My New Guinea friends are patient with my shortcomings and don’t expect much of me when it comes to the everyday challenges of New Guinea life. In New Guinea I’m the dope who can’t do elementary things like follow an unmarked trail or light a fire in the rain. When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, it became clear to me almost immediately that New Guineans are curious, questioning, talkative people with complex languages and social relationships, on the average at least as intelligent as Europeans and Americans. My own interest in this question became rekindled by my experiences in New Guinea over the last 50 years. As a result of the failure of historians to supply an answer, lay people often fall back on the transparent interpretation of supposed racial superiority of Eurasian people themselves, despite the lack of evidence for that interpretation.
But lay people still want an answer to this obvious question. Also, as we shall see, the answers to this question involve details of subjects (especially plant and animal biology and microbiology) in which history graduate students receive no training.
But most historians consider history to begin with the origins of writing, and consider the pre-literate past as lying outside the scope of their discipline and instead to be left to archaeologists. One reason is that the answer clearly lies in the pre-literate past, because by 3400 BC Eurasians (and North Africans, biogeographically and politically part of Eurasia rather than of sub-Saharan Africa) had already had metal tools for thousands of years and were starting to develop writing and empires, thousands of years before any of those things would appear on any other continent. Why, nevertheless, were Eurasians the ones to expand?Īlthough every lay person sees that this is a question crying out for answer, historians have mostly ignored this question. Australia provides by far the earliest evidence for human ability to cross wide water gaps, and some of the earliest widespread evidence for behaviorally modern humans.
North America is a big fertile continent, with the result that it supports the richest and most productive nation today. Africans enjoyed a huge head start, because Africa is the continent with by far the longest history of human occupation. Buy Guns, germs, and steel continents apparently also possessed advantages.
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