- Joined
- Jul 12, 2015
I don’t think you get how big a barrier the Sahara is. It blocks off access from most of west Africa, simply because of where it is on the coast - until the 1500’s, there wasn’t more than the occasional ship going around Africa from the west, as ships needed to stop for supplies along the coast - and the coastal desert blocked off quite a bit of it. Without any large permanent settlements on that coast, there wasn’t a reason or a way to go there, thus isolating much of west Africa. The river systems of the Niger were developed further inland and at the delta, leaving large areas where you simply didn’t have access to the rest of the world outside of traders from across the desert. The river system here also wasn’t extremely navigable by larger vessels.I'm howling. You deserve a medal for your contributions!
Aren't these the talking points popularized in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel"; that these civilizations were doomed from the very beginning by virtue of their geographic location and purported lack of resources? A view of the history of civilizations that has been widely debunked by contemporary anthropologists, many of whom largely revile Diamond's lack of scientific basis for his claims, of which he is criticized to set out to answer through circular reasoning?
I remember that his book had an upsurge in popularity some years ago, and true to Current Year™, Diamond's detractors were branded as being anti-scientific racists for pointing out the poor scientific standing for many of his claims, his cherry picking of facts and his downright falsification/misunderstanding of historical facts. I don't believe that anyone has ever denied the importance of geography and natural resources for human civilizations, but this narrowminded view of "geographic determinism" is, unsurprisingly, deemed as being not very accurate. The history of human societies is rather complex, after all.
The Congo river system is also sort of in a similar situation
East Africa by contrast is reachable easily, with the weather patterns of the Indian Ocean encouraging trade up and down the coast. It was far more connected to the global trade network, and thus picked up more from and had more overall contact with the rest of the world.
Geographical determinism isn’t the answer and never will be. but geography dictates a lot of what is and isn’t possible. You’re not growing large amounts of crops in a desert without rivers that regularly flood, you’re not traveling river systems that have fuckloads of rapids, and you’re not crossing large deserts with massive caravans regularly. The difficulties in traveling to sub Saharan Africa limited the amount of ideas and people and trade it got, meaning concepts and technology that got adopted elsewhere didn’t make it there until later and wasn’t always picked up as “needed”.
Zebras are unruly fucking little shits and are skittish of people in the extreme since we evolved alongside them. The effort to maintain a zebra herd was simply not worth it. I’m not even going to pretend you could realistically domesticate the hippo or Cape Buffalo.No, you see African animals are impossible to tame because niggers couldn't tame them, much like the word "ask" cannot be pronounced by the human tongue just because no East St. Louis hood rat can say it.
Africa has a fuckload of hyper predators that won’t hesitate to eat humans. Having herds there attracts them to you. Going through the effort of domesticating an animal that can not only kill you, but also attracts predators towards you is just not worth the risk, even when the benefits are visible. Herding did catch on with some savanna peoples, but certain tropical diseases kill off large livestock pretty fast so it didn’t spread across everyone.