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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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