(July 13, 2013 at 12:48 pm)thesummerqueen Wrote:(July 13, 2013 at 12:24 pm)Chas Wrote: That's whacked. How is having a favored environment racist?
I think it's the book the posits that whites 'evolved' in environments suitable for pack animals, and thus it put them in a higher position.
Sort of. We got lucky because many of the large herbivores that happened to live where we lived were suitable for domestication. There is the llama in South America, but that's all. I can't think of a single indigenous large mammal in Africa which has been successfully domesticated. Once it was possible to move horses and cattle and the rest of our barnyard with us by ship, these animals have been raised pretty much everywhere. But Eurasians were lucky in having had them available to increase the workload an individual could contribute, in part because of the labor of animals. As Eurasians evolved cultures they were therefore able to support many more specialists, which in turn enabled the development of technologies.
