Eskezia

2007

In Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) Jarred Diamond describes how a few conquistadors could come to dominate an entire continent despite their numerical inferiority. Many of the natives who weren't killed by the invaders' guns died from their germs, to which they had no biological adaptations. North American natives never developed animal husbandry and our domestic animals have been the major source of contagious diseases in our history.

In his book guns, germs and steel: the fate of human society, Professor Jared Diamond explores the origin of human inequality from the perspective of different continental environments. In different stages of history, the reasons for the gap in the comprehensive development level of different regions in the world are different. By clarifying the causes of human inequality, we can draw inspiration to deal with the current situation of the world and make due contributions to the development of the world community. Knowing the causes of human inequality, Professor Diamond believes that the answer needs to be found from the source of human existence. Before the disparity, people around the world lived in much the same way. Rousseau, in On the Origins and Foundations of Human Inequality, points out that humans of this period were: "Lonely, idle, and often dangerous barbarians... Always sleep when you're not thinking. " [1] The barbarians are basically in a state of isolation, and the level of development between the regions is almost non-existent in a natural state, during which time the regions are in a state of peace. With the change of the geographical environment in which human beings are living, the gap between the level of development of various regions is beginning to emerge. Professor Diamond believes that in the primitive period, agriculture, animal husbandry is very important to the development of human inequality, because of geographical location, living environment differences, often the most high-yielding ethnic groups are most vulnerable to high-yield farmers, thus accelerating the progress of their own people. As early as 1845, Marx pointed out in his book, "In order to live, the first need to eat, drink and wear and other things. Thus the first historical activity is the production of information to meet these needs, i.e. the production of material life itself." [2] From the perspective of labor, this paper discusses the premise of the historical development of human society, namely, the material life of production itself, and how the gap between the level of development between regions evolves in the course of labor. In his writings, Professor Diamond thinks the factors that arise from the inequality of modern human society in terms of the changing geographical environment. Diamond believes that prehistoric people spread across continents were still small, mobile groups, collected by women and hunted by men. It was not until the Stone Age that the first farmers in the Middle East, who settled near water sources and began to grow and store food, showed that humans began to break the normal environmental cycle, choose individual plants to grow, and began to control and domesticate nature. However, the landscape varies from region to region, so the types of crops suitable for cultivation vary, as do the time and worker required to grow them, as well as the nutrients obtained from the crops, and the physical fitness of people in different regions gradually varies. Thus, the gap between the level of development of various regions of human society began to appear. In prehistoric (13,000 years ago), in the Middle East, for example, the local people made a living from hunting, when people were only small groups of mobility, collected by women, hunted by men, and people around the world survived in a similar state. With the change of climate, wild animals decrease and the area of wild grain growth gradually expands, so that human beings can get more grain in a short period of time. During the Stone Age (11,500 years ago), the Middle East was home to the world's first farmers, who settled near water

Ecology Letters, 2021

Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) are embedded within complex socio-ecological systems. While research has traditionally focused on the direct effects of VBDs on human morbidity and mortality, it is increasingly clear that their impacts are much more pervasive. VBDs are dynamically linked to feedbacks between environmental conditions, vector ecology, disease burden, and societal responses that drive transmission. As a result, VBDs have had profound influence on human history. Mechanisms include: (1) killing or debilitating large numbers of people, with demographic and population-level impacts; (2) differentially affecting populations based on prior history of disease exposure, immunity, and resistance; (3) being weaponised to promote or justify hierarchies of power, colonialism, racism, classism and sexism; (4) catalysing changes in ideas, institutions, infrastructure, technologies and social practices in efforts to control disease outbreaks; and (5) changing human relationships with the land and environment. We use historical and archaeological evidence interpreted through an ecological lens to illustrate how VBDs have shaped society and culture, focusing on case studies from four pertinent VBDs: plague, malaria, yellow fever and trypanosomiasis. By comparing across diseases, time periods and geographies, we highlight the enormous scope and variety of mechanisms by which VBDs have influenced human history.

University Press of Colorado eBooks, 2023

The concept of the Anthropocene is based on the premise that humans have had a profound and increasing impact on our environments. Yet many environmental conditions (earthquakes, storms, tsunamis, fire, disease, and other dramatic natural phenomena) can easily overpower human capacities and result in significant change. Incremental processes such as soil creep, vegetation growth, oxidation, and material fatigue similarly act against human intentionality by causing deterioration and decay whose denouement is unpredictable in timing and magnitude. The sentient world of animals, in which behavioral patterns have evolved for viability in a diverse world of predators and reproduction strategies, similarly presents challenges when managed under the assumption that humans are the primary determinant of comportment. In this volume, we consider the agentive effects of natural phenomena to which the direct human response is primarily reactive. The objective is twofold: to highlight that even within the "Anthropocene, " not all natural phenomena can be anticipated, much less controlled, by humans; and second, to critically evaluate the variety of past human responses to natural and biological entities as seen through the archaeological record. The archaeological study of human-environmental dynamics has been heavily weighted on the "human" side of the equation. In recent years, that focus has been augmented by an increasingly pointed indictment of the way human activities can

By the eighteenth century, Europeans dominated the military technology of gunpowder weapons, which had enormous advantages for fighting war at a distance and conquering other parts of the world. Their dominance, however, was surprising, because the technology had originated in China and been used with expertise in Asia and the Middle East. To account for their prowess with gunpowder weapons, historians have often invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies in the peculiar form that military competition took in western Europe: it was a winner take all tournament, and a simple model of the tournament shows why it led European rulers to spend heavily on the gunpowder technology, why the technology was advanced as a result, and why political incentives and military conditions made the rest of Eurasia fall behind. The attached paper can stand alone, but it is part of a larger, book length project. The book seeks to explain why it was Europeans who conquered the world, and not someone else, such as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Ottomans, or South Asians. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution. Part of the argument turns on the simple static tournament model that is the focus of the paper. The next question is then explaining why the key exogenous parameters in the model (in particular, the political costs that rulers faced in mobilizing resources for war) happened to be different in major Europe countries, and different at precisely the time when gunpowder weapons were militarily useful and had enormous potential to be improved via learning by doing. Those conditions meant that European rulers would push the gunpowder technology further than rulers elsewhere in the world, and the resulting technological gap would allow Europeans to plant colonies and fortresses in far away parts of the world. Why were these key parameters so different in Europe? That question goes beyond the scope of the paper, but the answer turns out not to be geography, contrary to what Jared Diamond and others have argued. Rather, it was the unintended consequence of Europe's history since the collapse of the Roman Empire. That history could have been very different, and so could the histories of the other major Eurasian civilizations. It is in fact easy to imagine plausible counterfactuals in which someone else would have conquered the world. The issues involved in such counterfactuals go well beyond mobilizing resources for war or the size of states, for they also hinge on matters of politics, of culture and religion, and of social and economic policy. European governments, for instance, let civilians carry and use arms and placed relatively few limits on their ability to create organizations to trade or colonize abroad. Policy elsewhere in Eurasia was not so permissive. The unintended consequence was that it was much easier for civilians in Europeans to create colonies, and much harder for civilians in East Asia or the Middle East to do the same.

International Journal of Advance Research and Innovative Ideas in Education, 2020

Epidemic is a Greek term, which alludes to any plague sickness causing a high part of mortality, or more generally, as a representative for any abrupt episode of a heartbreaking tribulation (Buchill, 523). Throughout the Biblical text, Epidemic episodes are the bookends of human presence, thought about both a piece of beginning human community, and a part of the very completion of mankind. The epidemic is a scourge happening on a scale, which passes global frontiers, typically influencing an enormous number of individuals. In a basic manner, an epidemic is a pestilence, with higher extent regarding topographical territory, number of cases and long periods of enduring representing death (Samal, 165). Human populace has experienced numerous epidemics from the dawn of history, be it the previous type of smallpox, tuberculosis or the ongoing occurrence of Coronavirus, so the Human history is plagued by the deadly epidemics of catastrophes that caused the demise of empires and kingdoms, which were once dominant, prosperous, and the best example. This paper will discuss the impact of the Epidemic throughout history on the different flourished empires and how the scourge destroyed the economic, political and military systems of many empires such as Greek, Roman, Aztec and others. It also tries to outline how the Epidemic devastated the tremendous armies in short times, and killed great talent leaders before performing their tasks and getting their aims, for instance Alexander the Great.

Middle Ground Journal, 2019

International Handbook on Collective Violence

The evolution and history of warfare has been investigated by philosophers, historians, practitioners, social scientists and life scientists. Common questions in this endeavour are: How far back into human evolution and history do we find evidence of warfare? How frequent was warfare in any given historical period? How lethal was warfare? In short, scholarship on the evolution and history of warfare has focused on questions of origins, frequency, and intensity. Despite the fact that scientific interest in these questions is perhaps broader and more methodologically sophisticated than ever, consensus on these questions remains elusive for at least two reasons. First, the archaeological record of warfare is incomplete. Second, we do not agree on what warfare is or how to unambiguously distinguish it from other forms of violence. Beyond an agreement that warfare is something more than violence between two individuals, there is little consensus on the proper scope of our main unit of analysis. Given these hurdles, it would seem that an investigation into the evolutionary origins of human warfare is destined merely to perpetuate academic stalemates, in which old arguments are continuously repackaged with each new discovery of a mass grave or ‘peaceful’ society. Although this is a rather pessimistic view, I establish it at the forefront of this chapter since my argument will be that these hurdles (e.g. knowledge of ancestral phenomena and consensus on definitions) are not insurmountable. Entire disciplines thrive on their ability to successfully infer and model the unobserved past based on imperfect historical, geological and archaeological evidence. And the question of definitions must be placed in its proper scope – as a methodological, rather than ontological, consideration.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2012