HOW EARTH MADE US

**RonPrice** · January 29, 2012, 11:29 PM

Iain Stewart(b. 1964-) is a Scottish geologist, television and radio presenter, as well as a professor of Geoscience Communication at the University of Plymouth. I have just finished watching his epic 5 part series How Earth Made Us.1 I am twenty years older than Stewart, am a retired teacher and lecturer, now poet and publisher and currently am the secretary of the Baha’i Group of George Town Tasmania, the oldest town in Australia, the oldest continent.

Professor Stewart’s line of thought reminded me of Ellsworth Huntington’s intellectual mission “to determine step by step the process by which geological structure, topographic form and the present and past nature of climate have shaped man’s progress, moulded his history, and thus played an incalculable part in the development of a system of thought which could scarcely have arisen under any other physical circumstances.”2 Stewart presents a focus on how the environment has shaped history.

While this series was presented on Australian television the Plains Humanities Alliance held a public panel presentation entitled “Changing Places: The Geographic Turn in the Digital Humanities.”3 Sometimes called humanities computing this field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials relating to the traditional humanities disciplines. Digital Humanities currently incorporates digitized materials from the traditional arts and humanities disciplines, such as: history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies. It then combines the methodologies of these disciplines with tools provided by computing such as: data visualisation, data retrieval, computational analysis, digital publishing, and the electronic publication fields.

Also relevant to this discussion is geographic information system or geospatial information system(GIS). This is a system that captures, stores, analyses, manages and presents data with reference to geographic location data. It is a critical tool in facilitating a new wave of spatial analysis. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis and database technology. GIS may be used in archaeology, geography, cartography, remote sensing, land surveying, public utility management, natural resource management, precision agriculture, photogrammetry, urban planning, emergency management, landscape architecture, navigation, aerial video and localized search engines.

GIS allows users to create multiple layers of information that can be aligned on the same map or spatial field. Historical maps can be scanned and geo-referenced, that is, stretched to fit the current map, thus allowing users to combine and overlay various forms of information in order to understand how they relate to one another. -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1 TV, 8 March 2011 to 5 April 2011, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., 2 Ellsworth Huntington, Wikipedia, Aaron Hofer, “Geographic Determinism Through the Ages,” and “Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?”, as well as Jared Diamond, 3Office of University Communications University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Tooling Up for Digital Humanities.

I think it quite logical, Ellsworth,
that there is a step-by-step process
by which geologic structure, forms
topographic, & the present and past
climate shaped progress, & moulded
our history, playing an incalculable
part in the development of systems of
thought which could scarcely have arisen
under any other physical circumstances.1

I think it quite logical, Samuel,2 that the primary
source of conflict in our post-Cold War world is
and will be the cultural and religious identities as
you formulated in your 1992 lecture at the AEI:
American Enterprise Institute.2 And so Professor
Stewart, I can agree with your thesis, in part, and
I did enjoy your series on TV in this Australian
autumn: delightful, Ian, absolutely delightful!!*

1 Ellsworth Huntington(1876-1947) was professor of geology at Yale and known for his studies on climatic determinism.
2 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.

Ron Price
19 April 2011

**Sphere** · January 29, 2012, 11:49 PM

I am thankful for the brave fireman who saved my life by pulling me out of a burning building. Unfortunately he lost his life in the process.

I don't remember his name, but I think he had a mustache.

**Phier** · January 29, 2012, 11:58 PM

I've read Jared Diamond, and while I find his argument interesting I think it falls short for explaining the weakness of Africa. While the idea for disease vectors does work there, I think there are other factors besides grain and domesticated animals being cattle have been in Africa long long before colonization took place. Still I think there is a lot to his theories.

I used to have a mustache and goatee but I was sick of being my own evil version, which maybe was a good version, I'm not sure.

**sumskilz** · January 30, 2012, 07:18 AM

Originally Posted by Phier

I've read Jared Diamond, and while I find his argument interesting I think it falls short for explaining the weakness of Africa. While the idea for disease vectors does work there, I think there are other factors besides grain and domesticated animals being cattle have been in Africa long long before colonization took place. Still I think there is a lot to his theories.

I know a fair amount about this since it's sort of within my field, I could add a lot more, but here’s a start...

Diamond mentions some of this, but there has been a lot of compiling of data along the lines of his thinking since he first published his ideas.

While most of Eurasia and North Africa inherited agricultural techniques and crops (wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils) from the Fertile Crescent, these crops and techniques were useless in most of sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa has deficient fertile topsoil necessary for productive agriculture on 90% of its surface.

Species of grass in the savannah are specifically adapted to the conditions. Non-native grasses don’t grow well at all. Native grasses are twice as productive when grazed on by herd animals than when cropped annually. In other words, herding is a good survival strategy, but agriculture will quickly deplete the soil to uselessness.

However, all six of the large mammals useful to humans in sub-Saharan Africa (camels, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, horses) were of Asiatic origin, so they didn’t have use of them from as early a time. The tsetse fly means these animals are hard to keep alive in large numbers over a huge part of Africa, so even herding is limited.

The result is that civilization – cities supported by agriculture were few and far between across most of the continent. Isolation meant less technological exchange. There were exceptions of course – like the Swahili city states of East Africa which were connected to the trade routs of the Indian Ocean, and the Empires of the Western Sahel. The empires of the Sahel were based on indigenous crops like millet, but because of the toughness of the sun baked soil, it required so much of a caloric output to produce these crops that they couldn’t produce a surplus to support a specialized population without working and starving slaves to death. These slaves were acquired through warfare with neighboring city-states and raiding of lesser developed decentralized nearby societies. This system meant there was a tight cap on population growth. It’s been estimated that as much as 40% of sub-Saharan Africans were “disposable” slaves in pre-colonial times.