Something very interesting

So, I'm reading a bleeding fantastic book at the moment: 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond, after a reccommendation from a friend of mine.

Diamond's book is primarily about why the civilizations of the Eurasion landmass have been far more technologically and dominatingly successful throughout human history. The most interesting point he's made so far (I'm not long into the book!), which I want to mention here, is about humans migrating to different continents and their subsequent use of the terrain.

One of the first, and most important, steps in the creation of a human society is development of food production - farming. If an animal can be domesticated and used for work that was previously reserved for humans, or used as food itself, then the humans doing the domesticating have less work to do, and more food to eat, allowing for human effort (as a society) to be put into other causes, such as craftmanship or politics.

This is exactly what happened in Africa and the Eurasian continents - humans evolved in coexistence with other large animals. These animals developed a sense of fear of humans, so could survive alongside them and not get made extinct. However, when humans migrated to southeast Asia, particularly New Guinea/Australia, and to the New World (mostly North America) they came into contact with megafauna (large animals) that had never been exposed to humans. This allowed the new immigrants to easily pick off the animals for food, and soon - within millennia - drove them all to extinction.

Subsequently, there were no large animals to domesticate for the uses described above. This led to the Aboriginal and North American indiginous peoples' inabilities to develop food production. Consequently, when these cultures were discovered by Eurasians in the 2nd millennium AD, they were still living as hunter-gatherer societies using stone tools. Essentially, they were 'living in the stone age'.

Of course, this is not at all to say that these societies were less developed cognitively - Diamond asserts that they possess the same abilities as any other modern human society. They simply lacked the technological developments that African and Eurasian cultures created because of their ability to farm.

Neat!