of pathogens and parasites which is related to residence time. Our disease burden is comprised of pathogens and parasites from our long history as hunters and gatherers compounded by a later accumulation of crowd diseases that have arisen since the agricultural revolution. Africa's long history of human evolution generated a surplus of the former, whilst the dense interconnected societies of Eurasia in association with domesticated animals generated a surplus of the latter.
Thanks for the fascinating earlier discussion and for taking the time to reply.
I have to be honest and say that I’m really not sure how to respond, as the point I was trying to make in The Global Chessboard and above wasn’t an argument about tropical life being easy. It was merely highlighting what seems to a non-expert like the most obvious and likely reason for North America’s lack of technological development relative to Europe*. I realise that the quote from your post was related to hosts and pathogens, but the evolutionary arms race has much wider significance in understanding the world we live in and I think Uncharted Territories won’t fulfil its true potential unless we connect some of the ideas. I’m happy to try to do a better job of explaining what I meant if you’re interested.
*when I went back and read some of the earlier articles I realised that Tomas had used a similar explanation in a different article.
Hi Tomas, you might check out Dan Carlin’s Hard Core History podcast. The last episode dealt with the transatlantic slave trade. Towards the end it covers the revolution in what would become Haiti - with a major focus on diseases that greatly hampered the French.
Not sure how it could/would/should play out, but if we work together we should be able to reverse the consolidation of power taking place at the behest of the Davos Man and parties influenced. Happy to share my bio here, as it may help: https://1drv.ms/b/s!Asg3hbleoRl5gdtk0xCxlS5B7wLa2g
Hi, Tomas: You wrote "America", but I think you meant "the Americas". Your account of history is good because you focus on factors that allowed (or prevented) colonization (the Sahara, malaria, etc.). That's very useful for understanding what happened. However, your account is focused on Europe. Step back further and look at the interaction (or lack of) between China, India, and Islam: they affected the development of Europe. See andreas.com/global-history.html Let me know what you think. -- andreas
I think you've missed some nuances of geography that we miss because they're not obvious to modern people.
When it comes to travel, in the age of sailing ships the shortest route wasn't always the quickest route. Instead the quickest routes were dictated by the prevailing winds which meant it was far quicker to cross the South Atlantic by heading southwest across the ocean before tacking southeast than the alternative of creeping down the west coast of Africa. Although counterintuitive, with this understanding it becomes inevitable that the Portuguese would make landfall in Brazil in their quest to find the quickest route around Africa.
The influence of the technology of sailing and its constraints on the exploration of the world by European navigators is covered well in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 by Alfred W. Crosby (1986).
The importance of disease in the delayed scramble for Africa is definitely paramount. But whilst dealing with the proximate causes in the form of malaria and yellow fever you haven't asked the more interesting question of why it was that disease resisted the invaders in Africa and tropical Asia but not in the Americas and Australia. A discussion of this topic is also covered in the above book, and in more depth in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years (1998). I think this deeper historical perspective has been missing from some of your analyses. I noticed its absence when you rightly pointed out the strategic geographical blessings of North America in the context of an interconnected globe, but didn't ask why those same features weren't advantages for Native Americans in their resistance to European colonialism.
Super interesting, Philip. Thanks! Let me try to parse point by point.
Regarding the winds, I tried to cover them here:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/a-brief-history-of-the-caribbean?s=w
You're right that it's easiest to go from Europe to America via the South Atlantic, but that's true because it's easiest to go from Africa to South America due to the Trade Winds. But you first had to go to Africa—hence Spain's Canary Islands. The fact that Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope before America was discovered suggests this was a doable trip, even if the wind was not a tailwind. In fact it was one of the salient points of caravels that they could sail crosswind (and even upwind).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravel
But maybe I missed something?
I agree that I don't go deeper in the ultimate cause of malaria. I did read GGS, and understand why there were more lethal germs in Eurasia than America. If I remember correctly, the very long same-latitude extension in an east-west axis spread microbes across that axis (they could spread without adapting to new latitudes). That, added to the density of population and cohabitation with domesticated animals, led to more disease and more natural selection against them in Eurasia than in America.
I don't recall the reason why Africa had more than America though. There was little animal domestication in sub-saharan Africa. Population density was probably higher than in America (but not than in the Mexico area). The east-west axis in central Africa is wider than in America, but isn't especially vast. So that might not explain it. Maybe parasites didn't have time to evolve to humans in America?
If you can share resources on this, I'd be grateful.
I thought I had mentioned why North-American natives didn't benefit from the features that make modern US powerful, but I can't find it, so you must be right! I take note of it. In your opinion, what are they?
There's a lot to unpack here, so I'll break up the discussion for legibility. On the first question of the winds you're right that you discussed the role of winds in the North Atlantic in your article on the Caribbean. However, this was a discussion of how the geography of the North Atlantic structured the Spanish Empire once it had arisen. This is very interesting, but I don't think you exhausted the full dimensions of how the geography of the oceans structured the history of the Age of Exploration which is what is covered (amongst other things) in Alfred Crosby's work.
In brief summary, the Portuguese discovered early on that, due to the North Atlantic Gyre, the intuitive way of travelling by going out and back the same way, didn't really work. Instead, it was necessary to go out one way and back a different way in what they referred to as a Volta do Mar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar
This understanding was already well entrenched by the early 1400s, well before the discovery of the Americas. It was necessary to master the exploration of their near environment including the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries.
If this were just a quirk of the North Atlantic then it wouldn't have any global significance, but importantly it provided a good model of how most, but importantly not all, of the world's oceans worked.
When the Portuguese sailed south of the equator, they were quick to notice that the winds of the South Atlantic are like a mirror image of the North Atlantic which means that a Volta do Mar can be used there also.
This knowledge explains how the early navigators were able to make some spectacular voyages of discovery into the unknown with some important examples being:
Bartolomeu Dias' decision in 1488 to head southwest into the open ocean from the coast of Namibia to thereby round Africa into the Indian Ocean. Notably, he discovered the Cape of Good Hope not on his outward voyage, but on his return.
Vasco da Gama's decision on the next Portuguese expedition in 1497, not to follow Dias' route but instead to head out into the open ocean from Sierra Leone (north of the equator!) sailing far out to sea for three months before returning to the African coast at St Helena Bay in the Western Cape.
Pedro Cabral's decision in 1500 a mere 7 months after da Gama's successful return, not to follow da Gama's route but instead to head southwest from the Cape Verde's thereby accidentally discovering Brazil.
This shows that whilst the caravel definitely assisted the Portuguese in their slow advance down the coast of Africa prior to 1488, they quickly abandoned that route for longer expeditions, informed by their understanding of how the winds worked.
It is in this context that the Portuguese discovery of Brazil was inevitable, and also that Salvador and later Rio de Janeiro were critical nodes on the Portuguese trade network. It was an accident of the Tordesillas treaty that Portugal had some claim to Brazil but the Portuguese would have wanted Brazil regardless, and indeed pushed their claim well west of the Tordesillas line.
On the Spanish side, we have the following related evidence of the same knowledge at play.
Following his first crossing of the North Atlantic Christopher Columbus knew not to attempt to return the way he came, but rather to head north so that the first successful transatlantic crossing was followed up by a successful return.
Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, being the first European expedition to reach the South Pacific from the east was able to apply an intuitive understanding to how the winds in an unknown ocean might work and use that to cross the Pacific. Whilst Magellan didn't survive, it is nonetheless a marvel that the first expedition to make it that far could make it all the way back to Europe.
Lest all this sound like trivial details of history, it is important to understand that the near sea environment of the other great Eurasian civilisations was completely different. In the Indian Ocean, insular South East Asia and the South China Sea the winds are dominated by the monsoon. For hundreds of years, navigators in these oceans used the alternation of the monsoon to travel out and back the same way by waiting for the change of the monsoon to change the direction of travel. This makes these oceans a poor test bed for exploration under sail and indeed there is no evidence (pseudohistory notwithstanding) that oceangoing fleets from China or India ever left this domain.
So, taken together, this means that, of the civilisations of Eurasia it was the nations of the Atlantic littoral that were presented with a perfect environment for learning about the oceans and how to explore them. In particular the best sited of all was Portugal with its near access. Spain also had good access through the Port of Cadiz, but with its longer coastline Portugal could employ the strategy of the Volta do Mar with greater security since it was less likely to end up in hostile waters on its return.
Once the age of exploration was underway it led to a complete reorientation of the power structure of Europe away from the nations of the Mediterranean to those of the Atlantic littoral with Portugal, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands all becoming major players.
I didn’t know all this. Amazing, I appreciate, thank you! I’ll quote this in a future article with updates
You're welcome. I've been enjoying your articles for a while. I'm sure it won't surprise you that I started with your seminal article that cut through all the noise around Covid. So it's probably about time that I give something back.
I just channeled other people’s research and added my touch. Progress is a collaboration thing, and I definitely see this newsletter as something that gets better the more readers like you participate. So thanks!
The Ming treasure fleets made it to Africa and that isn't pseudohistory, but they could have used monsoon winds and just followed coastlines.
Exactly, East Africa is within the monsoonal Indian Ocean. There was widespread trade communication between East Africa, India, South East Asia and southern China prior to the Portuguese arrival in 1497. The Ming treasure fleets operated within that monsoonal world. My reference to pseudohistory was an oblique one to the fanciful works of Gavin Menzies.
On the second point of disease, you're right that Jared Diamond devotes most of GGS to differential effects of geography on historical development after the commencement of the agricultural revolution so perhaps I shouldn't necessarily credit him with the following ideas.
Prior to the agricultural revolution the different parts of the world had widely varying human histories. At one extreme, humans evolved in Africa so the evolutionary timescale for adaptation to the environment in Africa is very long. Outside of Africa, hominins also have a long history in Eurasia, particularly in the tropics of the order of millions of years. As you head north in Eurasia the time of residence of us and our relatives grows shorter with increasing latitude as the occupation of high latitudes required much more cultural adaptation for an essentially tropical species. At the other extreme, humans have only been in Australia for around 60,000 years, in the Americas for around 13,000 years and in New Zealand for only around 800.
Biological evolution is slow so these different residence times spanning several orders of magnitude are important. That longer residence time has meant a lot more evolutionary time to accumulate pathogens and parasites. The headline organism is malaria which has been around for millions of years in Africa
https://www.malariasite.com/history-parasites/#:~:text=Recent%20molecular%20studies%20have%20found,the%20bites%20of%20vector%20mosquitoes.&text=Malaria%20seems%20to%20have%20been%20known%20in%20China%20for%20almost%205%2C000%20years.
In addition, Africa is home to a whole suite of parasites of humans with quite complex life cycles often dependent on the interaction of multiple interacting species as vectors, primary hosts and so on. Some of these parasites such as Guinea worm and African trypanosomiasis have been restricted to Africa as without the right vector or secondary host they cannot colonise new areas.
Evolutionary theory predicts that over time parasites and their hosts will coevolve to a stable state where the host can tolerate the parasites. There is evidence that this has happened in the case of malaria with selection for the sickle cell gene a story that is well known, but there are other genetically determined polymorphisms elsewhere in malaria's historic range
https://www.malariagen.net/about/where-we-work/human-genetic-determinants-severe-malaria-papua-new-guinea
Human populations colonising new areas could leave some of their pathogens and parasites behind and experience ecological release. However, over time this meant that there was no longer selection for resistance to these parasites which left them vulnerable if they were ever to encounter them again.
So, in short, I believe that the answer to why Africa was so hostile to invaders is to be found in its much deeper human evolutionary history.
There are interesting corollaries to this. The crowd diseases of Eurasia born of domestication and urbanisation weren't the only diseases that European colonisation inflicted on the Americas and other areas where they were unknown. In bringing African slaves to the Americas, colonialism also inadvertently brought some of those diseases to the American tropics, most notably malaria and yellow fever. Thus, through the slave trade Europeans made the American tropics more dangerous to themselves and this is visible today in the demographics of the Americas where it isn't the descendants of the colonisers but the descendants of those slaves who form the majority of the population in the Caribbean and much of Brazil.
You did discuss North America* in The Global Chessboard which is what I was referring to below in replying to Phillip. I will try to restate my point there a bit more clearly.
* I'm somewhat relieved to hear you say you couldn't find something in Uncharted Territories. My mental map of it is now a bit stretched, so the search technique you suggested does come in handy.
In answer to your last question, I believe that Native Americans did have the advantages of geography in North America. However they were outweighed by the differences of geographic history that are outlined in GGS namely fewer crowd diseases, lack of animal domesticates, slower pace of cultural evolution due to the predominant north south axis of North America leading to technological disadvantage and so on. In being colonised by a Eurasian civilisation and maintaining connections to Eurasia, North America has become part of a larger whole and so most of these disadvantages no longer apply. North America is now exposed to the same crowd diseases as Eurasia and so cannot become immunologically naive and vulnerable; plants, animals and technology can flow into and out of it just as easily as they do across the axis of Eurasia. As an isolated continent, North America was at a disadvantage when that isolation ended, but as an easily defensible part of an interconnected world it is strong.
Very well put. Thank you!
"As you head north in Eurasia the time of residence of us and our relatives grows shorter with increasing latitude as the occupation of high latitudes required much more cultural adaptation for an essentially tropical species. At the other extreme, humans have only been in Australia for around 60,000 years, in the Americas for around 13,000 years and in New Zealand for only around 800"
See my comment on the North American geography article.
I repeat my point: what determines the pace of social and technological advancement is conflict and challenge (both from nature and from other humans once they became the primary source of threat) just as biological evolution requires selection pressure.
Compared to North America, Europe had a much longer period where humans had to learn to survive in adverse conditions and then to fight amongst themselves for scarce resources once population densities rose.
This is a recycled argument from the age of European imperialism that there was something about the European environment that somehow made Europeans advance further whilst life in the tropics was easy. I don't find it compelling. As Tomas noted when you presented the argument previously, there were plenty of civilisations spread throughout the tropics from the Maya in the west to Angkor in the east.
Moreover if adversity were the most important driver of technological change then the prediction would be that the most developed societies would be in the most extreme environments for human survival, the high arctic, the Sahara desert etc. This simply doesn't match the evidence.
My argument which you have quoted above wasn't about the pace of technological change of humans, but rather the accumulation of pathogens and parasites which is related to residence time. Our disease burden is comprised of pathogens and parasites from our long history as hunters and gatherers compounded by a later accumulation of crowd diseases that have arisen since the agricultural revolution. Africa's long history of human evolution generated a surplus of the former, whilst the dense interconnected societies of Eurasia in association with domesticated animals generated a surplus of the latter.
Thanks for the fascinating earlier discussion and for taking the time to reply.
I have to be honest and say that I’m really not sure how to respond, as the point I was trying to make in The Global Chessboard and above wasn’t an argument about tropical life being easy. It was merely highlighting what seems to a non-expert like the most obvious and likely reason for North America’s lack of technological development relative to Europe*. I realise that the quote from your post was related to hosts and pathogens, but the evolutionary arms race has much wider significance in understanding the world we live in and I think Uncharted Territories won’t fulfil its true potential unless we connect some of the ideas. I’m happy to try to do a better job of explaining what I meant if you’re interested.
*when I went back and read some of the earlier articles I realised that Tomas had used a similar explanation in a different article.
Just FYI I have updated my thoughts in The Global Chessboard and will post later today.
Hi Tomas, you might check out Dan Carlin’s Hard Core History podcast. The last episode dealt with the transatlantic slave trade. Towards the end it covers the revolution in what would become Haiti - with a major focus on diseases that greatly hampered the French.
Will be interesting to see how the next wave of colonialism plays out and what its most strategic levers will turn out to be.
What do you have in mind?
Not sure how it could/would/should play out, but if we work together we should be able to reverse the consolidation of power taking place at the behest of the Davos Man and parties influenced. Happy to share my bio here, as it may help: https://1drv.ms/b/s!Asg3hbleoRl5gdtk0xCxlS5B7wLa2g
You mean the metaverse?
Not necessarily
Hi, Tomas: You wrote "America", but I think you meant "the Americas". Your account of history is good because you focus on factors that allowed (or prevented) colonization (the Sahara, malaria, etc.). That's very useful for understanding what happened. However, your account is focused on Europe. Step back further and look at the interaction (or lack of) between China, India, and Islam: they affected the development of Europe. See andreas.com/global-history.html Let me know what you think. -- andreas
I agree with a lot of what it says. Thanks!
Fascinating description of how colonization happened as it has. 🙏🙏
tell the truth
the truth is never told truthfuly, tell the world aficans civilized the entire world 28,000 years ago 1842 europe evaded the world
Why was there no malaria in Latin America? It also lies close to the equator right?