If you find this interesting, or just generally want a remarkable overview of human history, I highly recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared diamond. It won a Pulitzer prize in its day, and really is a terrific book. Little dated, having been written in the late '90s, but the vast majority of it is still up to date and very interesting. The author does repeat a few fad claims from the '90s that have been debunked (such as the QWERTY keyboard being intentionally slow), but nothing really substantial.
A friendly note to anyone going into it with no other info: Guns, Germs, and Steel reached the status of having its own wikipedia entry [0] and is very widely known, with enough controversy to fuel endless debates on historical subreddits. Enjoy your read and be prepared when you'll want to share your thoughts.
Even as a lay reader (though I have read many other books and The Great Courses on similar material) there were several things I picked up on that are not scholarly at all. The most visible of which is the weird obsession the author has with repeatedly making sure that the reader knows that Europeans are not smarter than anybody else (though explicitly are less smart than Polynesians, an ironic contradiction to the author's own contention just a couple sentences prior that there are no intelligent differences among humans) and that any consideration whatsoever that different societies might have been different and made different choices with different outcomes, is utterly racist and unacceptable. It definitely struck me as very anti-science.
But taken as a whole I enjoyed much about the book's approach and there are plenty of great things in there. And I would say about any book, definitely don't take anything as gospel. Always, always, read the criticisms and other discussions before just accepting things as "correct" simply because they were printed in a book.
Though a fun thought experiment, this book isn't up to date with modern knowledge and isn't taken seriously by archaeologists. It also doesn't hold much water when the theories proposed are empirically tested. Grand narratives are legacy science.
You were on the mark until the last sentence. Grand narratives are an indispensable part of science. When we discover the right narrative (evolution, the big bang, etc) it helps to frame all of our subsequent thinking. His arguments are bad, but their attachment to a grand narrative are irrelevant to their being bad.
Grand narratives are different from epistemes. Grand narratives have assumed notions of absolute truth because of the power dynamic implied in those notions. See that second link. It's what postmodernism is all about. The tl;dr is epistemes = what knowledge is at a given time & grand narratives = who gets funded.
Jared Diamond tried to reclaim environmental determinism from its unsavoury origins, but he didn't realise that you couldn't repair something when the foundations were rotten.
Earth Transformed by Frankopan is a nice recent addition to the genre of big history. I found it incredibly well sourced, and devoid of grand theoretical claims. It also doesn't suffer of Western centrism, the author goes to great lengths to show global developments and how big environmental changes impacted different regions and cultures in different ways. Just facts and very balanced analysis, and it is a huge book. It has 200 pages just of notes, that you download separately because the tome was already nearly 1000 pages long.
You should also read the criticisms of that book, of which there are many. It's a good read, but much of it is speculation backed up by unprovable theories and the occasional factual error.
Yes please, I would love to read the criticisms of the book. Do you have any specific recommendations? Another commenter mentioned the Wikipedia page, which I am looking at now.
I definitely have criticisms of my own, such as the author being obsessed with telling the reader directly that Europeans aren't smarter (in fact he makes clear multiple times that Polynesians are genetically smarter than Europeans), and with him calling everyone and everything racist if they even consider the possibility that differences between groups of humans could have had anything to do with how their histories turned out, even directly calling any of those theories "racist." He also freely mixes his own opinion with facts, although he did usually make an attempt to include some of the counter-arguments, though they smelled a bit like strawmen.
But overall the book's attempt at comprehensive, engaging overview and the focus around what seems like such a simple question ("Yali's question"), and a lot of mostly accurate stuff, made for an enjoyable read and one I would recommend.
"Sapiens" by Yuval Harari is really remarkable overview of human history and is much more recently written. I read it twice already and enjoyed it a lot both times.
The book is internally inconsistent, with the author cherry-picking "facts" to support his own prejudices. In some cases the same data is used for mutually exclusive conclusions in different chapters. Basically, he making up conclusions and then throwing any shit against the wall in the hope it sticks, with no regard for what he's already said in the same book.
It's pseudo-science, designed to let complacent readers validate their prejudices, and pat themselves on the back.
I have never understood this particular criticism of the work. It is, if anything, an extremely strident argument against prejudice. The entire point is that differences in current day development are not due to innate deficiencies in the people but rather at least in part due to historical quirks of geography and ecology and therefore current development level says very close to nothing about the intrinsic potential or capabilities of anyone from any region of the world.
Yes. GG&S might be wrong, but the claim that it's explicitly racist has always seemed to me to be an astonishingly tendentious misreading.
It turns out that there are lots of readers out there who wilfully confuse "is" for "ought". Even when an author goes out of their way to emphasise that they are only describing their view of reality, not in any way assigning virtue to it.
Most of the GGS-hatred I've seen has come from people who hate that Diamond rejects racial differences or innate differences in will and spirit ("civilization", "culture" etc.) as an explanation.
Then there's some very few left-wing critics who hate it for basically the same reason, but with opposite sign, since it implicitly also rejects that western civilization or the white race is uniquely evil.
Then there's some grumbling from academics who hate a popularizer for all the reasons you'd expect.
I remember reading this as a boy and thinking what the fuck this dude is way too obsessed with these Polynesians. Something about geographical determinism really draws in the creeps.
If you like this sort of thing, track down the book The Sea-craft of Prehistory by Paul Johnstone. Unfortunately, not available on libgen but may be possible to borrow with an archive.org account or a good library. Published in the 1980s, it broadly summarizes global archaeological evidence to that date and breaks down the major boat-making techniques and their variants and limitations. A particularly well written, clearly illustrated and enjoyable book which I found to be extremely accessible and interesting. Expensive to buy though, used copies ~$120+
Boat building with adzes must have really sucked, but imagine the feeling to a prehistoric human taking their own boat on the open ocean for the first time, especially if they had a sail, invented around this time.
On that note, Wikipedia confidently states The invention of the sail was a technological advance of equal or even greater importance than the invention of the wheel, which incidentally is thought to have been invented roughly around the time of these boats.
Depends upon when :) I thought most migration to Australia was when they were land bridges due to the sea level.
But off hand I do not remember when the Polynesian started their migrations, was it 3,000 years ago ? Their boats and navigation were quite remarkable back then.
Anyway, makes sense that the Mediterranean area had good boat tech at such an early time. It is a kind of "closed" area and you throw a boat in it, it will run into some land after a rather brief time. So people with faster and reliable water transport would do better than people without.
I would not be surprised if they find some good boat tech much much earlier.
Australasia has not been connected to anywhere else by land for about 50 million years. The land bridges you're remembering are within australasia, particularly new guinea <-> Australia <-> Tasmania.
I would, absolutely, if you refer back you can see that in fact I did - but then I grew up in the region, have built boats, have sailed, and been diving with the Sama-Bajau in various parts of their territory.
This would be the collision of actual real world relevant experience and ALotOfReading.
The Sama-Bajau and all other modern humans have inherited maritime traditions that are tens of thousands of years old. They're not a good basis for comparison to the people we're discussing, just as you and I aren't.
We know very little about these people and their technology, but it's worth pointing out that this is the first definitively established oceanic crossing in human history. In fact, it's one of the few crossings we know about until many thousands of years later in the Holocene.
This is something that comes up regularly in these sorts of studies. There's a lot of ideas, skills, and technologies that look "easy" to us because we benefit from standing on the shoulders of giants, but are extremely difficult when you don't have that hindsight. It's entirely possible that this was a monumental feat to these people. It also might not have been, so I avoided describing it either way.
That the crossing of the longest stretch took place is a known fact.
The likelihood is that it was carried out by people that lived in an island archipelago chain and had, by the time of crossing, spent several generations building boats and very probably living a maritime life; huts and walkways on poles, more time on | over the water than land, diving for food, spending hours at night over shoals attracting octopus and other sealife with light.
In that context the crossing becomes a venture of following birds over the horizon for two days, some on a scale similar to what was already done to known points, once the first crossing occurs then the far shore becomes a place to stay when fishing for a generation or so and then becomes a location with a new village.
What does seem hard to imagine is humans arriving at the Wallace Line crossing never having had built a boat or a shallow water village before. I would assert that it's near certain that the required skills and technology were well in hand by the time they became essential to progress further to reach the Sahul.
Neanderthals got to Mediterranean islands using what had to have been boats 200,000 years ago. Of course we know nothing about the boats. It must have been terrifying to be first. One thing we have learned about island populations is that a small population loses cultural knowledge over time. It is reported Tasmanians had lost the secret to making fire by the time Europeans got there, something I find hard to believe.
Anyway boats were re-invented many times in pre-history.
Neanderthals settled all the Greek islands, except Cyprus. Cyprus was only settled ~12ka ago, long after humans had spread to both Australia and the Americas. The reason it took so long when the Greek archipelago was settled so quickly is that you can sail to every island in the Aegean knowing that there is land at your destination, because all the crossings are short enough that with a decent vantage point you can see land on the horizon. Cyprus is ~70km from the Turkish coast, which is just far enough that not only you cannot see it on the horizon from the tallest mountain on the coast, if you set off in a small boat (so you are very low and can't see far), the land won't come into view until you have completely lost sight of the shore you set off from.
Migration to Australia was in fact extraordinary, which we know because in an another place with significant seafaring culture, it took 50ka longer to do a shorter trip.
> a small population loses cultural knowledge over time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family is a good example that n=6 is way too few (even if the cultural knowledge is still there, the material goods, eg seed stock, hit absorbing barriers).
Do we have any reasonable (astrophysics-level) estimates of the population sizes necessary or sufficient to support some transect of various cultural and technological practices?
We do, but they're wild guesses based almost entirely on usubstantiated theoretical models. They're mostly useful for arguments between academics, not to guide any sort of intuition as to sustainable population levels.
Yes, they had decent boats that had outriggers on them made of lashed logs to steady for ocean travel. They did not have to go super far, and their boats and nautical skills were quite primitive by today's standards, but they were able to get to and populate the Polynesian Islands.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channels_of_the_Hawaiian_Islan... in the Hawai'ian islands is where one starts to sail for Tahiti. It was far enough away (4'000+km; ~20 days sail?) to Tahiti that by the time the polynesians made it out there the original Hawai'ian colonists had lost the linguistic distinction between /t/ and /k/ in "kahiki" — but they still knew how to get back.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...