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Not to take away from what are probably legitimate complaints about the modern day, but:
Historically this is pretty much straightforwardly false. Like almost as flagrantly false as you can get. A study of early human history is painfully clear that there is an immensely strong causal arrow from “excess food production” to advanced social organization and accelerated technological development.
Virtually every single modern scholar that I’m aware of seems to think that Australia is pretty much impossible for early human society to do any better. The soil quality is not good partially because of the geological history (no volcanoes or glaciers, bad phosphate content, etc), so you need artificial phosphate imports to boost food production (not a thing until like 1900ish). No domesticable beasts of burden, for plowing, or even for food. Native grains are shit. Rainfall patterns are laughably inconsistent.
Opinions can be debated about more broad topics but the quote in question is not an opinion, it is simply a false claim. There’s room for other HBD type arguments I suppose but even the anti-woke scholars will tell you that the Aborigines had hit pretty much a hard ceiling in civilizational development and it wasn’t their fault. You can correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure even the early settlers who brought all sorts of stuff with them had a shitty time at agriculture until they could mass import fertilizers and stuff of that nature.
Now, can culture be maladaptive still? Sure. Just because the Aborigines did all right optimizing for their shitty environment doesn’t mean that the society they formed was logical, just, or fair or anything like that. Cultural selection pressures are mostly survival-based.
Nobody ever has to trot out this kind of geographical apologia on behalf any group that isn't packing drastically subnormal IQ. I've never heard of any people who sat around neglecting to invent the wheel for ten thousand years, then turned out to have normal intelligence once someone introduced them to fertilizer.
Does this count specifically for carts and other transport (i.e. other vaguely wheel-like things don’t count)? Because the Incans never got around to wheels proper because of fairly obvious geographic limitations.
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I would call this the "Guns, Germs, & Steel" argument and I am very skeptical. Mainly because I read "Guns Germs & Steel" and the argument presented in that book does not stand up to scrutiny. The main flaw in the book is that the author compared apples and oranges. In the sense that he compared wild animals in Africa, such as the zebra, with animals in Eurasia which have been domesticated. For all anyone knows, the undomesticated version of the horse was just as unruly as the zebra and in fact it seems pretty likely. People tried to domesticate zebras and failed, but it's not the same because those people had the option of acquiring horses.
It's hard to believe that Australia is thoroughly and uniquely poor in this regard.
I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure people eat kangaroos. How can you be so sure that kangaroos are not domesticable?
I think it's pretty likely that the precursors to corn, wheat, etc. were "shit" as well, but of course I don't know what you mean by "shit."
It's hard to believe that the entire continent of Australia is completely lacking in areas with adequate rainfall for agriculture.
They’re called tarpans and they survived into the 19th century, we actually have a pretty good idea of their behavior.
Australian soil is, as far as I know, the worst in the world on average, and farming there requires fertilization techniques that require preexisting agricultural traditions to bootstrap. No comment on the kangaroos argument, but even today there are two domesticated species from Australia- macadamia nuts and a single kind of fruit, both of which are expensive luxuries rather than something that could be a staple.
I'm kinda skeptical of this, mainly because Australia is a very large continent and also due to my reading of Guns Germs & Steel. (And also because of that "Primitive Technology" YouTube channel). Can you provide a cite for this?
These types of arguments, standing alone, don't hold much water for me. The reason is that there's much less incentive to domesticate a species if there are similar species, already domesticated and already available.
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It definitely isn't. The Arabian peninsula and Saharan Africa both have much worse soil for farming, but both still managed to spawn civilizations. Arabia in particular spawning one that conquered the entire Middle East and North Africa.
This is more recent though. It wasn't called "the fertile crescent" for no reason.
Also I don't really think of nomadic Bedouins as a peak of civilization. Nomadic herder people's don't make it very far up the tech tree either, they're just lucky they had advanced agricultural neighbors to siphon off of
The fertile crescent very much doesn't include the Arabian peninsula. It's more Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.
I don't either, but in comparison to Australian aboriginals and their accomplishments, the Bedouins have them beat by a mile.
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There's some weak evidence against it: we don't have pre-domestication true horses around, but the Przewalski's horse is a little closer related to the modern horse than to the zebra, and while they're even more assholish than zebras, they're supposedly more trainable. I'm not convinced that it's a big difference, but I'm not convinced that it's strong evidence against the Guns Germs Steel view.
Kangaroos are farmed like deer, and take a similar environmental niche, but the males are also genetically primed to find the nearest biped and punch it in the face during mating season. That last bit's usually the argument why no one has domesticated them despite matching Diamond's six rules: yes, kangaroos have a dominance hierarchy, but it involves the lead male getting the shit clawed and kicked out of him, and humans aren't really built for that. They're also a little prone to panic, though that's kinda a hard metric to measure.
Conversely, the efforts to domesticate foxes, minks, and river otters are probably stronger arguments against Diamond: of his six proposed rules, these animals are bity, panicky, don't have as widespread a social structure, and are carnivorous. They still seem to get much more friendly pretty quickly; they just needed the right incentives and human leadership to domesticate or partially-domesticate.
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I'm completely unimpressed with that line of argumentation. There's no evidence that animals in other parts of the world were any more "domesticable" at the time we started domesticating them, or that the grains were better from the get-go.
Unless the argument is there are no native beasts of burden, period.
There are no native beasts of burden in Australia.
There were megafauna when the Aboriginals got here. The Aboriginals killed them all.
(I will note that "not trainable" does have some legs as an idea; the Australian megafauna was marsupial, and hence less intelligent. I'm not aware of any prehistorically-domesticated marsupials, although only the South Americans would have had the chance to try and even then not for all that long given how late it was settled.)
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This would be more convincing if the Maori weren't well ahead in civilizational terms, despite being even more remote from Eurasia. They had permanent dwellings and much more advanced politics, as did the Torres Strait Islanders. It's hard to see how the Torres Strait, tiny islands that are barely visible on the map, are more hospitable than all regions in an entire continent. Bananas are well suited to Queensland and could've been brought in from New Guinea... but only the Torres Strait Islanders did that. The most obvious difference is that they had Polynesian background.
Australian soil is not that bad either, not around the rivers at least. The colonists managed without fertilizer for a long time. Kangaroos are perfectly edible as a meat source too, albeit a bit tough.
You are aware that the Maori only arrived in New Zealand in the 13th century, right?
Taiwanese indigenous people had agriculture back in 3000 BCE and took it with them when they spread to Philippines and around Melanesia (and then in the 13th century to New Zealand). The distances in Melanesia much smaller, so a bunch of related cultures with centuries / millenia of seafaring had no problem exchanging ideas and technology between them. That situation is completely different to Australia.
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There has been some scholarship on quasi-agricultural stuff like fish farming and harvesting moth spawns. However it's a bit muddy since a certain chunk of Indigenous scholarship doesn't like anything that might indicate that they may have had a sense of land-ownership or settlement since it's counterproductive for their narrative claims vis-a-vis White settlement. I do agree that extrapolating any of that to 'productive agrarian society' would have been broadly impossible, but they've discovered a lot more organization and quasi-agriculture than earlier writers expected.
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