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According to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, one of the first steps from a hunter-gatherer society towards civilization is agriculture. While agricultural societies appeared all over the world, the old world had a more suitable environment, especially with regards to the grains and large animals that lived there. The old world had wheat, which is ...

Interesting. I'd never heard this before, so I went digging myself. It appears that Michigan's prehistory of copper working really fired some people's imaginations. If you look there are even fanciful stories about Phonecians crossing the Atlantic to get at Great Lakes copper! There's a great paper online by what appears to be a very frustrated ...

The most important "paradigm shift" of the early 19th century was the Industrial Revolution. That was the harnessing of the steam, and later, internal combustion engines, for manufacturing advances that led to an "order of magnitude" gains (five to ten times) in the standard of living. The great powers of the time were also among the earliest beneficiaries ...

"The nail that sticks out gets hammer down" While a Japanese saying, it holds true for all the super powers. Be their outside enemies, inside corruption, or just economic bad luck, the hammers are numerous indeed. Spain in particular, was cripple by mega inflation due to all the gold coming from the Indies. Portugal was assimilated into Spain and then ...

Depends on what you mean by advanced. If you mean in terms of metalworking, the lack of easily exploited tin deposits in the Americas means that a bronze age never took off. There was a copper-working culture surrounding the Great Lakes, and it pre-dated the chalcolithic in the old world by a few thousand years, but this lasted only as long as the accessible ...

For many years, the Extremadura region was the border region between Christian and Moorish Spain. As a result, their inhabitants were quite literally "living at the edge." Hence they produced the largest number of "desperado" type conquerors. It's like saying that America's most renowned Indian fighters (e.g. Buffalo Bill Cody or George A. Custer) were ...

I think this is a valid question. But the answer is a rather resounding no. For one thing, we have no shred of evidence for such a conjecture. For another, this conjecture cannot be squared at all with the fact that Columbus to his dying day insisted on having actually landed in India - had he been dissimulating about his knowledge of the existence of ...

I have been travelling in Extremadura for the past 5 days. What strikes me is the large number of rivers, some surprisingly large in June, most navigable. ALS remember the Romans took the trouble to come here overland and of course the Moors and the Castilians marched and counter marched this terrain for centuries. A theory I will advance is that after the ...

Historically, civilizations have developed best along peninsulas: mostly surrounded by water, but with one land bridge. Egypt was a peninsula (between the Nile River, Red Sea, and Mediterranean). So was Babylon (between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers). India is one large peninsula, as was ancient China (between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers). Greece and ...

Well, Africa is in the Old World, but most of sub-Saharan Africa was developed less than the Maesoamerican civilizations. Pre-Christian North-East Europe was also at the stage comparable with American cultures. Siberia and North Asia were less developed also. That is, only the European civilization developed from Classic Antiquity had significant advantage ...