Tag Archives: history

guns, germs, and porcines

At last, here is a grand unified pork-centric theory of history.

Many people, for many different reasons, rejected pork in the ancient Near East. Largely arid, it was a land of sheep, goats, and cattle. Nomads didn’t keep pigs because they couldn’t herd them through the desert. Villages in very dry areas didn’t keep pigs because the animals needed a reliable source of water. Priests, rulers, and bureaucrats didn’t eat pork because they had access to sheep and goats from the state-focused central distributing system and considered pigs filthy. Pigs remained important in only one place: nonelite areas of cities, where they ate waste and served as a subsistence food supply for people living on the margins.

Later the Greeks and Romans were both huge fans of pork, which I didn’t know.

Inca Roads

NPR has an interesting article about Inca roads. It’s a reminder that there were some very advanced, densely populated civilizations in the Americas before the European arrival.

The Inca road began at the center of the Inca universe: Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, said to be built in the shape of a crouching puma. It actually was not a single road but a network of royal roads, an instrument of power designed for military transport, religious pilgrimages and to move supplies…

Schoolchildren around the world learn about the ancient Roman roads and the Great Wall of China — but most people have heard little about the great Inca Road. Kevin Gover, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, says the road is largely forgotten because it just doesn’t fit into a typical Western narrative.

“Indians play one of two roles in that narrative,” he says. “They are either the opponents of civilization or they are literally part of the nature that was there to be settled and conquered. We’re not taught that some of these were very advanced civilizations, because that means this wasn’t a wilderness. And that means somebody had to be displaced. And it wasn’t necessarily a noble endeavor.”

 

1,000 year drought in southwestern U.S.

From the Earth Institute, this drought in the Southwest U.S. is likely to be worse than the one that destroyed an entire advanced civilization in the same spot.

During the second half of the 21st century, the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face persistent drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, with the drying conditions “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, a new study predicts.

The research says the drying would surpass in severity any of the decades-long “megadroughts” that occurred much earlier during the past 1,000 years—one of which has been tied by some researchers to the decline of the Anasazi or Ancient Pueblo Peoples in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century. Many studies have already predicted that the Southwest could dry due to global warming, but this is the first to say that such drying could exceed the worst conditions of the distant past. The impacts today would be devastating, given the region’s much larger population and use of resources…

“The results … are extremely unfavorable for the continuation of agricultural and water resource management as they are currently practiced in the Great Plains and southwestern United States,” said David Stahle, professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas and director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory there.

Discarding the theories about alien abduction, the Anasazi most likely just walked away from their urban lifestyles, which the surrounding ecosystem could no longer support, spread out, and resumed earlier, lower-impact ways of life. Although there was probably significant suffering and loss of life, that entire group of people did not “vanish” – their descendants can still be found in the same general region. Drawing parallels to the modern world, the southwest U.S. is obviously part of an interconnected national and global system, and people, water, materials, and food can be moved around a lot easier than in the 13th century. On the other hand, the world is crowded and there isn’t much space left to spread out in. We can’t have billions of people just walking out of their cities, into the surrounding woods, and resuming a hunting and gathering lifestyle.

1989

“We’ve got to do more to ameliorate the violence and suffering that afflict so many regions in the world, and to remove common threats to our future. The deterioration of the environment, the spread of nuclear and chemical weapons, ballistic missile technology…”
-George H.W. Bush, December 3, 1989

Hmm…how are we doing on this stuff now?