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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

Guns, Germs, and Steel is thoroughly discredited pop science. And even then you’re misrepresenting its claims.

Look to David Reich and his students for actual evidence based science on human migrations.

And of course there are virtually no impartial contemporary works on the Age of Exploration, because the politics of our day require vilifying those civilizations.

The objective reality is that the colonial period was just one of many human migrations. It wasn’t the worst, it wasn’t the first, it’s not the last, and there will be more, including the largest mass migrations in human history occurring right now.

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How about 1491? He straight up claims the arrival of manioc in Africa contributed to a population boom that presaged the slave trade.

Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. It takes far longer to adapt to native food sources than to bring in annual crops that not only take but a few years to establish, but also require removing the forests and prairies of the defeated culture to do it. There is nothing for you here anymore. Assimilate to your new masters.

Also if anyone has refuted that patterns of conquest around the world have been highly amplified in east-west bands because of the biomes those territories represent, I’d love to hear it.

> Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples.

Nomadic people are quite capable of conquering land, the most obvious example being Genghis Khan, who managed to build the Mongol empire into the largest in human history.

It is true there is a general trend in history of agricultural societies displacing hunter/gather societies, but that's simply because agriculture generates more calories per square kilometer than a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. As populations grow beyond the carrying capacity of the natural environment, hunter/gatherers either forced to adopt agriculture or get conquered by the larger armies of those people that have.

Europe had a considerable population predating the Age of Exploration, while I won't commit to calling it causal, enclosure is attributed as one of the reasons for the AoE in texts. And enclosure was at least in part driven by agriculture. So you can call it what you may, but I would call socioeconomically driven violent ingress into previously occupied territories colonialism and not migration.

Reich's book was good.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14395-4

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