I wrote a couple of years ago a blog post about why are uncontacted peoples still so primitive, where I give two (non-mutually exclusive) hypotheses to answer that question.
Lately I have been thinking more generally about the vastly different developmental levels of different parts of the world, particularly before (mostly British, Spanish and Portuguese) imperialism, and later internationalism, spread the same level of technological and societal developmental level almost everywhere around the world.
After all, consider that almost all if not the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the entirety of the American continent was still literally living in the stone age, with people living in straw and mud huts, hunting for their survival, with their most advanced weapons being spears and very primitive bows, at the same time as in Europe there were huge cities of even hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, gigantic castles, massive gothic cathedrals, multi-storey buildings, paved roads, carriages, firearms, a strong economic system, a vast network of commerce, and even the printing press. While people in sub-Saharan Africa and the American continent were drawing cave paintings, Europeans and East-Asians were writing scientific books, law books and extravagant stage plays. While in those other places the most sophisticated instrument was a drum and perhaps a primitive flute, in Europe they were composing and playing entire classical music concerts, played in gigantic extravagant opera buildings.
This even though all these peoples had lived about the same amount of time, tens of thousands of years, and thus having about the same amount of time to develop their technology and society.
This got me thinking: Humanity was, roughly speaking, divided into two vast groups: One still literally living in the stone age, the other living in renaissance Europe and East Asia. But how did this happen? What was the ultimate first cause for this deviation? When and why did humanity split like this?
Then it hit me: It was the development of agriculture. That's the splitting point and the reason.
Stone-age people who have not developed agriculture are hunter-gatherers by necessity. They need to hunt almost every day for survival. At certain times of the year they might gather some berries, but that's it (and in fact there are still some tribes that eat meat only, no plant food of any kind.)
Why does this make a difference?
Because when you are a hunter-gatherer, it's pretty much a "hunt and consume" existence: The meat spoils very quickly so it has to be cooked and eaten pretty much the same day, or the next day at most. Even after cooking it still spoils in just a few days. Some tribes may have discovered and developed a way to preserve meat for longer (eg. by drying, smoking or salting), but that was rare and didn't make a whole lot of difference overall.
This means that in a hunter-gatherer society, particularly one that lives in a tropical climate, there's very little planning for the future. There simply is nothing to plan, really. You hunt, you eat, maybe build a hut out of straw or mud to protect yourself from the elements, and that's about it. Rinse and repeat. There is very little motivation to improve, especially since there's a very distinct lack of planning-for-the-future.
Agriculture, however, was a complete game-changer. This is because agriculture is not a daily "hunt-and-eat" activity. It requires long-term planning. It requires long-term work. What you do today will not produce anything for possibly months (very much unlike in a hunter-gatherer society). You have to know what you are doing, and you have to be prepared for a big delay between your work and its products.
Moreover, agriculture is very seasonal, especially in colder climates. This means you have to plan for the times of the year when you are not getting anything from your fields. Certain plant products, such as grain, are much easier to preserve for months on end than meat, but it still requires some planning and some infrastructure.
In other words, agriculture requires significantly more work and significant planning ahead, several months ahead in fact. However, the rewards are much bigger: A successful agricultural society will produce in the long run a huge abundance of food. Much more than they could even consume themselves.
Thus introduce commerce, introduce a monetary system, introduce transportation, travel and communication between peoples, introduce innovation and discoveries created to make agriculture, transportation and commerce even more efficient.
Give it a couple thousands years and you will have advanced from mud huts to gothic cathedrals.
Comments
Post a Comment