Originally posted by Stapel
So far, everybody skips the highly taboo-ed factor about race.
Can we discuss that without becoming racists here?
I find it pretty hard to believe it has had no influence at all.
I totally with Oda.
Race does not fit, simply because biologically speaking there are no racial differences among humans, otherwise interbreeding would not be possible. The differences in hair, color, eyes are but quite limited as gene differences : for instance a black and a Chinese can be much closer genetically speaking than the Chinese with another Chinese. "Seems" weird but true. So I discard race not in order to be PC but because it is not a valid explanation. This is not towards white only, black racism towards others being definitely a fact.
On the other hand, I agree with Oda on that again, culture can be definitely considered, especially that culture is both a way to civilisation and a result of it.
But culture is often the result of the combination of the reaction of people facing different external factors : such as climate, food resource, natural or human danger, relation to other groups, .... and then by reaction and by choice made progressively global and that can interfere with other reactions it builds itself.
And I seriously doubt there is anything linked to the physical type in that. On the other hand it is not something that can disappear over one or two generations only.
One geograph asked once what would happen in Mali where you have the fertile Niger triangle if you replaced all its inhabitants by Vietnamese from the Mekong delta. Projections allowed for a large improvement on food production, wealth and organization.
The geograph was far from being racist though and the result did not mean that blacks were inferior as such but that Vietnamese had found a way to deal with nature and social relationships that was in that case more efficient because they had learnt, practiced and improved on these ways for a long time. A simple early choice can mean a lot of variation at the end. Ex : the way southern Vietnamese learnt how to deal with both monsoon and the delta to cultivate rice meant they both needed a high population to work on the paddy fields and that the high productivity of rice could in turn feed a large population. Having a large population in turn asked for special social and political answers that Africans mostly did not have to meet.
Lack of social organization meant unimportance of writing and was probably caused by scarce population which was scarce probably because no social organization was created that could use intensively the natural resources. Kind of a vicious circle.
What is strnage though is that sub-sahara Africa was not cut from the rest of the world. They imported and use now lots of foreign foods (rice for instance, but cocoa or even tea for trading products). But it could seem they refuse the social and economical organizations that developped in Eurasia.
To blame natural conditions is an oversimplification for simple minds. Conditions on the top of the Andes (Incas) or in the jungle peninsula of Yucatan (Mayas) were far from excellent and, even isolated from the old world and without any horse nor wheel they build Empires in the tropical zone while rich temperate soils of the North remained gatherers-hunters areas.
