Dieoff starting in Africa

[DominicJ]

JSD
Are Carthage and Egypt African or Mediteranean?

Ancient Egypt was populated by people from Iraq following the Nile upstream.
Carthage was fleet resupply hub built by the Phoecans.
CARTHAGE WAS A COLONY
One that eclipsed its parent astate, and survived the fall of said parent.

Ethiopia resisted imperial ambitions to a degree, so did Zululand, did the Ethiopian Empire build pyramids to rival those at Giza? Did it create any great literature? Or science?
The same goes for Igbo, it reached so far as having a written language, but how far past that?
Did they even forge iron?

The infamous Pirates of the Barbary Coast (from Morocco to Libya) had managed to mount sail powered raids on the mighty European civilisations carrying off over a million people to slavery in the centuries either side of Samuel Pepys

Indeed they did, they actualy depopulated the spanish coasts, but they were arabs....

The difference between Haiti and Japan is that everyone in Japan can rely on their rich state to look after them whereas nearly everyone in Haiti lives just above poverty and has good reason to distrust the state. The reasons for that are generations of foreign funded political infighting due to it's location.

Again, youre refusing to answer the points presented, prefering to build your own strawmen.
Why did Japan create its highly centralised, if stagnant, state, whereas haiti did not?
Why did Japan recover from the Perry expedition, and 50-100 years later, becoming the dominant power in East Asia? Why didnt haiti?
Why can "foreigners" afford to fund infighting within other cultures, yet are themselves immune to it?

To believe that our modern, transitory, Western dominance is based on racial characteristics is utter tripe and racist to the core.

Where has anyone said that white westerners are geneticaly superior?
The only person saying anything of the sort is you, and you are demanding anyone who doesnt immediatly agree is burnt at the stake.

[DominicJ]

This is an interesting question but I don't know if there's a simple answer. Once civilisation gets rolling, its development is exponential. So we shouldn't take the sophistication of Chinese, east Asian and European civilisation as a sign of a huge intellectual advantage.

And tribalism has been rife in parts of Europe until recent times. Ireland was notorious for it.

Of course theres not a simple answer, thats the point.

To say there are no genetic differences between people is to deny fact.
To say all blacks are thick is to deny fact as well.
To say on average....
Well, JSD will probably demand I'm hung drawn and quartered, so I'll pause there.

[Ludwig]

There was nothing in North America because there was little need to do it with so few people and so much resource laden land.

It's been suggested by numerous historians that agriculture and subsequent civilisation emerged out of necessity, in places when population started to exceed what a hunter-gatherer way of life could support. Necessity is the mother of invention. As you indicate, if you have a simple life with plentiful resources, where's the incentive to go to all the trouble of building cities and breaking your back in manual agricultural work?

[biffvernon]

And tribalism has been rife in parts of Europe until recent times. Ireland was notorious for it.

Was? As recently as last night:

Twenty-six people were arrested during rioting in nationalist areas of north and south Belfast and Londonderry after Tuesday's Orange Order parades.

Sixteen police were injured and officers fired 55 plastic baton rounds - all of them in north Belfast's Ardoyne area.

Police said children as young as 10 were involved in the rioting in Derry.

Rioters threw petrol bombs, bricks, stones, fireworks and bottles at officers during the trouble.

Twelve arrests were made in Derry, nine in Belfast's Ardoyne - including a 12-year-old by and five in the Markets area of south Belfast.

In Armagh, there were reports of public disorder in the Friary Road and Killylea Road areas, while in Ballymena a car was burnt out in Dunclug estate.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-14138356

[DominicJ]

Ludwig
Indeed, if you think about, the further you move from the equator, the more you have "seasons".
The closer you go to the equator, the less you have seasons.

Seasons equate to availability of food. If you site dead on the equator, fruit of some sort is available 365 days of the year, as are vegetables, grass, and the animals that eat the grass.

That is simply not the case for the UK, we have 9 months of plenty, where, for example, you can pick and eat apples till your stomach explodes, but we also have 3 months of hardship, when there isnt a berry to be found, when even the hardiest veg is unedable and the pasture has wilted such that the game has mostly died off, and what remains is in hiding.

The only way to survive in the UK, is either to import food over winter, or to store food in summer to eat over winter.

Now, it could be that forward planning is an entirely learned behaviour, but if its not, if there is an inheritable brain formation that influences long term planning, that would be somewhat absent in an equitorial climate, but would become increasingly prevalent as we went further north, or south. Or to any area with a variable environment.


It could be that JSD is right, there is no heritable genetic trait giving a predisposition towards long term plans.
But he has no proof of that.
And his claim that anyone who thinks otherwise is a vile racist who must be silenced, is little more than flat earthism.

Am I intelligent because I inherited it from my mum? Or because she nurtured me as a baby?
I dont know.

But if height, skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, predisposition to baldness can all be influenced by genetics, why not intelligence?

It's been suggested by numerous historians that agriculture and subsequent civilisation emerged out of necessity

I agree, but did you survive based on survival of the fittest, or dumb luck.

[goslow]

I'm sure its a big area of academic study and debate as to why Africa has not developed quite like other continents.

Africa has lots of geographical features that prevent the development of large powerful empires (compare with China that has a large single area of land with few natural boundaries).

Malaria has played its part in limiting development along the lines of "classic" civilisation. And Western (and Arab?) colonialism.

Agriculture could be limited due to the lack of active volcanoes that renew the soil with minerals (compare Italy, Japan etc)

However, AFAIK, there were quite a few rather wealthy city-states in Africa especially in West Africa around 1000-1500 AD.

[biffvernon]

Am I intelligent because I inherited it from my mum? Or because she nurtured me as a baby?
I dont know.

Go read last week's New Scientist. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... smart.html

[UndercoverElephant]

I'm sure its a big area of academic study and debate as to why Africa has not developed quite like other continents.

The question about genetics is not asked. Not usually, anyway, and you can see why in this thread.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

This is an interesting question but I don't know if there's a simple answer. Once civilisation gets rolling, its development is exponential. So we shouldn't take the sophistication of Chinese, east Asian and European civilisation as a sign of a huge intellectual advantage.

And tribalism has been rife in parts of Europe until recent times. Ireland was notorious for it.

Of course theres not a simple answer, thats the point.

To say there are no genetic differences between people is to deny fact.
To say all blacks are thick is to deny fact as well.
To say on average....
Well, JSD will probably demand I'm hung drawn and quartered, so I'll pause there.

What are you talking about? I haven't once stated that you (or anyone) should be pilloried or censured for their beliefs nor did I start this nonsense about race.

My interjection was to remind everyone that this is a public forum.

Japan was rebuilt by the US after WW2 as a very convenient military base.
Haiti suffered PaPa Doc for 30 years.

Africa's problems are rooted in geographic, political, historic and cultural reasons, not genetic ones.

[Ludwig]

Ludwig
Indeed, if you think about, the further you move from the equator, the more you have "seasons".
The closer you go to the equator, the less you have seasons.

Seasons equate to availability of food. If you site dead on the equator, fruit of some sort is available 365 days of the year, as are vegetables, grass, and the animals that eat the grass.

That is simply not the case for the UK, we have 9 months of plenty, where, for example, you can pick and eat apples till your stomach explodes, but we also have 3 months of hardship, when there isnt a berry to be found, when even the hardiest veg is unedable and the pasture has wilted such that the game has mostly died off, and what remains is in hiding.

The only way to survive in the UK, is either to import food over winter, or to store food in summer to eat over winter.

Now, it could be that forward planning is an entirely learned behaviour, but if its not, if there is an inheritable brain formation that influences long term planning, that would be somewhat absent in an equitorial climate, but would become increasingly prevalent as we went further north, or south. Or to any area with a variable environment.


It could be that JSD is right, there is no heritable genetic trait giving a predisposition towards long term plans.
But he has no proof of that.
And his claim that anyone who thinks otherwise is a vile racist who must be silenced, is little more than flat earthism.

Good points, Dom. Generally speaking, life would seem to go along the path of least resistance. You could argue that a similar lack of evolutionary pressure means that people breed in the developed world who would have struggled for one reason or another in pre-industrial times. I'm not arguing for eugenics and I'm not adopting an attitude of superiority, since it seems to me I have inherited some pretty bad genes myself And there may be nothing in it. (No one is quite sure why parrots are so intelligent, when there is so little need for intelligence in the their nutritionally abundant habitats.) But it's an interesting, if awkward, question to ask.

If I were a black person reading this discussion, I might feel differently. I can't deny that. And this is a dangerous topic, because it's a short step from making observations like UE's about the poor record of African politics, to making completely spurious claims about other races that most people in our society would be only too happy to swallow uncritically. The Nazis would have argued that Jews are genetically inclined to meanness and deviousness. It's a thin line, and for that reason I think science should let it lie.

[UndercoverElephant]

Ludwig
Indeed, if you think about, the further you move from the equator, the more you have "seasons".
The closer you go to the equator, the less you have seasons.

Seasons equate to availability of food. If you site dead on the equator, fruit of some sort is available 365 days of the year, as are vegetables, grass, and the animals that eat the grass.

That is simply not the case for the UK, we have 9 months of plenty, where, for example, you can pick and eat apples till your stomach explodes, but we also have 3 months of hardship, when there isnt a berry to be found, when even the hardiest veg is unedable and the pasture has wilted such that the game has mostly died off, and what remains is in hiding.

The only way to survive in the UK, is either to import food over winter, or to store food in summer to eat over winter.

Now, it could be that forward planning is an entirely learned behaviour, but if its not, if there is an inheritable brain formation that influences long term planning, that would be somewhat absent in an equitorial climate, but would become increasingly prevalent as we went further north, or south. Or to any area with a variable environment.

This theory is inconsistent with what is already known about human evolution. Humans are indeed uniquely capable of planning ahead, but this is far too critical a trait for it to have only appeared at the latest stages in human evolution. It either already existed at the point speech became important, or appeared at about the same time. This far predates the point at which all living humans shared a common ancestor.

It is also inconsistent with the fact that farming first appeared in a region just north of the tropics.

[UndercoverElephant]

If I were a black person reading this discussion, I might feel differently. I can't deny that. And this is a dangerous topic, because it's a short step from making observations like UE's about the poor record of African politics, to making completely spurious claims about other races that most people in our society would be only too happy to swallow uncritically.

I agree. I think some people have already read too much into what I've posted about the relevant science.

[DominicJ]

Ludwig

I'm not arguing for eugenics

I've got you there, I cant, Governments always screw up, imagine what they'd do if we let them control natural selection?
We'd be extinct by tuesday


UE

This theory is inconsistent with what is already known about human evolution. Humans are indeed uniquely capable of planning ahead, but this is far too critical a trait for it to have only appeared at the latest stages in human evolution. It either already existed at the point speech became important, or appeared at about the same time. This far predates the point at which all living humans shared a common ancestor.

But we dont stop evolving
Humans are indeed unique in our ability to plan ahead, but theres a difference between a finding a coconut, and keeping hold of it until you find a rock so you can smash it open and eat it. Carrying an axe, because you want to chop up a cow later, and building a granary to store 10 years of food.

*If* forward planning, and the length of such plans, are heritable, then that could be relevent.


*****
Does anyone know when we first started "farming" fruit trees?
*****

[Ludwig]

This theory is inconsistent with what is already known about human evolution. Humans are indeed uniquely capable of planning ahead, but this is far too critical a trait for it to have only appeared at the latest stages in human evolution. It either already existed at the point speech became important, or appeared at about the same time. This far predates the point at which all living humans shared a common ancestor.

It is also inconsistent with the fact that farming first appeared in a region just north of the tropics.

It seems possible that it appeared in this region owing to population pressure, and its invention made it possible for humans thence to advance in large numbers northwards and eastwards to climates where natural food was not abundant all year round. Pure speculation, I hasten to add.

[UndercoverElephant]

UE

This theory is inconsistent with what is already known about human evolution. Humans are indeed uniquely capable of planning ahead, but this is far too critical a trait for it to have only appeared at the latest stages in human evolution. It either already existed at the point speech became important, or appeared at about the same time. This far predates the point at which all living humans shared a common ancestor.

But we dont stop evolving
Humans are indeed unique in our ability to plan ahead, but theres a difference between a finding a coconut, and keeping hold of it until you find a rock so you can smash it open and eat it. Carrying an axe, because you want to chop up a cow later, and building a granary to store 10 years of food.

Finding a food object and carrying it to a place where it can be smashed open is something that monkeys are capable of. Some birds also have this level of cognitive ability. Carrying an axe (a stone tool) is also something that goes back at least as far as Homo habilis (1.4 million - 750,000 years ago.)

*If* forward planning, and the length of such plans, are heritable, then that could be relevent.

This process of forming and carrying out plans must have been heritable and in its advance form it is linked to the development of language. The success of H. sapiens had a lot to do with its ability to hunt large game in packs, using language to pre-plan the strategy.

The problem I have with your theory is not that this is irrelevant, but that it is too relevant to have appeared late enough in human evolution for there to be a significant difference between the existing races.

The key difference between the humans which remained in Africa and those which left was the ability to adapt to new environments. There is additional data which can be brought to bear on this. As mentioned earlier in this thread, H. sapiens evolved in the area of the rift valley, in what is now Kenya and Ethiopia (about 150,000 to 100,000 years ago.) From there our ancestors spread out slowly over the rest of Africa. Then something like 80,000 years ago, a group of humans appeared which had learned to specialise in a new environment. These people were coastal specialists, and they first appeared on the south coast of what is now South Africa. They lived in caves and made their living entirely from the sea. It is in these caves that the first examples of human art have been found.

See: http://archaeology.about.com/cs/humanor ... lombos.htm

These coastal specialists then spread northwards up both coasts of Africa, remaining as coastal specialists rather than returning inland. It was these coastal specialists which eventually found their way into Europe and the middle east and which gave rise to all of the non-black races which eventually went on to colonise every livable environment on the entire planet.

Now put two and two together...

*****
Does anyone know when we first started "farming" fruit trees?
*****

No.