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Comment by sn41 | Hacker News Reader

This seems an inane and oversimplified view. Sure, coffee would have helped. But ignoring colonization, and its huge positive impact on Western Europe and negative impact elsewhere, and concluding that industrialization is a corollary of a stimulant is strange.

I think these kind of "historians" rarely bother to place themselves in historical context. This article seems right in the much derided class of insight porn articles. I believe history is not the result of "one minor cause" - you could write articles equally myopic that the Chinese invention of sailing against the wind created civilization, gunpowder created civilization, double-entry bookkeeping created civilization, steam power created civilization, better glasswork and telescopes created civilization, etc. It was not one thing by itself, but probably everything together.

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The only argument i ever really bought was the origin of agriculture. and even that is pretty suspect, but i still think it's a decent argument.

10,000 years ago, pretty much everyone was a hunter gatherer. Humans can survive on pretty much anything from seeds to whales. There's not really much need to control the environment to maintain a food source in that context. Yes, there will be lean years, yes there are other populations you're in competition with (but they could also be food...)

In any case, the argument goes, somebody stumbled on fermentation. The desire for regular access to whatever plant got you drunk might actually be enough to become a farmer. It's tough to say. I think it's plausible, and probably part of the whole story.

Hunter gatherers were healthier and longer lived than their farming counterparts. I think that's still true of the few hunter gatherer cultures that remain. Food security is a good reason, but for a human, especially a hunter gatherer, everything is food. Alcohol security though, that's a pretty compelling argument. Perhaps not for you personally, but i'm sure you've met people that would agree. Addiction is powerful.

Also domestication could have had a part, once you have a herd nomadic life is much harder and you need to tend to pastures.

Domestication also explains, why development has been slower in Africa. They had nothing to domesticate.

Is this a testable claim? Were, say, sheep progenitors easier to domesticate than ibexes or antelope or okapi?

Well there's the American Natives, which are a conundrum because they both had hard animals to work with (I think they did manage to domesticate turkeys, but not buffaloes) but some still managed to farm and hybridize crops.

many points are debated here, there are also some links to start https://www.quora.com/Farming-Why-didnt-the-Native-Americans...

disclaimer: I know nothing of the subject and my initial hunch was pure conjecture.

It's a claim made by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Wikipedia has a pretty well cited section on "Behavioural preadaptation"[0] however I can't speak to its accuracy as I haven't read any of the literature.

I'd be pretty interested in seeing a domesticatability comparison of the guanaco (wild predecessor of the domesticated llama still in existence today) vs. the zebra.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_animals#Behav...

There was a story on HN a few months ago. I do not have a reference, but it said, that all the African animals are either to dangerous or to fast. There are no horse, cow or pig equivalents. Some might seem like it but are actually not (like Zebras, look like horses, are actually very different).

There is a pleasurable aspect of "getting drunk", but I personally wouldn't discount the food security angle either. Which is why I feel the "alcohol created civilization" argument is overkill. Fermented food can be stored for much longer times than fresh food. It's no surprise that many other non-alcoholic fermented foods have ancient histories. Same with other simple means of preservation (such as cured meat).

To give an example: Ancient beer (as mentioned in the Wiki on ancient Egyptian cuisine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_cuisine) was likely cloudy with lots of grain parts (not strained), and thus more nutritious than today's filtered beers. Even notwithstanding the hunter-gatherer aspect, I can see something appealing about having a source of readily available nutrition that you don't have to work for once prepared. With an added bonus that it can be transported over large distances, even to places where no food is available at all.

I don't entirely discount the "pleasure" angle, of course -- history after all records many examples of other psychoactive plants used since ancient times -- but in most cases, they are not food and were primarily used for ritual, medical, or social purposes. (This is still the case today.) The USA Today article is on a bit stronger ground when describing the coffee house's role in the Enlightenment.

Absolutely. Almost no major historic events or developments had one single cause.

No event period has a single cause. In order to hit a pool ball with another pool ball, you need to create the universe first. It sounds pedantic, but you can't always find more than one reasonable cause for any event. Aristotle named four, but there's always more than that.

> and negative impact elsewhere

This is factually incorrect.

The USA, Canada, Australia and NewZealand we're colonies.

Certainly under British rule colonisation had a hugely positive impact.

For the Europeans, who moved there. The original inhabitants might think different. In their point of view, these colonies actually were the most devastating.

But leaving aside whether the advantages accrued to one ethnic group or another, didn't colonization increase the economic output on those land masses?

Overall, I mean (unquestionably it was destructive too).

I can speak about India. India went from controlling 25% of the world's output in the 1500s to controlling 2% of the world's output in 1947. Till about 1900, Indians were banned from starting industries. Just so that you don't think that Indians had no industries, the first Fellow of the Royal Society from India was a shipbuilder [1]. British colonization was devastating for Indian commerce. You can argue that it is only now hobbling back to normalcy.

On balance, British did introduce railways, which was instrumental in unifying the country, and a unified legal system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardaseer_Cursetjee

smallpox riddled Native Americans might want a word with you

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