Irbis wrote:Note that outside of Egypt, there is virtually no civilization in Africa that can be considered pioneer of civilization for almost all of recorded history - with too good environment to survive as hunter/gatherer, need to expend effort and thinking on farming (and consequently, need to develop trade, specialized crafts, accounting, etc) disappears as there is no longer any advantage in doing so, it even becomes disadvantage. So, being in warm spot doesn't give you examples to the contrary, not even North's "only" 500 years of domination.
This doesn't make a lot of sense, you're missing some critical points.
1) What do you mean "with too good environment to survive as hunter-gatherer, need... disappears..." OH. I see, sorry, that sentence didn't make sense at first, because of the way the punctuation worked. I understand now. But that leads to...
1A) You missing facts about African history. Sub-Saharan Africa may not have been one of the
first regions of the world to civilize, but it did so, and did so in ancient times. Most of Africa was not occupied by hunter-gatherers when Europeans 'discovered' the place in the 1400s and 1500s (and 1800s, because it took that long for them to reach the interior). It was occupied by Iron Age civilized societies, not so different from what you might have found in Europe a few centuries earlier, if you make allowances for climate, resources, and geography. Only the most inhospitable terrain in Africa was full of hunter-gatherers: jungles and deserts. Which leads into...
1B) You are missing facts about African climate and geography. There are huge parts of sub-Saharan Africa which are not suitable for intense agriculture using pre-industrial technology. There are jungles which cannot be cleared without heavy machinery. There are deserts (and, for that matter, savannas) which cannot be adequately watered for farming. Like the steppes of Asia, these areas
did remain occupied by hunter-gatherers and pastoral herdsmen... but not because they were 'too good' to create an incentive to civilize. On the contrary, they were land so marginal that you couldn't safely farm there, and were
forced to scrape a marginal living out of herds of cattle and gathering whatever the hell grows in the Kalahari Desert.
1C) Incidentally, the reason there were hunter-gatherers
there and (mostly) only there is that they were driven into those regions by more violent and successful farming cultures- the pygmies and Bushmen of the continent were forced onto land no one else wanted or could use. Just like in Europe, nomadic groups like the Lapps were pushed out onto the extreme frozen margins of the north. There's a fair amount of anthropological evidence on this.
2) Come to think of it, that's a fundamental contradiction. Land "too good" to create an incentive to civilize means people remain as hunter-gatherers. But when we
find hunter-gatherers in real life, it's usually in inhospitable terrain that's very cold, very hot, very overgrown and rugged, or otherwise totally unsuited for farming. Or we find it in 'post-apocalyptic' environments where there
used to be a populous civilization that was destroyed by disease outbreaks or ecological disasters (i.e. Easter Island, or the Americas after Columbus when European disases killed 90%+ of the population in about 50-100 years).
Whereas the kind of very fertile place that it would be
easy to survive in by hunting and gathering... there we see civilizations emerge spontaneously, or spread into such territory very quickly, and any hunter-gatherers who happen to live there are violently brushed aside.
How do we square these ideas with each other? People who live in 'warm' places can afford to be too lazy to civilize because 'life is easy'... but it's only in hellish deserts and jungles where life is hard that they
don't civilize.
3) That takes us back to "heat/cold influences religious views." As Murazor points out during his own analysis, take data with grain of salt. There are almost NO countries except for European or Europe-derived ones to be found at high latitudes. If we assert that religious tolerance comes in large part from a logic-promoting climate, what we're really asserting is that the cold climate caused Europeans to be more logical than anyone else in the world, and then the habit spread.
That invites questions about whether European culture really is, on average, more logical than that of other regions. And about why the Lapps and Inuit aren't super-geniuses.
So before we say climate accounts for much of the variance, we need to figure out a way to see whether there are any confounding variables we need to strip
out of the variance.