Prologue: Yali's Question
 

"In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools other parts developed only non-literate farming societies and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools.   Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies."


Yali’s Question

Yali, a New Guinea  politician asked " Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"  To rephrase, "why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?  For instance, why weren't Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

Common explanations
 
1)  Racial or genetic superiority.
          --No objective evidence for this theory

2) Cold climate stimulates inventiveness
         --But Europeans inherited agriculture, wheels, writing, and metallurgy from warm climate peoples!

3)  Lowland river valleys in dry climates depended on irrigation and thus required centralized bureaucracies

•   Nile river valley
•   Tigris and Euphrates valley
•   Yellow and Yangtze valleys.

 4)  Guns, Infectious diseases, steel tools, manufactured products
        -- Yes, but these are the immediate or proximal reasons.
        -- Why did the Europeans rather than Africans or Native Americans have these?
 

Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Point

Homo Erectus

Homo erectus (half the brain size of modern humans) evolved in Africa, spread into Eurasia one million years ago.

Homo Sapiens

Homo Sapiens appeared about 100,000 years ago, with crude stone tools.
About 50,000 years ago the Great Leap Forward occurred with standardized stone tools, jewelry.

Cro Magnons

Cro-Magnons moved into Europe 40,000 years ago.
Tools, needles, fishhooks, harpoons, bows and arrows, sewn clothing, houses, carefully buried skeletons, art, hunting big prey.  "Cro Magnons  somehow used their far superior technology, and their language skills or brains, to infect, kill, or displace the Neanderthals [who had occupied Europe previously] leaving behind little or no evidence of hybridization between neanderthals and Cro-Magnons."

Neandertal

 

Spreading Out
40,000-30,000 years ago humans used watercraft to cross from Asia to Indonesia to Australia and New Guinea.
 This time period correlates to a massive extinction of large game in those places.

Large Game in Eurasia
 Diamond's theory is that large game survived in Eurasia because humans took a million years to develop tools and become lethal predators of large game, giving game time to adapt.

Spreading to the Americas
By 20,000 years ago, humans learned how to survive in Siberia.
This led to migration to Americas by 12,000 BC.
It took 1,000 years for humans to cover both N. and S. America.
Time period correlates to a massive extinction of large game in Americas: Horses, lions, elephants, cheetahs, camels, and giant ground sloths.
 

Chapter 2: A Natural Experiment of History

In 1835, a seal hunting ship visiting the Chatham islands 500 miles off the coast of New Zealand brought the first news to New Zealand of islands where "there is an abundance of sea and shellfish; the lakes swarm with eels; and it is a land of the karaka berry...The inhabitants are very numerous, but they do not understand how to fight, and have no weapons".

Maori of New Zealand
 Nine hundred of the native Maori people of New Zealand, armed with guns, arrived in the Chatham Islands announcing that the Chatham Islands people (the Moriori) were now their slaves, and killed those who objected.

Moriori Slaughter
An eyewitness account said "The Maori commenced to kill us like sheep...We were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed -- men, women, and children indiscriminately".

Maori Explanation
A Maori conqueror explained, "We took possession...in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people.  Not one escaped.  Some ran away from us, these we killed, and others we killed -- but what of that?  It was in accordance with our custom".

Natural History Experiment
This is a natural history experiment.  Both the Maori and Moriori descended from the same Polynesian farmers who settled New Zealand.

Moriori
 But the Moriori, after moving to the Chatham islands hundreds of years earlier could not farm due to the cold climate, and became hunter/gatherers.  They learned to live peacefully because their resources were so limited.

Maori
The New Zealand Maori continued farming,  had dense populations, more complex technology and political organization, and ferocious wars: the difference was geography.

Polynesia
 All the other Polynesian islands in the Pacific were populated by the same stock of farming Polynesian people.
 But the islands all have different geographies, sizes, amounts of isolation, and food and mineral resources.
Therefore, the societies that developed had varied population sizes, levels of organization, economies, and social complexity as a function of differing geography.

Geography
 Thus geography is a major player determining which societies develop, expand, and which don't.
 

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