Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test

I really liked Guns, Germs &amp; Steel. Not necessarily because I was immediately convinced that it explained everything and that was the end of it (I don&#x27;t have the relevant expertise to be the judge of that), but just because it showed me a way of looking at the world at a way larger scale than I had previously done, and was very engaging while at it.<p>It makes sense that such theories like the continental axis hypothesis may turn out to play some role, but not be a single cause-and-effect. Earth is a pretty complex system, after all.

To be fair to Diamond, his arguments in GG&amp;S are bit broader in scope than just the the continental axis hypothesis. The disparity in domesticable animals between Eurasia and other continents always seemed more persuasive than the axial argument. Although it is true that he leans too far into determinism and discounts cultural and economical factors.

Diamond’s ideas seemed pretty intuitive to me. The idea that geography is the primary shaper of civilisations seems _very_ likely to be true in general. I’ve read other books on the impact of geography on military defence and how that shapes geopolitics, for example.<p>Having worked in academia for many years, when I see academics attack a book such as GGS my instinct is to question their motives. Academics can be very egotistical and territorial. A priori, it is very difficult to imagine a situation where academics would say to any book like Diamond’s “oh yes this is a really great point and we need to learn from this guy” and very very likely to say “this guy doesn’t know anything about (less important factors that I know a lot about)! What an idiot! He even gets the date of this event wrong, proving I am clever and he is wrong.”<p>So when I hear about academics attacking something that seems to be fairly obviously correct at least at a very general level, my instinct is not “oh, yes, this guy must be completely wrong” but rather “this guy is probably mostly right but of course there will be a lot of other factors and it will be very easy to pick apart his book if you so wish, especially if your ego relies on you finding fault with him.”<p>I’m not so easily dissuaded that GGS isn’t mostly right that geography and in particular agricultural factors are the broad strokes of history, rather than the less permanent and smaller scale “Gaussian noise” of cultural events that intuitively are likely to mostly even out over time.

Even if the layout of the land didn&#x27;t give an advantage to Eurasia + Mediterranean Africa, the sheer size did. It had a lot more arable land, more space for nomadic tribes (capable of fast travel and spread of culture and technology), more resources, more people. Brief study of geography and climate would make it obvious that areas like Mediterranean, Middle East, India and China will become centers of civilization. All these were connected by land and sea routes, that made it possible to exchange knowledge (and germs). Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia didn&#x27;t stand a chance.

If you&#x27;re looking for an alternative view, check out &quot;The Dawn of Everything&quot; by Graeber and Wengrow.

It&#x27;s weird to see the people in this thread stating the generally accepted scientific viewpoints downvoted while those praising Diamond are upvoted.<p>Diamond is a skilled and persuasive writer, who&#x27;s had success as a pop science writer but the theories he pushes to put it lightly are largely not accepted within academic communities.<p>Some, like the stories of ecocide featured in Collapse, have been completely and thoroughly debunked. That book is about as academically rigorous as The Lorax and fills the niche: a modern ecological morality tale for a modern Western audience.

&gt; the transmission of cultural traits among 1,094 traditional societies<p>So people had already been living in a given zone. When Europeans first arrived in America, had the locals not already been there and learned the ways of that land and shared, famously the first Thanksgiving in US education, the new arrivals would have perished.

&gt; The findings suggest that factors such as the movement of peoples<p>These are heavily influenced by geography.<p>&gt; direct and indirect cultural exchanges<p>This are heavily influenced by physical proximity, which, of course, is heavily influenced by geography.<p>Of course that geography is not destiny, at the end it of it all nothing is, but it plays a very big part. And the historical truth is that Karakorum (located towards the Eastern end of the Eurasian landmass) had a lot more closer connections to places like Budapest and Kiev (located towards the Western end of the Eurasian landmass) compared to the connection between, let&#x27;s say, Cairo and Johannesburg.<p>As such, saying that &quot;Jared Diamond is wrong&quot; without looking at concrete historical facts from our past does not help anyone, no matter if the people doing it like to brandish themselves as &quot;scientists&quot;.

My hypothesis is better (and its probably pretty common): easy living (temp, soil, etc) and navigable waterways (lots of ports) made the difference. When conditions are comfortable for civilization, there&#x27;s plenty of time to think about things, and with lots of ports its easy to spread those ideas. This is probably why places like Egypt, Greece, Italy, Minoa, etc, get the gold medal for early civilizations.

I found the more mundane explanations in &quot;Why Nations Fail&quot; to be far more convincing than the geographical determinism of &quot;Guns, Germs and Steel&quot;

No love for Gruber?

What an abhorrent shitpost.

So apropos of this pop history author, my &quot;oh shit, being compelling and interesting doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s correct&quot; anecdote comes courtesy of another book that was popular around the same time as Guns, Germs and Steel, 1421: The Year China Discovered The New World.<p>I read it, found it all very plausible and interesting.<p>I read Gavin Menzies next book, 1434, found it equally interesting and compelling.<p>Then I read his <i>third</i> book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and found it just as plausible as his first book.<p>Except the prior plausibility in my head of a Minoan civilization maintaining global trade was way, way lower, and so I didn&#x27;t just accept it as uncritically as I had the first two books, and that made me realize how unskeptically I had been reading the first two books, and other books in the genre.<p>It was a more enjoyable life lesson than most, all things considered.

Despite having his book, I anticipated this story being about how some aspect of a jewelry store&#x27;s marketing is hogwash, and there was in fact no discernible difference between their specially-sourced diamonds and any old diamonds dug up from control sites around the globe.

&quot;Eurasia’s geographic layout inherently facilitated a quicker spread of critical innovations compared to other regions of the world, such as the Americas and Africa.&quot;<p>sadly, &quot;critical&quot; and &quot;innovation&quot; are semantically characterized as both important and good because who made those critical innovations dominated with weapons other trivial and unoriginal populations.<p>Edit: I havent&#x27;t read the book but such hypothesis are quite sterile considering how populations move (and used to move) around the globe. We are taught a pretty static idea of ancient civilizations, while they probably move more than us.