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The degree to which historical events were inevitable or just due to happenstance is a debate that is probably impossible to conclusively resolve
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Aug 23, 2020 04:07
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I also remember a chapter on the "why Europe not China?" question tacked on at the end that was basically just a big East Asia is isolated from the rest of Eurasia by mountains, deserts, and jungles that are significantly more impassible than is usually recognized, and I think it's honestly more incredible it was basically at parity / had moments where it arguably surpassed the rest of Eurasia for most of its relatively isolated history rather than it having been just as likely that it should have developed like Europe did. Miss Broccoli posted:What motivation would an Asian civilisation have to try circumnavigate the globe There's a couple of instances that fit actually. First during the Qin Dynasty; people were just talking about Qin Shi Huang's obsession with immortality by way of mercury, but the dude also sponsored a couple of actually pretty substantial expeditions to sail into the unknown in search of the alleged "Isles of the Immortals." Crews of hundreds, stocked with masses of supplies; enough that like 100 years ago them landing in Japan was actually one of the favored theories for how the Yayoi came about (this is not taken seriously today, mind). It's not unthinkable that had a later emperor during a time with better shipbuilding and whatever had the same weird obsession and sailed into lands unknown, maybe they could have even found something. The other is obviously Zheng He, who sailed out to bolster China's tributary network for the fledgling Ming Dynasty, parading foreign rulers the world over in the imperial capital to show China's might and how the Ming could form an empire just like the Mongols. I'd go into this more but I gotta go now, but Zheng He's expeditions are actually a lot more nuanced than the usual "went out to explore" they're tagged with. Koramei fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 04:10
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Phobophilia posted:His thesis really only holds to explain how Europe colonized the Americas, but alone can't explain how it also colonized Africa and the Middle East and South/East Asia. It doesn't explain it because the book didn't intend to, as those areas regularly shared a lot of germs with Europe, as well as having their own access to guns and steel (although I dunno anything about societies on the south end of Africa having guns other than what Europeans brought). If you want a book that has a grand uniting theory about that, with its own set of issues as most grand uniting theories in popular history books tend to have, but plenty of interesting points and a fancy graph, there's this:  tl;dr: both Europe and East Asia went through booms and slumps, and it happened that China was in a slump during the 19th century right when Europe was hitting one of its biggest booms in history from the steam engine and industrial revolution, and through a combination of xenophobia and failures of European marketing, East Asia wasn't part of the big academic exchange of technology before Europeans started getting aggressive with their relative advantage. Of course, that's also reductive, but I think one of the big things I learned is that there were amazing population booms during the age of colonization. That I also later learned that some of Europe had decidedly less of a population boom than England or the US, and I don't really know why.
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Aug 23, 2020 04:50
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I'd put the aurochs with the bison and the mammoths as surviving specifically where prehistoric hunters weren't. According to wikipedia, this was the range of the aurochs. 
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Aug 23, 2020 05:16
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the JJ posted:But is weirdly very pat, teleological, 'it could never have been otherwise' about it. I mean, this is a weird criticism IMO because the thing about geobiological (is that a word? I guess it is now) advantages is that they depend on the geobiology, which until recently was beyond human control. It's a bit like accusing the California gold rush of being a teleological event because, y'know, gold fields aren't dependent on geology or anything.
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Aug 23, 2020 05:18
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Weka posted:According to wikipedia, this was the range of the aurochs. coincidentally identical to the range of the korean empire,
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Aug 23, 2020 05:36
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cheetah7071 posted:coincidentally identical to the range of the korean empire, uh yeah what did you think the hyperwar was about???
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Aug 23, 2020 05:37
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cheetah7071 posted:coincidentally identical to the range of the korean empire, an auroch reverse the junction loss (as seen in other words like apron/napron) a nauroch and account for vowel shifts naerok and reverse korean It was all so obvious Tunicate fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 05:52
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evilweasel posted:yeah domesticating animals appears to have been hard as poo poo and a real luck of the draw sort of thing, and it’s not like anyone has done it in the past thousand years or more so it clearly isn’t easy to do with an arbitrary animal
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Aug 23, 2020 05:55
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I mean, this is a weird criticism IMO because the thing about geobiological (is that a word? I guess it is now) advantages is that they depend on the geobiology, which until recently was beyond human control. Sure, but saying that, I dunno, Hollywood was always and inevitably going to be the center of the world's cultural output because of the gold deposits is a reach. Sure, it's a point in the chain of causation but I dunno how much emphasis you'd want to put on it. Also theres a difference between "geobiological factor was necessary for x to happen" and "x was necessarily going to happen due to geobiological factor."
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Aug 23, 2020 06:07
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Weka posted:According to wikipedia, this was the range of the aurochs. Negatory, this is the Hwan Empire. wow, beaten Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 06:08
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Scarodactyl posted:Russian researchers have domesticated foxes. It's apparently easier and faster if you know what you're doing. Apparently there's still a number of issues with domesticated foxes where they're still pretty far from dogs and cats, so we haven't fully figured it out yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dwjS_eI-lQ And that's just considering them in their capacity as pets for just companionship, as opposed to being crafted, engineered even, to do a job, like how most domesticated animals stuck around. Tunicate posted:an auroch Its the Star Control 3 twist about the precursors all over again.
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Aug 23, 2020 06:20
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Koramei posted:The other is obviously Zheng He, who sailed out to bolster China's tributary network for the fledgling Ming Dynasty, parading foreign rulers the world over in the imperial capital to show China's might and how the Ming could form an empire just like the Mongols. I'd go into this more but I gotta go now, but Zheng He's expeditions are actually a lot more nuanced than the usual "went out to explore" they're tagged with. The whole point of such an expedition is to go to countries that you know exist, following trade routes that you know exist (even if only vaguely in both cases), right? It's not like Columbus trying to reach India with absolutely no idea of what might be in the way.
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Aug 23, 2020 07:33
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Kassad posted:The whole point of such an expedition is to go to countries that you know exist, following trade routes that you know exist (even if only vaguely in both cases), right? It's not like Columbus trying to reach India with absolutely no idea of what might be in the way. Didn't he actually gently caress up his math and think it was way closer than it was, while the Greeks (who had a good rough estimate of the Earth's actual circumference) had figured out a much larger number, suggesting that the plan was practically impossible?
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Aug 23, 2020 07:36
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Nessus posted:Yeah Columbus's galaxy brain was "There's poo poo to the east of China, right? What if we go WEST? According to my calculations we'll surely hit China, or at least the stuff to the east of it." Yeah, his expedition would have been doomed if the Americas didn't exist (unless he lucked out and found some islands to refill supplies). They wouldn't have had the supplies to cross an ocean the size of the Atlantic and the Pacific put together.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:09
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Nessus posted:Yeah Columbus's galaxy brain was "There's poo poo to the east of China, right? What if we go WEST? According to my calculations we'll surely hit China, or at least the stuff to the east of it." yes. it's not like nobody had ever thought of going west to go east before, it was just believed to be a real dumb idea - the route around africa might be long as hell, but at least you're following a coast instead of being isolated on the open sea for way longer than you can realistically provision for. columbus managed to convince the spanish crown that giving him three ships for a suicide mission was less irritating than having him hang around asking for ships, but it was a bad idea that nobody expected to actually pay off
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Aug 23, 2020 08:11
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Nessus posted:Yeah Columbus's galaxy brain was "There's poo poo to the east of China, right? What if we go WEST? According to my calculations we'll surely hit China, or at least the stuff to the east of it." Yeah, he heard that Al-Farghani's estimate of the width of a degree of latitude was 56.7 miles, but didn't realize this was in Arabic miles rather than the Roman miles he was familiar with, so he underestimated the circumference of the earth by about 25%. All the royal courts he visited refused to fund him, because they correctly calculated no ships available could carry enough food and water to last the whole way. He just lucked out that the Americas happened to be roughly halfway in between. Someone suggested the huge number of political divisions of Europe helped Columbus get this funding, because he was able to bounce among them making his case until one of them finally agreed. (I think that may have even been Diamond, but it's been more than a decade since I read it.) Even Ferdinand and Isabella rejected him twice, convinced by their sailor and astronomer advisors that his calculations were ludicrously short. But then other advisors convinced them to give him a shot, because they'd lose almost nothing if he failed, but stood to gain a ton if he succeeded. And that did turn out to be true, although not in the way anyone expected.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:14
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Kassad posted:The whole point of such an expedition is to go to countries that you know exist, following trade routes that you know exist (even if only vaguely in both cases), right? It's not like Columbus trying to reach India with absolutely no idea of what might be in the way. Oh yeah, good point, I mischaracterized that.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:20
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Kassad posted:Yeah, his expedition would have been doomed if the Americas didn't exist (unless he lucked out and found some islands to refill supplies). They wouldn't have had the supplies to cross an ocean the size of the Atlantic and the Pacific put together.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:22
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A propos Aristotle’s love in a cold climate racial theories, I remember reading years ago an official communication from I think a Shahanshah of Persia to a Roman emperor in which the honorifics and titles up front include a phrase like “[ruler of the Persians], who are the most beautiful of peoples, being neither pallid nor too dark.” I remembered it as being in Justinian’s Flea but I can’t find it in my kindle edition. Has anyone else read or seen this?
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Aug 23, 2020 08:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:Apparently there's still a number of issues with domesticated foxes where they're still pretty far from dogs and cats, so we haven't fully figured it out yet. Also it's that domesticated foxes aren't really useful for anything besides vanity pets, iirc they intended to try to make it easier to breed for their fur but they ended up with the same thing as dogs where the more friendly ones exhibit neoteny and don't grow the kind of fur coats that they want. Compare that to pretty much any domesticated animal and most show at least some kind of use, even in the case of say, rabbits and doves just for food and eventually showing off. While various farm animals all have niches and multiple uses, dogs are extremely useful, and as the legend goes, cats more or less started hanging around humans on their own accord. And someone brought up zebras vs horses before. Might be key that zebras live in a continent with lions and cheetahs and other big predators, while horses iirc are generally native to the central Asian steppes and plains, nature's sensory deprivation chamber.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:29
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Nessus posted:I wonder if he had heard about the Basque fishing grounds and was half-expecting to at least find somewhere to lay over. maybe. he was definitely expecting to find some kind of territory to claim considering the terms he negotiated, though whether that was blind faith or not who knows; while i wouldn't put it past columbus to think he could seize java with three ships or some such nonsense, i'd speculate he was angling to be the lord of a layover island between europe and east asia, which would have been profitable to say the least Jazerus fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 08:37
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Also really important to keep in mind that while they might look similar, zebras are not horses with a fancy coat of paint. Intuitively they share a common ancestor but Zebra lack any sort of cooperative social structure. Horses have a strong group bond and follow the head horse. Both things that humans can take advantage of, since horses don't apparently care if a human is the head horse. Zebra are literally the rage against the machine song. gently caress you I won't do what you tell me. They hang around in groups but don't have the same kind of social bonds, instead it's more "If I stay near Larry I dont have to outrun a lion, just larry" while male Zebras also seem to greatly enjoy their hobby of drown everyone else's children at the watering hole. To domesticate something like a zebra you have to break the spirit of each and everyone of the fuckers from scratch. To domesticated a horse you just have to get it to accept you as lead horse.
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Aug 23, 2020 09:03
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It's very difficult to draw comparisons between horses and zebras, since almost all 'wild' horses are in fact feral descendants of domesticated horses in the first place, so they have undergone genetic selection for low aggression, though this could be affected by generations in the wild. Also why arguments about how aggresive animals can't be domesticated fall a little flat - the wild ancestors of todays domesticates were also more aggressive than todays domesticates, indeed selection for low aggression (as in the foxes) brings with it some of the common features of domestication such as white patches of fur, floppy ears, smaller skulls etc.
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Aug 23, 2020 10:04
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And urban foxes are getting more domestic-like! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-52892194
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Aug 23, 2020 13:01
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:
What if I just want a horse that isn't a cowardly dumbass but one that I can respect.
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Aug 23, 2020 14:00
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Kemper Boyd posted:What if I just want a horse that isn't a cowardly dumbass but one that I can respect. Such creature does not exist. Horses have two emotions: fear or anger and no horse dies from natural causes because they are some of the dumbest animals to walk the earth
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Aug 23, 2020 14:18
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all these haters and losers complaining about the noble horse, but id like to see you concoct a soldier who is battle ready at 5 years of age and can eat grass
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Aug 23, 2020 15:24
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Nessus posted:I wonder if he had heard about the Basque fishing grounds and was half-expecting to at least find somewhere to lay over. The idea that European fishermen had been to NA (at least off the coast) and he'd heard about it is a fun one but I expect there's no evidence to be found, unfortunately. I'd love it if they found a shipwreck or something.
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Aug 23, 2020 16:24
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Has anything more come of the thing someone posted a month or so ago about polynesians getting to Peru?
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Aug 23, 2020 16:38
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Has anything more come of the thing someone posted a month or so ago about polynesians getting to Peru? 
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Aug 23, 2020 16:39
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Actually another good counterpoint is probably: why not India? The Chola had an overseas empire for a while and it certainly wouldn't have been hard for a strong Indian state to block europe from expansion into south east asia. I'll answer myself it was the mughals and their long fall that allowed it
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Aug 23, 2020 16:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Has anything more come of the thing someone posted a month or so ago about polynesians getting to Peru? The genetic evidence puts them in Mesoamerica, not South America. But combined with the other circumstantial evidence we had like sweet potatoes in Polynesia and the probable chicken bones in Chile, it strongly suggests Polynesians were exploring all over the Pacific coast of the Americas. Maybe not way up north but pretty extensive. I haven't seen any more articles about it since then, no. I don't expect anything bigger anytime soon though. It's already huge to confirm they were there for long enough to get to fuckin' and leave that DNA trail.
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Aug 23, 2020 16:53
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Has anything more come of the thing someone posted a month or so ago about polynesians getting to Peru? Not really, but when I looked into it I found this research actually was confirming prior studies that it already been done on Easter island. Thinking back I actually remember when that study first came out and was skeptical of it at the time, but it looks like the results have held up. So that means we already have two teams of scholars who have confirmed these results. And because their research is based in genetics, it’s also really easy for independent researchers to do there own confirmatory research. If you want to learn more I would keep my eyes open for new research into plant and domestic animal genetics where we might also expect to find a signal from South America in Polynesian.
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Aug 23, 2020 17:07
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Wasn't Portugal developing some crazy new sailing technology for its own fishing fleets as well as circumventing Moroccan traders? I remember reading that was the only reason why it started to be feasible to make such a long journey into the open sea. I wonder how things would've gone if Mali successfully established a route to America.
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Aug 23, 2020 18:34
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SerialKilldeer posted:And urban foxes are getting more domestic-like! I know that's one of the theories of how domestication started, but foxes starting to adapt to eating trash isn't particularly unique. Rats developed along that line long ago, but most people don't consider that "domesticated". I wonder if you can find adaptations like that in other vermin like raccoons or possums.
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Aug 23, 2020 18:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wasn't Portugal developing some crazy new sailing technology for its own fishing fleets as well as circumventing Moroccan traders? I remember reading that was the only reason why it started to be feasible to make such a long journey into the open sea. I know one reason Portugal suddenly lost interest in Columbus when he was petitioning them too was because Bartolomeu Dias returned from rounding the Cape of Good Hope, proving there was a navigable southern passage to India around Africa using current technology.
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Aug 23, 2020 19:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:Wasn't Portugal developing some crazy new sailing technology for its own fishing fleets as well as circumventing Moroccan traders? I remember reading that was the only reason why it started to be feasible to make such a long journey into the open sea. Yeah, the reason the age of exploration started when it did was they developed ships capable of traveling such vast distances. Bypassing the middlemen to trade directly with Asia had been a goal of various European states all the way back to the Romans, but they just lacked the technical ability to do so. The Romans were able to bypass the Persians/Parthians somewhat by going down the Red Sea and across to India. After the rise of Islam, though, that route was cut off--the Muslim states were happy to be the middlemen and sell to Europeans, but they weren't about to let Europeans bypass them to access Asia directly. So they had to wait until ship technology allowed them to travel all the way around and bypass that way.
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Aug 23, 2020 19:54
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The Basques probably knew about America before Columbus but weren't going to tell anyone because otherwise it would give away the good hunting grounds and it isn't like anyone would understand them. Also the Norse knew about America from the 11th century onward but no one bothered to to there.
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Aug 23, 2020 20:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:I know that's one of the theories of how domestication started, but foxes starting to adapt to eating trash isn't particularly unique. Rats developed along that line long ago, but most people don't consider that "domesticated". There are both pet rats and working rats.
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Aug 23, 2020 20:51
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