| pokoko said: No. Civilization building is highly dependent on circumstance and environment. Natural resources, periods of stability, and climate are all important factors. Civilizations developing within rain forests, for example, is very rare, as they typically lack the raw materials to create safe, long-standing structures and proper tools. Proper roads are difficult to create. There is very little need to move away from the hunter-gatherer system, though doing so is often the beginning of the structure needed to advance. Wet environments are not nearly as viable for record-keeping as dry environments and so systems of writing rarely develop. There are a LOT of factors that can push or hold back the development of civilization. The conditions have to be just right. |
True - though a lot of Africa is actually savannah and tropical woodlands where the climatic adversity and the need to plan for dry and growing seasons are much alike what motivated the growth of cities and states elsewhere in the world, even on pre-colombian America, and most of Africa is a mineral-rich crystalline shield.
I think maybe the people who migrated from Africa were subjected to an evolutionary bottleneck who poised them just right on a short ammount of (geologic) time to develop civilization. Most of the subsaharian peoples perhaps were not subject to the same sort of pressure in the time modern civilization developed. It's telling that, asides from a few stone artifacts on Zimbabwe, most african civilizations were the result of conquest or cultural spill from somewhere else (Madagascar from Austronesians, the old Mali empire and the Tutsis from the Berbers...).
Of course, a statistic encompassing an entire people tells nothing of an individual on itself, and even when it does, it means we are allowed to treat people on a discriminatory fashion? Would you treat your neighboor differently if therw was hard evidence he comes from a less intelligent ethnic stock? Food for thought.
