Why europe?

[Flareon]

monkeys spent aeons becoming adapted to their african climate. the first humans who evolved from monkeys benifited from this, and were perfectly suited to their environment.

 

Sorry to be stickler, but we did not evolve from monkeys! Otherwise, we would have had a good chance of retaining our tails. Monkeys and humans both share common ancestry; we are like two twigs coming off the same branch. It would be a bit more correct to call our ancestors "ape-like creatures."

 

I have to admit, anthropology is not my strong suit. Anyone else have a better term to call our "foreparents?"

[Ophiolite]

Proto-hominid?

[Dak]

human evolved from ape-like creatures, which evolved from apes, which evolved from monkeys: so humans did evolve from monkeys, i jus missed out a few steps

 

...at least this time i didnt claim that we evolved from chimps

[swansont]

human evolved from ape-like creatures' date=' which evolved from apes, which evolved from monkeys: so humans did evolve from monkeys, i jus missed out a few steps

[/quote']

 

No. Missteps, not missed steps. Apes also evolved from ape-like creatures.

 

Our common ancestor is not an extant species. It confuses the issue to use terminology that describes the latter when referring to the former.

[Martin]

I was thinking' date=' why did the European nations advance so fast in comparison with other regions of the world?

or did other regions have their time in the sun that is all but forgotten now?[/quote']

 

I'v often wondered why Greek culture was so incomparably dynamic in period 600 BC to 100 BC

 

aristarchus estimated the distance to the sun and developed the "copernican" sun-centered system (as archimedes tells us in his book the sandreckoner)

 

eratosthenes accurately measured the size of the earth

 

hipparchus accurately measured the distance to the moon as 30 earth diameters (which is right!)

 

ptolemy constructed a earthcentered model of planets which predicts positions pretty well

 

euclid axiomatized geometry, beautifully

 

archimedes came very close to inventing calculus, when he calculated the areas and volumes of various shapes.

 

the architecture was graceful, the writings of herodotus are still extremely entertaining, they thought thoughts that are still interesting

 

the treatment of the human body in sculpture was amazingly natural

 

they asked questions

[Martin]

I was thinking, why did the European nations advance so fast in comparison with other regions of the world?

or did other regions have their time in the sun that is all but forgotten now?

 

probably there are a lot of reasons

 

some of them have been mentioned

 

some of them may have to do with language (the indoeuropean languages) and with geography, perhaps with sheer accident

 

I dont think Diamond explains everything, but he explains parts of the picture.

 

Asia and Europe form a single landmass that Diamond correctly points out is more Latitude-linked than, say, North and South America. He says that cultural discoveries and inventions, along with diseases and domesticated plants and animals, can move more easily along latitude. He says that sped up evolution in Eurasia, as compared with the Americas.

 

And then you are left with questions like "why, among the Eurasians, was it the ones at the Western end of the land mass and not those at the East end?"

 

If you had been able to visit the earth in 1300 and had checked out Europe on the one hand and China on the other, and asked to lay odds about development in the next 600 years what would you have guessed?

 

BTW my private point of view is that the geographical fragmentation and jagged coastline was very helpful both in the case of Greece in 500 to 100 BC, and the Mediterranean, and also Europe in general.

 

I think geography does people a favor when it makes them fishermen, sailors, navigators, traders.

 

And I think the 1493 return of Columbus had an electrifying effect on Europeans and made them think that there were whole new worlds to discover and that they could do amazing things if they just put their minds to it. It set loose a spirit of discovery in Europe.

It is not so much that Columbus managed to get to the Americas but that he managed also to get back and publicize it. this caused a change in the culture.

 

What if, in 1300, a Chinese sailor had managed to reach Puget sound (Vancouver BC, Seattle Wash) and did not just settle there and marry a native woman but had also succeeded in returning to tell about it? What if?

would the Chinese have been interested by this news?

 

Would they have done anything? would it have energized their culture the way the new world discovery energized the Europeans?

 

hard to guess. Anarchaus, what do you guess?

[galaxygirl]

Humans come from the family of Hominidae which is very different from the Cercopithecoidea (which includes monkeys). Our ancestors, members of the genus Australopithecus, are now extinct. The closest living species to ours would be the ones in Pongidae- chimps, gorilla, and the orangutan.

 

[Sayonara]

Very informative, but the entire "origins of humanity" discussion is off-topic.

[Martin]

I agree with Sayonara about topic

 

I was thinking' date=' why did the European nations advance so fast in comparison with other regions of the world?

or did other regions have their time in the sun that is all but forgotten now?[/quote']

 

this is the question that starts the thread

 

it is primarily a cultural question, or so I think

 

I think it is not a question of whether we have tails or not but has to do with the unique role of Europe in world history, a curious fact.

 

does anybody have any ideas, or is everything said when you say

Diamond Guns Germs and Steel?

[Ophiolite]

Europe has the longest coastline relative to size of any continent. This encouraged skills in engineering (e.g. shipbuilding) and science (e.g. navigation). It promoted the development of trade and hence of Empire.

It's back to swanson's geography.

[Dak]

i always seem to screw up on the 'humans came from x' part.

 

whatever we evolved from, my basic point was that it was only when humans moved to europe that they found themselves unsuited to their environment, and thus needed to compete with each other for resorses, which led to the development of new technologies to better kill each other, and also to better cultivate the land to grow more food. this may have played a part in forsing the development of european societys.

[swansont]

Asia and Europe form a single landmass that Diamond correctly points out is more Latitude-linked than' date=' say, North and South America. He says that cultural discoveries and inventions, along with diseases and domesticated plants and animals, can move more easily along latitude. He says that sped up evolution in Eurasia, as compared with the Americas.

[/quote']

 

Cultural evolution, though, not biological, as we're dicussing only the last several thousand years. Given the recent tangent I think it's important to make that clear.

[swansont]

I'v often wondered why Greek culture was so incomparably dynamic in period 600 BC to 100 BC

 

...

 

they asked questions

 

But they also relied heavily on philosophy to get answers, which limited them.

[atinymonkey]

They also had a large amount of slaves, which freed up a lot of time for thinking.

[swansont]

whatever we evolved from, my basic point was that it was only when humans moved to europe that they found themselves unsuited to their environment, and thus needed to compete with each other for resorses, which led to the development of new technologies to better kill each other, and also to better cultivate the land to grow more food. this may have played a part in forsing the development of european societys.

 

Africa was hampered by the dearth of domesticatable animals and the isolation of climate for obtaining suitible grains - you can't gave the slow diffusion of crops across a desert. No excess food means you don't get cities with the excess population to sit around and invent new technology.

[Martin]

Cultural evolution, though, not biological, as we're dicussing only the last several thousand years. Given the recent tangent I think it's important to make that clear.

 

definitely

 

I was thinking it was understood that we were talking cultural evolution

(technology, science, general adventurousness, etc.)

[Martin]

They also had a large amount of slaves, which freed up a lot of time for thinking.

 

one quarter of the Athenian population was slaves (standard book on the Greeks by the historian H.D.Kitto)

 

nowadays some people have money and it frees up some of their time for thinking. perhaps equally important is what you think ABOUT

[galaxygirl]

Very informative, but the entire "origins of humanity" discussion is off-topic.

 

I was answering Flareon's anthropology question.

[Flareon]

Sayonara: sorry, I didn't intend to stray from topic.

 

Galaxygirl: Thanks for the info.

[Asian Guy]

Read Jared Diamond's [u']Guns, Germs and Steel[/u]

 

Jared Diamond debunked: http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/ml_ggs.html Nothing personal, but I'm just not a fan of Left Wing ideology. I tend to be very Conservative.

[swansont]

Jared Diamond debunked: http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/ml_ggs.html[/url'] Nothing personal, but I'm just not a fan of Left Wing ideology. I tend to be very Conservative.

 

So, you prefer right-wing bigotry?

 

A few unsupported assertions that whites are smarter than blacks is a debunking? He doesn't seem to call Diamond on any facts.

[Sayonara]

I was answering Flareon's anthropology question.

I meant everyone involved really, not just you.

[Aardvark]

True, but that sounds a tiny bit Eurocentric (which I can understand, as you were probably educated in a 'western' society.)

 

As the thread is about European civilisation by definition the discusion wil be 'Eurocentric'.

 

Incidentially, you seem to be implying that 'Eurocentricism' is a bad thing? What does it actually mean and why would it be subject to implied criticism?

[Aardvark]

basketball,

 

From South West England.

 

Now largely supplanted by cricket in its own birthplace.

[-Demosthenes-]

I was thinking the Europe had many different types of people, a lot of groups of people who lived in different places and spoke different lauguages. It seems the compitition between the people stimulated growth and made them more expantionistic. They would fight each other and try to take each other over, and when other lands were found that would be easy to take and colonize it was their natural inclination to take it, like the Americas other colonies.