From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Apr 13 2002 - 23:13:08 MDT
Last fall there were some interesting exchanges concerning the rate of
advancement of prehistoric peoples, but I was indisposed at the time,
and didn't join in.
One's of history's strangest and most moving moments occurred when
Cortez met Montezuma. Here were representatives of two elaborate
cultures that had never heard of each other; nothing like it
happened before or since. Judging from the cultural accomplishments
of contemporary Meso-American and European civilization, a long
time ago I guessed that European civilization was about 3000 years
more advanced.
Later I read in Jared Diamond's great book "Germs, Guns, and Steel",
a long list of particulars that reinforced this perception. Finally,
I made a graph of Diamond's data, and decided to order the data by
Eastern Hemispheric discovery, and distributed the following result
to my local book discussion group a few years back when we read
Diamond's book:
Graphical Comparison of Eastern vs. Western Hemisphere Civilization
by Lee Corbin
based upon data provided on pp 362-363
in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The vertical axis comprises eight indicators from Diamond's table ordered by Eastern
Hemisphere date of discovery. The horizontal axis denotes thousands of years B.C. or
A.D. (no politically correct B.C.E. or B.P. here!)
B.C. (1000's): 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 +1
Writing E W
States E W
Metals E W
Chiefdoms E W
Pottery E W
Animals E W
Plants E W
Villages E W
B.C. (1000's): 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 +1
Now I have re-examined this chart carefully, and it seems
inescapable to me that the Western civilization was narrowing
the gap between itself and the Eastern civilization, because
whether you consider triples or pairs of items, the gap in
time between initial development in the East and the West
is definitely narrowing.
This, if true, is incredibly strange! Diamond documents the
following rather obvious reasons that one would expect the
Eastern Hemisphere's peoples to have been more advanced:
the land mass and population of the Eurasian/African continents
is much greater, the "meeting place" of the continents (the
Middle East) is much more accessible than the corresponding
meeting place in the West (Panama), and (what perhaps isn't
so obvious) broad bands of geographical uniformity along
lines of latitude exist in the Eastern Hemisphere, but not
in the Western. The latter particularly enables ideas to
spread more quickly at any particular latitude.
And the causes of them being more advanced in the first place
would surely continue to hold, with the effect that the gap
in development should have become greater with time, not less!
Exactly as we would expect a small island, say Japan, to
eventually fall behind the rest of the world if cut off,
and then to fall further and further behind over time.
The Spaniards first visiting Mexico City (Tenotitlan) report
over and over again their awe at the size and splendor of
the city. Perhaps it really was much more impressive (in
certain ways) than European cities at the time. It certainly
was more numerous, with a population, IIRC, of about 200,000.
But of course, those same Spaniards might have been equally
impressed with ancient Rome, which had a very large population.
I have been completely unable to account for any reasons that
Mezo-American civilization should have been gaining on the
East. (Please, if you do get uploaded and live past this
trying century, you simply MUST run some simulations of the
Americas without the Spanish advent!)
Conjectures, anyone?
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:30 MST