Ideas: A History by Peter Watson

Author:Peter Watson [Watson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, World, General
ISBN: 0753820897
Google: 5XwXAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00DZOEAX6
Publisher: Phoenix
Published: 2013-07-24T22:00:00+00:00

21

The ‘Indian’ Mind: Ideas in the New World

In many ways, the events of 1492 were as much an end as a beginning. If one accepts the evidence that, some time between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago, early man crossed from Siberia into the Americas, via the Bering Strait, then the epoch between that time and the close of the fifteenth century represents a unique natural experiment, when there were two huge groups of people, on two vast landmasses – what we might call the Old World and the New – entirely separated from one another and developing side-by-side, oblivious to the existence of each other. Such a state of affairs, though it has a great deal of shortcomings as a perfectly designed experiment, ought still to tell us a great deal about what is intrinsic to human nature, and what can be put down to environment. The same goes for ideas: what ideas were shared by the Old World and the New, and what were specific to each? Why was that so?

Equally fundamental is the question: Why was it that the Europeans discovered America rather than the other way around? Why did the Incas, say, not cross the Atlantic from west to east and subdue the Moroccans or Portuguese? This issue has been examined recently by Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at California Medical School but also an anthropologist who has worked in New Guinea, and who won the Rhône-Poulenc Science Book Prize in 1998 for Guns, Germs and Steel. Examining the evidence, Diamond found that the answer lay in the general layout of the planet, in particular the way the continents are arranged over the surface of the globe. Simply put, the continents of the Americas and Africa have their main axis running north–south, whereas in Eurasia it is east–west. The significance of this is that the diffusion of domesticated animals and plants is much easier from east to west, or west to east, than from north to south, or vice versa, because similar latitudes imply similar geographical and climatic conditions, such as mean temperatures, rainfall or hours of daylight. Diffusion from north to south, or south to north, on the other hand, is correspondingly harder to achieve and this simple geographical fact of life, Diamond says, inhibited the spread of domesticated animals and plants. Thus the distribution of cattle, sheep and goats was much more rapid, and thorough, in Eurasia than it was in either Africa or the Americas. In this way, he argues, the dispersal of farming meant the build-up of greater population densities in Eurasia as opposed to the other continents, and this had two further effects. First, competition between different societies fuelled the evolution of new cultural practices, in particular the development of weapons, which were so important in the conquest of the Americas. The second consequence was the evolution of diseases contracted from (largely domesticated) animals. These diseases could only survive among relatively large populations of humans, and when they were introduced to peoples who had developed no immune systems, such as the Incas or the Aztecs, they devastated them.

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