Opinions on this read

It's hated in academic geography for subtly pushing the idea that Europeans are culturally "better" because of their resources.

Wrong. Amerindians started the civilization race 15000 years after europeans, and europeans started the civilization race thousands of years after the settlers in middle east.

The development rate of Amerindians is superior through history and prehistory. How is this hard to get?

I believe in biological race but I also think this book's hypothesis is partly correct. I think the theory is strongest explaining how the Americas developed so poorly. There was clearly a distinct lack of domesticable animals suitable for heavy labor.
Where he fails is in later history (explaining why Europe surpassed China) and in his weak explanations for why Subsaharan Africa failed to develop much civilizational complexity.

there is literally nothing wrong with this statement

Apologist, godless, fanfiction

popular history bullshit, it belongs in the trash

dumb people don't seem to understand the difference between tamed and domesticated
this may help explain a few things youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo
the book is pretty decent but nothing ground braking. it's meant for the general public and discuses a number of varied subjects with varying succes

Veeky Forums core

My thing is we can say, even though the concept of race is touchy and according to many, does not exist, certain population groups can have certain traits. For example, East Asians have ended up with smaller eyes, more prominent cheekbones, and shorter limbs. That's a fact right? I just don't understand how people can say that broad population groups can develop certain traits regarding pretty much anything. But say anything at all about the brain and you're a nazi. I don't think it's anything particularly significant, if there even are minor differences between the brains of "races." however, even just mentioning the subject is met with demonization and immediate confiscation of credibility.

...

>omits things that would either contradict some of his ideas or suggest a more consistent hypothesis.
example?

i've seen that video before and most arguments are pretty sound, but the "agressiveness"/unpredictability argument is pretty poor, considering many of the ancestors of our domesticated animals.
The non-hierarchical structure of zebra herds is a pretty good argument against the domestication of zebras, but what about water buffalos or painted dogs? Their domestication shouldn't be any harder in principle than the domestication from the Aurochs to the modern cattle or from wolves to modern dogs, since they are comparable in agressiveness, size and hierarchical family structure

what are they hating exactly?
The implications that europeans are "better" in general or the push that we are "only" better because of the resources?

>Where he fails is in later history (explaining why Europe surpassed China)

Here's an interesting theory on the subject

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap

Africa outside of the Nile Valley didn't have agriculture until c. 2500 BC. The Americas had agriculture at about the same time as China (c. 6000 BC), but China was also influenced by other parts of Eurasia where agriculture was older (c. 8000 BC), giving them domesticates like horses and technologies like the wheel and metallurgy.

I'll never get over how dumb this shit is. It claims the fucking silk road didn't exist.

buffalos were domesticated in SE Asia and spread all over the world but still have a reputation of being rather moody animals. Water buffalos are probably far to aggressive and hard to control. I don't know anything about painted dogs but they do seem savage. Just because it's a canine doesn't mean it can be domesticated easily. Jackals and coyotes haven't been domesticated and only recently have we gotten domesticated foxes.
Even though two species are related they can still have very different temperaments.
The aurochs is an interesting example. They were huge and strong and were domesticated either in the middle east or in north africa and independently in india. However europeans didn't domesticated the wisent which is smaller than the aurochs.
in order to be domesticated animals should accept human living environment.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap

>different economies, religions and cultures produce different outcomes
wow

(jk, it's an interesting argument. I've read once, that it was because of their perfection of ceramics, thus neglecting the development of glass, thus preventing the development of lenses; which isn't a prequesite for industrial revolution, but for scientific progress in certain fields)

sure, they're differences in the characters and behaviour of different bovine and canine species. We likely haven't domesticated jackals and coyotes, because domesticating wolves was easier, but as the russian fox experiment showed, it isn't impossible to domesticate other canines.
Same with the aurochs vs Wisent. The aurochs was probalbly better for that purpose, so we concentrated "our" efforts on him.
But what if you have no wolves, would we have domesticated jackals?
What if we had no aurochs, would we have domesticated wisents?
I'm not saying domesticating certain species will always have a perfect outcome, like it did with the cow, your SE Asian buffalo example shows that quite well, but in the absence of a better option it might be the better choice.

I'm just not accepting the argument that africa simply had no domesticable animals. I might accept arguments about them not having the prequisites of doing so, like it being a waste of time and effort when other survival strategies are more likely to succeed (if you can hunt fine on your own, you don't need to invest in painted dogs to help you hunt; if you don't form large large groups, it's unlikely that trying to domesticate water buffalos will be something you should do)

This.
I doubt the first horses and other mammals people attempted to domesticate in both Europe and Asia were friendly and resembled the modern ones in their behaviour.

>But what if you have no wolves, would we have domesticated jackals?
doubt it. prehistoric man needed a pack hunter to help him track and chase his prey. they would have been useful as guard animals with the condition they developed barking
the wisent question is harder. thin is neolitic communities arrived in europe with already domesticated animals. had they lacked them would they have substituted them with local fauna. they clearly could have domesticated the wolves, aurochs and boars. but what about the rest? deer haven't been domesticated, but you can clearly tame roe deer. horses lived on the fringes of europe, the only local equine went extinct.
would they have tried to domesticate the local ibex and chamois? maybe european wild cats can be domesticated.
the only species domesticated in europe that i know of are rabbits, ducks, geese, ferrets and raindeer.
europe has an abundance of fowl, yet chicken were brought from SE Asia while quail and capercaillie remained wild.
it seems to me to be more of a matter of trial and error. you just keep a tame animals around you (if you can), breed them selectively and hope something good comes out of it. this process took time, span over generations and most likely humans weren't really aware of the changes they were making and the consequences they would later have

If i was filthy rich i'd fund a decades long project where researchers try to domesticate various animals from all around the world, just so we can finally shut up about wheter it's possible or impossible to domesticate species XY

>/pol/ bash on Jared Diamond for being jewish and writing the book
>he says this
Sometimes I think /pol/ never reads and relies on infographics and internet articles.

his points are either obvious or irrelevant if not spurious

he is only famous because the left likes knocking down the white supremacy strawman

but he's basically saying that whites are superior because they were born into the right environment.

>I'll never get over how dumb this shit is. It claims the fucking silk road didn't exist.
what about the other points? Some of them seem reasonable refutations of Diamonds arguments

Nah, they basically had a post Gravettian toolkit by the time they reached america.

Can we ban this topic already? How many times per week do we have to read babbie's first history book threads?

can we ban all history book threads with books that are older than one year?
If you haven't read all of the others by now and haven't formed your own oppinions without the need for discussion you're basically a brainlet

Ignores the presence of llamas/alpacas as beasts of burden in mesoamerica

Half of this is incorrect.

Why?

cus it aint true

Shhhh, don't upset the /pol/acks.
They'll unleash an autistic rant on genetic determinism with the force of a thousand suns

I don't think he does actually.
Besides Alpaca's aren't that useful when you don't have a wheel

care to elaborate your own oppinion on genetic determinism?

>muh pol

it's not the incas fault that they didn't invent the wheel. Their environment prevented that from happening

>It claims the fucking silk road didn't exist.
Yes, because claiming there was no significant cultural exchange between China and Europe is the same as claiming the silk road never existed.

That's fucking stupid.

If you want to compare civilizations just compare years of inventions and development.

And all kind of POVs lead to the same conclusion: Amerindians are superior to europeans.

You realize wheels were only invented once in mesopotamia and the invention spread across the old world from there right? Most technology is adapted from neighboring cultures instead of indipendently invented like writing, agriculture, and yes the wheel. The problem with the wheel is that Aztecs on the other side of a vast wooden jungle had the wheel but no pack animal. The Inca had a pack animal but no wheel.

>You realize wheels were only invented once in mesopotamia and the invention spread across the old world from there right?
You're fucking wrong, in fact the oldest fucking wheel is found in Europe

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Marshes_Wheel

Comparing pack animals from the old world and llamas is dumb though.

Old worlders' pack animals were already strong enough to carry several objects. Meanwhile Guanacos weighted less than 80kg, compared to the horses which already weighted more than 300kg.

Llamas nowadays weight 200kg max, but that's nothing compared to the horses nowadays which can weight 800kg now.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Marshes_Wheel
Fine twice in the old world.
The argument still stands. The vast majority of people didn't invent wheels independently

>plainlands 300m above sea level
It's obvious which civilizations would use the wheel. The coastal ones. Even then the wheel wasn't widely used, in fact Horse domestication spread the use of the wheel.

>wheels were only invented once in mesopotamia
>most technology including the wheel is adapted from neighboring culutres and not being invented independently
>the Aztecs had the wheel

???

>in the old world
You're splitting haird

>The vast majority of people didn't invent wheels independently
There were similar wheels, albeit younger, found in Germany and Switzerland. They were most likely independently developed, as they were in China and the Americas meaning there were several times that the wheel was invented.

>he thinks this is plains
>he thinks this is coastal
Nigger, you're an idiot or did you miss the "marshes" part or the "pile dwellings around the alps" part?

>DisEase ONly beCaMe a FacTOr poST-CoNqueSt

Are you retarded? The plains near the coast are perfect for agriculture, and don't forget the massive changes of environment just after the deglaciation.

>Where he fails is in later history (explaining why Europe surpassed China)

For that I'd suggest Pommeranz's "The Great Divergence"

The Ljubljana marshes are not plains and they're not coastal, you dumb faggot. They lived in pile dwellings on lakes/marshes and used fucking hollowed out trees as boats.

t.live here

He only quotes the conclusions which are based on perfectly valid generalizations except some others. The pic is retarded because it omits the process of modernity and how it does allow more exceptions over time. You can't compare bronze age mechanism with 1900 europe. It's like claiming that there cannot be a settlement 5000+ above sea level, but nowadays in Peru there is one.

>There were similar wheels, albeit younger, found in Germany and Switzerland. They were most likely independently developed, as they were in China and the Americas meaning there were several times that the wheel was invented.

>in China
source required

>implying
The first evidence of wheeled vehicles appears in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe (Cucuteni-Trypillian culture), so the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle is still unsolved.

Besides even if the wheel was invented simultaneously "several" times. It would be an aberration compared to other civilization changing technologies like writing, farming, industry, and the scientific process

You lived there in 5000BC?

The wheels are useful if there are already paths to walk through. The pack animals made it possible to create these paths quickly and ont bother with vegetation and wildness.

Literally all Pacific coast South-America suffers from landslides, deluges, floods and droughts, and it can be understood how 99% of South American crops are from the mountains, instead of having a coastal-plainlands origin.

what exactly are you arguing for?
That most human inventions were just an accident and spread form one place to the rest of the world and that the reasoning, process etc. one group of humans had to develop a certain thing can't be also similarily repeated in another culture?
I think the wheel with Aztecs and mesopotamian/europeans is a good example that it doesn't have to be that way.

>Amerindians are superior to europeans.
I've seen seveal posts from you in this thread and i really don't understand your reasoning as to why amerindians are supposed to be superior

>so the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle is still unsolved.
>originally
Yeah, because you can't invent the wheel separately, right? Who the fuck gave you the idea that things can only be invented once? We know that the wheel was invented independently in the Americas so it stands to reason it could be independently invented almost anywhere on planet earth. There is no need to "spread" the wheel.

>You lived there in 5000BC?
Great, I didn't know I'm arguing with creationists. No, I didn't live there, and if I had, I'd have to swim as the area was an uncleared marsh and shallow lake. Luckily we have literally hundreds of archeological sites.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_pile_dwellings_around_the_Alps

>The wheels are useful if there are already paths to walk through. The pack animals made it possible to create these paths quickly and ont bother with vegetation and wildness.
>Literally all Pacific coast South-America suffers from landslides, deluges, floods and droughts, and it can be understood how 99% of South American crops are from the mountains, instead of having a coastal-plainlands origin.
All I've read is some unrelated shit because you were called out on your assumptions which you made by skimming a wiki article.

Simple.
Europeans settle on europe: 40000BC
Amerindians reached Canada: 25000BC; then after the deglaciation (10000 years later) populated the rest of the continent in 15000BC

European crops date from 10000BC.
Amerindian crops date from 6000BC.

Europeans getting the bronze from other culture in 3200BC.
Amerindians reached the bronze age in 500BC approximately.

Also as a great factor:
Horse domesticated in 3000BC approximately.

Knowing that the rests of all amerindian populations of 14000BC to 10000BC were pretty much paleolithical-tier and all lived as nomads, practiced some artistic manifestations as european paleo-populations. It's safe to assume they started again in the paleolithic and had to morph the environment of woods, jungles and coasts to their convenience, the same the europeans did with their environment for thousands of years before the Neolithic.

Then let's compare:
Europeans lurking around as nomads: 30000 years.
Amerindians lurking around as nomads: 9000 years.

Europeans reaching the bronze age from other cultures after the Neolithic stage: 6800 years.
Amerindians reaching the bronze age by themselves without the influence of a culture thousands of years ahead of development: 5500 years.

Let's check also how many years have humans modifyed the horse population and environment: 37000 years.
Let's check how many years have amerindians affected the camelids of South-America, when the spaniards came: 16500 years. They had less than half the time, yet they already domesticated diverse species for food and whool. Llamas can carry up to 50 Kg.

And I didn't mention the disadvantages such as continental isolation (north-south and east-west), Niño fenomena that destroys coastal villages, less cultures to trade with, and no naval technology, iron, horses, wheel, and writting from north-african nor anatolian cultures.

So, it's safe to affirm. Incas were superior to europeans. Their higher development rate was excellent compare to europeans.

That most of time inventions are adapted from neighboring cultures instead independently made by different cultures. It's possible and has happened before (Olmec, Chinese, and Cuneiform) but it's not as likely as adapting an invention from someone else. (Aztec&Mayan, Japanese&Vietnamese, Latin, Cryllic, and Arabic). Why you never really saw the spread of wheeled transport in the new world is that pack animal was domesticated in one civilization and the wheel in another with next to no interaction between the two, so no chance to combine the technologies.

Kill yourself, faggot. Goddamnit this board is doomed.

Great argument, thanks for posting, >>>/reddit/ is that way

If it can be invented independently without any prerequisite then why didn't those prehistoric slovenians invented it 100 years before it was invented?

Who is to say they didn't invent it 100 years before and you just didn't find it yet because you're too busy sucking all those dicks while posting on Veeky Forums?

We may never know

>invented it two years before, then invented it again
You still don't get it. There are prerequisites. Protomesopotamic populations didn't invent the wheel for certain reasons, the same as the rest of the people from ME.

The problem is that its just this one guys guess, an educated guess to be fair, but simply a guess as to why sub saharan africa sucks in terms of technological achievements. But his fanboys treat it as gospel. Its very lelddit tier

>You still don't get it. There are prerequisites.
When you claim something as fact, it does not make it a fact. The american natives built toys with wheels. What was the prerequisite there?

But, I'll stop for a moment, and jump back a bit. You claimed the wheel was spread to Europe. I corrected you because you were wrong. You tried to explain it trough assumptions based on falsehoods. I corrected you again. Why are you a butthurt faggot? It's not my fault you're wrong.

see

I didn't claim it wasn't invented in europe you fucking retard.

If civilizations don't need prerequisites to invent x, then science is useless.

>If civilizations don't need prerequisites to invent x,
Yeah, that prerequisite is fucking wood out of which the wheel is fashioned. Not pack animals, not plains, not the weather or random Gods. If you want to go broader the prerequisite for civilization inventing something is...civilization.

see

>prerequisite is wood
Then why didn't other europeans invented it?

Not him, just saying. The bow and arrow was a mesolithic game changer, it was invented around 10000 BC and quickly spread throughout the world and so is a better starting point.

They clearly did as wheels were found in Germany and Switzerland, furthermore the absence of a wheel does not mean they did not invent them. People like you believed not 20 minutes ago that the wheel was brought to Europe from the Middle east as they did not find wheels in Europe that dated older than middle eastern ones and simply worked on assumptions

Why do you think the Europeans invented wheels when they could've acclimated their technology from a nearby source that's undiscovered? After all the earliest wheels cluster close to Mesopotamia, invading IE people's could've used the wheel first with horses and introduced it into neolithic populations?

>believed
Irrelevant. The remnants show that there was an earliest wheel.

>from the ME
Again, how many people do you think have answered you?

Still there is no evidence of wheel technology spread from europe to middle east. You can imply it spread from europe to ME without enough evidence, but it won't be nothing more than an hypothesis if we can't construct a model of spreading through the ancient terrains from east europe. Why do you still keep pushing for it?

>Why do you think the Europeans invented wheels when they could've acclimated their technology from a nearby source that's undiscovered?
Or maybe it's the other way around? But probably because there's no evidence of cultural exchanges between them?

>Still there is no evidence of wheel technology spread from europe to middle east.
Where did I claim there was?

>You can imply it spread from europe to ME without enough evidence
Where did I imply it?

>Why do you still keep pushing for it?
Where did I push for it?

Are you retarded? Because if anything I'm pushing for the fact that the wheel was INDEPENDENTLY invented by different peoples in different areas and is NOT the result of it being invented once and then spread and this is a fact unless you want to claim the wheel was spread to the Americas from the Middle east as well.

>Europeans settle on europe: 40000BC
>Amerindians reached Canada: 25000BC; then after the deglaciation (10000 years later) populated the rest of the continent in 15000BC

don't you think that different starting point is rather ill conceived? i mean both ancesors shared about the same time doing nothing on the eurasian continent basically befor the indians emigrated
Either start both at 40000BC or 25000BC

Amerindians didn't exist until 25000BC. Europeans started existing in 40000BC.

Amerindians in 14000BC had a technology comparable to 30000BC europe.

It's an ethnic comparison to determine which one is superior. And it demonstrates that Amerindians are superior.

>Europeans started existing in 40000BC.
Europe was covered by fucking ice m8 and indo-europeans are quite a ways away still

All southern europe was populated. The deglaciation finished in 8000BC more or less. The first crop of the world is in Greece in 10000BC.

Amerindians didn't advance from Canada until 14000BC, when the deglaciation made it possible for them to advance.

What's your point?

Europeans settle on europe: 40000 BC
Euroaustralians settle on australia: in the 18th-19th century

had technology comparable to europe in a few decades, even invented shit themselves like refrigirators and marmite and shit.
same with caucasian americans.

Why do you insist on separating the history of the asian ancestors of amerindians from the amerindians themselves?

>Why do you insist on separating the history of the asian ancestors of amerindians from the amerindians themselves?
Because his entire argument rests on it?

>asian ancestors
Because Amerindians are a different ethnic group that is pretty well documented biologically.
For the fact that they started again, and they are a completely different ethnic group. You keep avoiding the fact that 14000BC archeological remnants are similar to 30000BC european technology.

Amerindian development rate is superior to europeans. How is this hard to get?

>For the fact that they started again
that's the point: they didn't start form absolutely zero. They had a history in the old continent before they arrived. They didn't come to america and were buttnaked, having to figure out how to make fire and stone tools. They brought dogs with them and all other kinds of usefull stuff for the new settlements

and of course they developed into their own ethnicities, nobody is arguing against that, but that's not the point

and don't get me wrong Indoamerican cultures are pretty cool and all
just saying

The point is simple. Amerindians started existing in 25000BC and showed in 14000BC technology from 30000BC europe. Are you gonna deny archeological research?

From such primitive technological advancements, and more disadvantages to develop in, they had a higher technology and civic advancement rate.

Flawed book with some good analysis in it and some pretty awful ones. Sure pisses off a lot of people, but those people also tend to be comically resistant to the idea geography is a leading factor in certain things.

Basically a book explaining why savages from the Americas were btfo by Europeans.

Despite superiority and allegedly earlier advancement

Lmao

>Where he fails is in later history
That's not surprising considering it is not topic of the book and not part of the analysis.

People still post this shit?

You mean eurangutan pestilence.

Amerindian superiority will remain history forever.