DWill wrote: Fishing is an interesting example where a major food source--maybe the most important of all, worldwide--comes straight from non-domesticated sources. It does seem that JD should have mentioned this activity at some point, if only to anticipate objections and try to explain how fishing doesn't alter his theory of continental development. During the period that JD is concerned with, the 13,000 years before about 1500, I would think that fishing would have provided mainly subsistence but not the potential to rack up food surpluses that grain and livestock provided. When industrial methods of catching fish and storing them became available to fisherman, that changed things. But it had to wait until relatively modern times. Fishing as we know it today is also done by settled people, even though they may travel far out to sea to find their prey.

I'm wondering if there is documented evidence that hunter-gatherers (including fishermen) lacked the capability to accumulate surplus? For some reason, we seem to think that the hunter gatherers were a desperate, starving lot who could never organize themselves well enough to develop because they were always on the move .. certainly this is JD's premise .. I just wonder if it is fact? To my knowledge, hunter gatherers actually spent only part of the time on subsistence food, depending on seasons and herd movements etc., and in some seasons gathered together in camps and temporary communities. I accept as fact that they were outcompeted by farmers and the resulting rise in population and concentration of population then drove development (along with disease and eventually severe environmental problems etc.) ... but I think JD too easily dismisses the h-g's as a footnote of history, an evolutionary dead end road.

With regards to fisheries, I would think that people migrated along major waterways, like the Nile and the Mississippi ... both of these rivers (and many others) basically run north south across the latitudes that are so central to JD's theory of east west migration. The rivers provided everything, water, food and transport .. they may also have impeded east west movement. Water of course is essential to crops so once irrigation was developed a major, reliable water source, preferably year round, would be required. So, sticking close to major rivers and their tributaries would make sense. Also, major river valleys may have similar growing and climatic conditions over a long distance even if latitude changes.

Thanks for the 'criticisms' link that you posted, I will check that out.

D. does mention that in extremely favorable conditions, h-g life could become settled, because there were such ample resources available to people regardless of season. The reason for nomadic hunting-gathering would have been the need to follow the seasons or animal migrations. However. that doesn't address the question of food surpluses. There would be the potential to lay up stored food in times of plenty in the absence of agriculture if the culture practiced smoking or drying of fish and meat, perhaps storage of wild nuts, etc., but Diamond suggests that the scale of this simply wasn't sufficient to get civilization going, with its dependence on large numbers of specialists who had no hand in providing the food that sustained them. You'd need to ramp up the capacity of a given area of land to produce food, which is what agriculture is all about.

I don't get the impression that you get, though, as to his personal viewpoint on the value of hunting-gathering. He just seems hard-nosed about it to me, pointing out what seems to be the obvious fact that hunter-gathers were either absorbed by farming cultures or were destroyed by them, because of the greater military power that followed from having grain- (or corn-) based food surpluses. Even though that life was undoubtedly very hard, with exposure to the elements and starvation sometimes not far away, devastating diseases appeared to be unknown, because humans didn't live in close quarters with domestic animals or in concentrated numbers. Then you have to add in the stratification of society that came along with agriculture and population growth. It begins to seem more like a trade-off than a steady rise of progress.

Good points about the importance of river valleys. In most, but not seemingly all, of the areas of original or early food production, the major rivers were a base of operations.

yes. good point about the rivers, Giselle

At the end of Part II JD does qualify his focus on latitude as a determining factor by saying there are many other factors, so the 'river' point would fall into this basket. Still I think he has turned a complete blind eye to the impact of waterways and fisheries as a major h-g activity, likely one that has shaped history, and I think this is a weakness in his argument.

Although he qualifies the latitude argument, he doesn't deal with the underlying problem that I have with his theory - he wants to show us that environment was the major determining factor in human development, favouring some, and by ommission, that cultural factors were secondary or not determining. I do appreciate that he is challenging our thinking on these points and I am enjoying the book for this reason but I am struggling with this environmental determinism message.

I have moved on to part III but one last comment on part II, which I think is salient when one considers the impact of environment vs culture. When a group of people who know their land really, really well, who have developed an intimate knowledge of their land and a mythology and culture around life on that land .. when they decide to move/migrate this is a huge decision, a huge step into the unknown. My guess is that they would only do it for a very good reason.

To be successful they would have to prepare and during that preparation I would think they must have sent out 'scouts' to inform them of what they will encounter in terms of natural and human obstacles or friendly/unfriendly humans, to find trails or waterways if they can travel by boat, to find food sources that will support them when travelling, to have some idea of where they are going and why. Those who failed to do this would likely have perished so would not have been part of the successful migration that eventually shaped the human world. These scouts would have found the best ways, the mountain passes, waterways etc. but may have had little idea of where they would end up ... but one thing for certain, they would not settle down again until they found a place that provided the basics of what they needed ... water, food, shelter, security including but not limited to a land and food production opportuntiy that they understood and could work with. Again, those who failed to do his would likely have perished so they would not have shaped the human world.

Where I am going with this is that I think the effectiveness of planning, looking ahead, anticipating, decision making, scouting and the ability to do all this up front and while on the move would have had a significant, perhaps determining, impact on success. If they failed at any or all of this (a bit of Anna Karenina factor here), their likelihood of successful migration is low, I would think, hence their impact on the overall human migration over history would be negligible to non-existent and its unlikely that their method of food production, whether it be h-g or farming, would even enter into the historical equation, they would drop into the evolutionary bit bucket.

On the other hand, the successful migrants would establish their food production and would impact human history in an evolutionary way ... but I would argue that the determining factor was their success in the strategies of migrating (ie cultural factors) whereby they overcame obstacles and took advantage of favourable conditions be they natural or human. They would require these skills to succeed, they would have to be adaptive, to learn in fairly short order, how to survive and eventually prosper. I think this goes way deeper than the simple point of whether or not the food and growing conditions they are familiar with exist in their new locale.

I don't reject JD's argument for food production/environmental determinism entirely but I think it is merely one factor among many and the other factors are largely cultural not environmental.

The role of culture in this grand historical pattern is something many commentators feel is important and not adequately addressed by Diamond. What he says about the ability of culture to create idiosyncratic responses is that this happens on a more local or regional scale, but that over wide areas such as continents, the effect won't change the overall trend. He's writing in opposition to a conventional view that some cultures have simply been more successful than others, and the only explanation for this success differential is that the people themselves must have been more able, smarter. But Diamond has told us that there isn't any evidence that genetic differences in humans touch on their general fitness to manipulate their environments. People everywhere have the same endowment as far as we can tell. (We've already mentioned that he undercuts this claim with his belief that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners.) Although cultures obviously have differences, these differences don't create the pattern of continental development that he sees; geography does that. Generally speaking, I'm with him on this.

It might be that people long ago who moved about went through a process like the one you described, giselle, but if this is just something that humans in general did, Diamond might not find it significant, because it wouldn't seem to explain the differences in how the world developed, and that is his whole reason for writing the book. What people may have in common he wants to exclude. It's already quite a long book, after all.