Seems to me like some of us were luckier...

Just going to touch on a topic which has been popping up in different parts of my life recently. It’s based around the curious fact of why Europeans and other societies advanced so quickly into the civilised world and left some countries and cultures behind.

One theory, which makes absolutely 100% sense to me, is the geographical luck of Europeans. Because although every modern human on every part of the globe started as hunters and gatherers - always on the move, following the migration of animals and good weather - only some of us were more fortunate in having good agriculture and livestock to start rapid farming.

When the earth’s climate changed so many thousand years ago, the human food supply started to become scarce. With our evolutionary luck of growing the brains to think to collect seeds from crops and plant them, we became farmers.

This of course didn’t only happen in parts of Europe, South America and Asia, farming was happening in less advanced societies like Papua New Guinea. Unfortunately, due to the geographic location of Papua New Guinea, these guys didn’t have access to the protein enriched wheat, barley or rice crops. Crops which can be planted with a simple throw of seeds over the earth and grow efficiently, quickly and in abundance. No, Papua New Guinean’s main crops were bananas or taros (a root vegetable which is cultivated individually by hand).

Papua New Guinea cultivating taro plant

As for animals –

“Of all the animal species in the world, only 14 have ever been domesticated. 12 of these are native to Eurasia. One, the llama, is native to South America – and the farmers of New Guinea managed to domesticate the pig. But pigs can't pull plows, and until the arrival of Europeans in the 20th century, all New Guinean farming was still done by hand.” – Guns, Germs & Steel

So in no way is it about the intelligence of the more advanced over the less advanced societies. In fact, the less advanced of us are far more resourceful than the western world and can survive in situations people from the Western world would perish at the thought of.

These more advanced civilisations were simply lucky enough to have the plants and animals which were easy to farm and reproduce to feed the masses. Groups of people and villages were able to expand and grow, living together and working together to continue to flourish, build and invent. Breeding animals to eat their meat and drink their milk, domesticating them so that they could be ridden or pull plows.

Tree house in Papua New Guinea. The people of Papua New Guinea build their houses up to 100 feet above the ground!

Places like Papua New Guinea had no such animals. They weren’t able to live in big groups and build progressive buildings with natural materials. They managed to domesticate the pig, but those fattys are no good for anything except delicious crispy bacon and roast pork.

Funnily enough, I was inspired to write this blog yesterday in the Monday morning WIP meeting at work when a colleague was asked to choose an inspiring picture to present and talk to (someone gets randomly selected each week).

She posted a picture of a bunch of Olympians, both old and new and spoke about the stereotypes of different countries and their sports. Eg. Australians and swimming, Africans and running, China and gymnastics etc.

She pointed out that it can be incredibly racist sometimes. Like the comment that was made that Africans are good at running because they run to school. When one of our Nigerian world champions pointed out that he grew up next to his school and simply jumped the fence each day. If anything, you’d guess he was good at high jump.

Perhaps Australians are supposed to be good swimmers because of our lovely weather which allows us to be outdoors more and encourages us to hit the water.

Oh boy Australians are lucky – we have a beautiful country with great weather. Our animals are native and our beaches are sandy. OK, well not all our animals are native. Did you know that our rabbit problem started with some muppet bringing 12 rabbits into the country to shoot in his backyard for sport? There was absolutely no farming, eating or agricultural reasoning, it was simply because he was bored and could entertain himself with death and blood. We did try to wipe them out once by releasing the myxomatosis virus on their furry little butts, we managed to kill 95% of them or something. But alas, there were a few who were immune to the disease and survived, and we all know that bunnies don’t take long to bump. Pop, pop, pop, pop – out come a bunch of myxomatosis resilient bunnies to take over the land again.

Reference: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/episode1.html