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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

The money quote: "Our findings point out that geography, like genetics and ecology, matters, but it is not destiny."

That is, yes to some degree, but not as strongly as Diamond claimed.

I think this is a better quote:

> Our analyses uncovered significant variation within continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural transmission, a finding that is consistent with the critique that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially reductionist and overreaching. More importantly, our results indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank lower than those in other continents across any cost type [...] at none of the time points considered did Eurasia have any clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which most societies around the world transitioned into an agriculturalist mode of subsistence.

Diamond's central claims are about Eurasian/European dominance, not a general claim about natural resources being advantages. The latter is, y'know, pretty obvious.

Doesn’t geography affect genetics and ecology though?

The Horde didn't let that stop them, nor the Romans, not the Spaniards. Certainly there were bottlenecks, but there's instances of insane trade networks for instance Indus Valley artifacts turning up in the EU region and South American bird feathers in the Eastern US. Certainly there's some leakage here and there. And indeed it's known to anthropology that there are many systems to obviate inbreeding in tribal societies, Aboriginals come to mind.

Graeber's proposition, if memory serves, was that while many of the programmatic approaches are true, human volition ultimately decides. I bring that up because the more I think about it the more evident it becomes, it's not just technology but just about anything.

And that was also true of his assertions on the sharing and adoption of technology - for instance North American native tribes refused to adopt the obviously superior instruments of their neighbors for cultural reasons.

> The Horde didn't let that stop them

Apologies for my historical ignorance, but who are The Horde? I mean, I assume you don't mean the ones from Warcraft, in which case I do know them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Horde

They're likely referring to the Mongol empire.

The Mongols and the various steppe nomad invaders before them depended on the continuity of the Eurasian steppe though. The long, flat, grassy expanse from Ukraine to Manchuria not only supported their livestock and culture, but functioned as a massive superhighway that allowed them to maintain such big empires. I'm skeptical of a lot of Diamond's bigger claims, but the steppe was what allowed so many expert horse archers to repeatedly conquer big parts of Eurasia over millennia.

The Mongols were absolutely not tied to the steppe. The middle east, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, China, and Korea are all famously mountainous and all of them quickly came under mongol rule. Heck, large parts of Mongolia itself are rugged. They were already well adapted to mountains long before they ever left Central Asia.

Of course they weren't tied to the steppe. They could leave it. However, they needed to steppe to form these huge empires, and conquer settled cultures in the first place. This is due number of related reasons that are fundamentally about the unique steppe environment:

1) Large herds of horses consume monumental amounts of grass, especially when they are on the move during military campaigns. The steppe is suited for continuous occupation by these herds in a way that most of Europe or the ME isn't. The Mongol's forays into non-steppe areas were limited by available grass.

https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-logistic...

2) Related to this, abundant grass was why they had a horse-oriented culture and economy, and why horses were ridden by common people, and not just the elites - as in most all other areas.

3) While parts of Mongolia are mountainous and the Mongols and other steppe groups ventured into them, horses don't do well with very rugged terrain. Horses can't make it up many or most hiking trails in the American West, for example - they can't be too steep or have significant obstacles. In addition, again there is less grass in such areas.

To sum up, the Mongols and other riders needed the steppe for the abundant grass. The flatness of the Eurasian steppe also allowed for incredibly fast travel, which is why the Mongols, Turks, and others were able to have continuous cultures and empires from Europe to China.

Whenever the steppe conquerors conquered and ruled from non-steppe areas, they could not maintain massive cavalry (unless they were receiving reinforcements from the steppe). This leads to the treadmill of conquest and abandonment of the horse-oriented culture that made their conquests possible in the first place. That happened with the Iranians, Mongols, and various Turkic groups, among others.

You're missing my point here, which is that mountainous areas weren't some peripheral interstitial zone they would occasionally mount expeditions to with a lot of preparation and care. Rather, they were a core part of the Mongolian homeland and critical to the economic system of central asia. Mongolian horses were extremely important to that success, with good adaptations for the harsh environments and much better foraging than almost anyone else's. It allowed the Mongols to mount lightning fast campaigns across terrain no one else could, in conditions thought impossible. This was enabled by the incredible depth of experience with adverse, arid, and mountainous terrain possessed by Mongol commanders. If you want a specific example, look up the campaigns against Qara-Khitai, which famously included an expedition of ~30,000 over the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan in the dead of winter.

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