Man is not a universal being, but simply mobile. Therefore, the impact on him of unfavorable conditions does not at all mean that he will begin to develop – often he simply goes to where the living conditions are better. But when too many people accumulate in one place, possessing very different knowledge accumulated earlier in different places of the planet, an explosion of technological progress occurs, and it does not matter in what conditions – even at the North Pole.
Once at a lecture I had a chance to hear the thesis that the worse conditions a person lives, the more he is inclined to development, because he constantly struggles with harsh natural conditions, and he has to strain his mental abilities, inventing all kinds of protection.
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I don’t remember how that lecture ended, but the students seemed to have no complaints about the theory presented. But later I had to think a lot, and I found many gaping holes in it.
First, in harsh conditions, not all peoples began to think so actively as to invent many useful things, the combination of the introduction of which led to the emergence of civilization. Let’s take the same North American Indians and Eskimos, as well as the Siberian Chukchi. They live in extreme conditions, and throughout their history they have fought for survival. But for some reason they did not invent anything that would help them create a technological civilization.
Secondly, all technologically significant civilizations of antiquity arose precisely in favorable conditions – Ancient Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, Central America and other tropical and subtropical regions.
Well, and thirdly, European civilization, which literally in several hundred years changed the face of the whole world, developed in a temperate climatic zone. But at the same time, there were many such temperate climatic zones in the world, for example, in Australia, in the south and north of America, and in South Africa, too, the zone is not very extreme in climatic terms. But no bursts of technological activity were observed there, although people have lived there for many millennia.
In general, it is completely incomprehensible why modern technologies began to develop only in Europe, and not somewhere else anywhere in the world. Are people special? No, modern Europeans are practically all without exception – the descendants of other peoples who moved to this continent, mainly from Asia – both its northern and southern parts.
That is, most of the Proto-Europeans came to Europe after they could not establish scientific and technological progress in their regions – China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt. After all, European Aryans did not originate in Europe, they came from Asia. And the Celts, who became the progenitors of many European peoples, did not originate in Europe, but came from South Asia. And the Slavs also appeared from somewhere in the same place.
In general, it seems that the foundation of Europe’s technological power was laid several thousand years ago, when knowledge carriers of various ancient civilizations began to flock to the almost deserted European continent from all over the world. This process got its start at the emergence of the first ancient Greek civilization in the middle of the 1st millennium, then continued in Ancient Rome, but slowed down for almost 1000 years due to a new wave of migration of peoples from Asia and Africa to Europe.
And only by the middle of the 2nd millennium AD, when the European ethnos as a whole took shape, despite all its internal diversity, a real technical revolution began, which began to resemble an avalanche.
In contrast to European civilization, you can oppose the American civilization – the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas and others. Over the millennia of its existence, it has shown good success, but it has not matured to the creation of a technogenic civilization. And not at all because its appearance was prevented by the Europeans invading the continent – and before the Europeans, the Incas and Mayans had enough time.
But for several thousand years, all these American peoples, who mastered agriculture on an industrial scale even earlier than the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, did not even manage to invent wheels and real writing. It is also indicative that the Europeans who came to America in the 15th century discovered there a slave system that had been dragging on for all these thousands of years.