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Our world is some five billion years old, but modern humans have inhabited it for only a few hundred thousand years. Where did humans come from? When did they originate? And, how did they get to virtually every nook and cranny on the planet? This week we will begin with these questions, as we read Alfred Crosby's essay, "Pangaea Revisited."
From human origins and early migration routes, we will turn to the different rates of human development on the different continents over the last 13,000 years. To do this, we will read a brief essay by Jared Diamond.
Diamond's essay begins at the time of the last ice age, around 11,000 BC. At that time, all humans on earth lived as stone-age hunter-gatherers. This means that the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas lived according to very similar patterns. They had only basic stone technology; no domesticated plants or animals; and no large cities.
Diamond then jumps ahead to 1492 AD, when Christopher Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, uniting the continents of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. At the time of Columbus's voyage, the world was terribly unequal. Much of Europe and Asia was occupied by Iron Age states with ocean going vessels, large cities, guns, and steel. Meanwhile Native Americans, Australians, and Pacific islanders remained in the stone age without domesticated animals, guns, large ships, or steel weapons. This technological inequality helps to explain why Europeans were so successful in conquering and colonizing the Americas.
Now for our big question: Why did history turn out this way, instead of the opposite way? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who conquered or exterminated Europeans and Asians? The answer to this question is that different rates of development on different continents from 11,000 BC to 1492 AD produced the inequalities that Columbus found when he stepped foot in the New World.
Now for the really big question: Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? Those differing rates constitute the broadest pattern of history, the biggest unsolved problem of history, and they will be the subject of our second reading this week. |
