Richard Bulliet - History of the World to 1500 CE (Session 2) - Valley Civilizations 8000-1500 BC

works later this evening it will include you know the names of the chapters you were to read and of the units and bridging world history online I wanted to look at but it will not include all readings that might be assigned although it will list just the first reading the one from my book on animals on Sunday you will receive notification about sectioning and then say the the times and the places of the sections and it will be first come first serve still working out some TA issues but they should be fixed by then my section for graduate students is going to be on Thursdays it wasn't this week I sorry a couple of people misunderstood that starting next week and it will be Thursday from 10 to 11 in in my office in 421 unless there are too many people so can I have a show of hands how many graduate students once again 1 2 3 4 5 6 of that 7 that should easily not easily that should be accommodated all within my office so we'll meet there in 421 Oh all right this is a week for chapter 1 chapter 1 deals with the entire history of the species up to the Neolithic Revolution and then whips to the Neal after Revolution to the first supposedly the first River Valley civilizations investor taymiyah and Egypt in the last class I sort of debunked the idea that you could learn anything from big history but somehow you do have to to think about all the things involved with the peopling of the world over a period of tens of thousands of years particularly in as much as that time span encompasses a variety of significant climatic shifts that make it very difficult to recover exactly what the experience was like for humans as they moved into new habitats there are some things that we can tell from from bones and from implements one of them is that the hominid teeth becomes smaller and these are primarily the grinding teeth and this is interpreted as a shift to a diet that does not require so much grinding of hard vegetable matter therefore there's a there's been a tendon clusion that as hominids move out of Africa they eat more more soft foods presumably meat this is also accompanied by a reduction apparently in the extent of the intestinal tract again seeming to to allow for a meat diet I know this may come as a disappointment to the vegans in the room who are convinced that no since Adam and Eve did not eat meat therefore vegan culture has been the natural paradisiacal state of humankind but in fact we seem to have abundant evidence that tremendous amounts of meat were eaten I say up in terms of rapport ssin of the diet why would this be the case it actually makes a great deal of sense if you are stranded in a place that you have never been in before let us say you know you were on an airplane that came down on an island somewhere in the South Seas that has never been located and at the end you had to survive fortunately there were pigs there but but the question is what can you eat in the vegetable world what we know is that big proportion of the plants either you cannot digest or they taste awful or they poison you a small percentage of them get you high and therefore there's abundant reason to keep trying and you really have to visualize particularly for Central and South America where the number of psychotropic plants identified by pre-columbian peoples was in the hundreds you have to imagine you know you and you know you and your roommate going out in the jungle and saying I'm gonna need this leaf and if I die say something over my grave and but if I don't die and then report back what I ate and if I don't die I'll tell you what it was like and they end up getting I think you have to realize that getting stoned was a major social goal cultural goal for humans in certain parts of the world over substantial periods of time and in a sense where we're recovering the pristine nature of humankind today not not me I'm too old um any signs I'm a tenured professor at Columbia I would do something like that so so so if you can't just go out and pick up things to eat from trees and root in the ground and so forth what you can do is eat an animal almost all flesh is edible it's one of the curious things about animals now it's true that you want to you know avoid certain poisonous animals a particularly Blowfish but even there the fish is good it's just the poison part of it that's bad but it is likely that when humans spread from one habitat to another it took time for them to learn what plants they could eat but they could immediately eat the animals so one of the things that you can think about is that the the spread of hominids to other to other parts of the world is correlated some degree with this shift toward toward meat-eating then that brings the problem of how do you eat meat oh I used to ask this in my history of domestic animals course I said well how would you go about eating an animal and you know the football girl says it why I take it by the horns do this break its neck say okay now you've killed it now what do you do how do you get inside and once you're inside what parts do you eat you certainly don't chew on muscle say well they're soft parts like eyeballs and testicles in the liver and so forth and by and large it seems likely that all the parts of people avoid now are the ones that were preferred early on but even so meat-eating probably began more as scavenging the the bodies left by other primates or other carnivores predators rather than humans going out and killing things on their own although as they move in a new habitats killing on their own becomes more and more important if in fact they are eating more and more meat in the Mesolithic period where you have fully fledged Homo sapiens sapiens rather than Neanderthals or other not quite up to date modern forms of humanity you have a big increase I mentioned this last time in leading of fish so you extend the diet but you extend it toward other animal products and then over time you you learn what plants are edible within your environment although for many of the humans who settled in or who ranged over Europe Asia there was very little in the way of edible plant cover this was Tundra that simply did not have a very broad spectrum of of edible foods plant foods all right the Neolithic Revolution is the introduction is seemingly of large-scale consumption of specific specific plants as I've said there's this problem about why it is that that grass seed is the one that seems to have the biggest impact this there there's no clear answer to this although one of the answers probably has to do with the number of inches prove rainfall that you that you need for tubers and rhizomes you know big fat starchy things that grow underground most of the edible species require something around 30 inches of rain per year whereas cereal grains can grow in about eight inches of rain per year and indeed the definition of the Fertile Crescent which is often I used to talk about the first areas supposedly the first areas of of grain production is the the line of 8-inch rainfall that runs along the the highland areas of Israel up into the coastal areas of Syria across southern Turkey and down along the mountains of western Iran the if you had an arid zone as you have now in which you had heavy rainfall in tropical areas and comparatively heavy rainfall in temperate areas much farther north let us say you a lot of rainfall in the Congo and you know plenty of rainfall in Scotland but somewhere in between you have a band that's very very dry spreading the the dependence on crops or on wild plants that are that are dependent upon substantial rainfall across that zone would be very difficult so for the for the temperate norm northern climates it's not particularly surprising that a seed plant like wheat or barley would be more likely to spread than yams or manioc or something like that all right this this is enough what is a fairly tedious subject let me shift - not from the history of archeology to the archaeology of history when history conceptualization gets packaged in the form of books or courses or simply a received wisdom or documentaries or something like that it reflects not simply the recurrent perceptions of the of the author's or makers but it reflects the accumulation of of discoveries or theories or accepted stories that go back for a very long period of time and of course the one that we're going to start with here a river valley civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt has a very long history as an area of thought and it has to do with archeology in the primarily I mean in the 19th century but going back to the 18th century when Europeans went to Egypt in the Middle East and started to dig things up and take them home they could have gone to the Yucatan and dug up and taken home things from a Mayan pyramid except that it was covered with trees and vines the nice thing about the Middle East was that there wasn't any nasty ground cover and so you could see you know often when people think of archaeology they think Oh an archaeologist went out and he found a mound and he escalated it there are about a million mounds in the Middle East they're all over the place you travel long in a car in Iran or Iraq or something and you see this irregular landscape where you have mounds presumably there's something underneath the mountain there's no trouble finding amount the the trouble is deciding which mound to dig getting permission to dig up and putting up with the experience of having there be nothing of interest there an archeologist friend of mine who died a number of years back said that throughout his career he felt he was always about three feet away from becoming world famous that if he just dug a little bit differently he would have found the earliest something inscribed plaque something like that he never found it he was very distinguished archaeologists but he never made the big find and he said that the amazing thing is that some archaeologists make may have made the big find again and again and again and the question of why some people were successful and others were journeyman you know it raises questions I was in Iran in 1971 and I wanted to go out and search for long forgotten buried Buddhist monasteries which may have existed I don't know I never I never found any idea theory but I had a good friend who you know an army u.s. army intelligence who had leave time and a government truck and so we went out camping in the desert going to villages looking for the stuff and we were driving along and he said well what are we going to be leaving for I said I'm looking for mounds he said yeah well what what does that mean so well it'll be a pile of Earth that doesn't fit said well let's next time you see one let's stop said oh no we're still hundreds of miles from here we're going so we have it it's my car and I'm driving so when you see a mound let's stop so only about two three hours from Tehran on a fairly major road not the most major road the sort of the second road I said okay there's a mound that's really close to the road like you know 30 metres off the highway so let's stop and so we walk over to the to the mound and we're looking around and when I pick up this this is a five-pointed star pecked out of apparently granite has no hole in the center but it is exactly the shape of a fourth millennium VC mace head except of the mace head should have a hole in the center so he could put up you know a stick of it and make it a club in the last 30 years I have not found any archaeologists who can tell me what this is there was pottery there that was appeared to me to be around 2000 BC now sort of yeah 2000 BC and that that must be about right but it was you know hand thrown thought straw temporary bitumen blind pottery and and there was it was a mound it may have been a very very early mount or may not but what are you going to do of course you can put this in your pocket and take it away and violate iranian antiquities laws so this is an illegal theft from the from the iranian people on the other hand the iranian publishers ignore international royalty international copyright law so they translate my books without paying a royalty and i steal their their stone star in violation of their law so i have no i have no negative conscience in all this but the point is that there are there are lots and lots of sites in the last 30 or 40 years fewer and fewer sites have been dug and more have simply been been surveyed and a survey work has been very enlightening because it helps you choose which one to dig and there are a number of theories particularly central place theory that give you ways to try and analyze what are the places you should dig and one of the places that would be less relevant but of course then you have to have permission now in the nineteenth century you simply went and you stole whatever you found you got permission from a governor perhaps but you took whole temples off to European museums and so on an archaeologist nor less by contemporary and Iran told me that there was a village in Iran where he had examined a an Akkadian inscription on a stone very rare to find Akkadian inscriptions in the iranian highlands and the villagers said that a couple years earlier some japanese and a Range Rover Rover had come to the village and ordered the villagers to put the stone in the truck and the villagers said no so the Japanese drove off but you know a hundred years earlier that would have worked they could have taken it back to Tokyo and be in nice Museum there the result is that where the excavations are done is a function of the politics the the geography the degree of safety for people working in a particular area and that all converged very nicely upon Egypt and Mesopotamia and lo and behold where you were able to they most easily is where you end up deciding civilizations started now this has become an ironic because one of the great problems of the master narrative that dates the beginning of civilization to Egypt and Mesopotamia as the people in Egypt and Mesopotamia were not European white people this this was a big problem back in the 19th century because racialist theories of superior and inferior peoples were were very widespread and had a big popular following and indeed one of the products of of this was a distinction between on the part of certain archaeologists between people who lived in the Tigris Euphrates valley in Iraq whom they thought were white and people living in Egypt we just didn't seem as white as the people in Iraq so they came up with a theory that white people from Iraq came to the Nile Valley and brought civilization with them in their grip it and you had quite a bit Witten on this question of a so-called conquering white race of civilized people who went different places this is also when they thought they went from Greece to England to tell people to build Stonehenge that sort of thing oh all of this racialist stuff has pretty much been been discarded but the narrative of Western civilization has still been burdened by the by the idea that the origins of civilization that we see is the roots of our Western civilization they go back to parts of the world that we don't longer include in our Western civilization namely Egypt and Iraq wouldn't it have been better if the earliest civilization had been in Europe now how cool would that be then the Europeans could say you know we're at the origin point of civilization now that happens to be true it appears that let's say if you go back to 4000 BC or 3800 BC which is a good 500 years before the earliest things that we call cities in Iraq the beginnings of Sumerian civilization the largest human settlement in the world apparently was in Rumania made up entirely of gymnast it's amazing now it was it was it was in Romania very much in the valley not of the Tigris and Euphrates or the Nile but of the Danube River and this civilization you know you had one community there that is estimated have had 5000 inhabitants about double the size of the Sumerian cities when they come to be built and in sort of great arts of houses that seem to be organized in a certain form but this wasn't known back when Lee and the theory is being established now this civilization is recognized and is called old Europe you will not find any reference to Old Europe in Chapter one of the earth and its people's not my fault that I didn't draft that chapter but our ancient historian felt that you know how do you tell the story of the great river valley civilizations that give rise to civilization if you have to start with Romania because the civilization in Romania old Europe is dead by 3500 BC instead of it going on and giving rise to empires and codes of law and religions and so forth and so on it began it flourished it ended and it was in a river valley which which is very you erased great problem because the the standard narrative requires the reader to believe that civilization once it starts is kind of self propagating and you can see it's spread and you can see it increase in complexity so what was going on in Old Europe and why didn't we know of course we go back to the 19th century and you look at the areas that were involved which were primarily Romania Bulgaria and of the southern most parts of Ukraine this was a very unsettled and warlike period is a period of the decline of the Ottoman Empire rise of very parochial nationalisms among the various peoples of Southeast Europe it really wasn't a good time to simply go out with a shovel and start digging up in someone's village so that was one reason perhaps that people never noticed this civilization there it also be the question of if you found something how did you get permission to to take it to your Museum because who who was the government the government and that could be a problem it turns out that Old Europe was not suspected to exist as a civilization until the Soviet period following World War two between the end of World War two and the end of the of the Soviet Union there was a massive archaeological Enterprise in Southeast Europe Russia southern Russia and Ukraine to dig up mounds there are zillions of mounds in that area just like the Middle East but they hadn't been dug up before there you know there wasn't any any tradition that there had once been a civilization there and when they were dug up the findings were published in Russian and Romanian and published by local academies of Sciences in books and articles that were not read by Western archaeologists they also were books and articles that were predicated upon Marxist theories of the development of human society which were very different from those that prevailed among Western archaeologists so when the Soviet Union fell there was a particular time in place where a handful of archaeologists were invited from Russia to come to an archaeological convention in the United States and to talk about what they and their colleagues have been doing for the last two generations and lo and behold they said we have found a civilization that is incredibly complex and that has the oldest layers going back to well before parallel developments that you have in Egypt and in Mesopotamia but it came to an end even then this did not have the impact that it might have had if all the writings had had been translated into Western languages is if they weren't that many archaeologists working in the West who could read Russian excavation reports you also I had to have the freedom to go to the site and go to the museums and look at the collections so it is only now that the the great accumulation of archaeological knowledge from the Soviet era is being melded into the thinking of of European archaeologists one of the leading centers for for publicizing this is the center for the study of the ancient world at NYU and they had an exhibition last spring of the archaeology of old Europe and a number of publications are related that this is run the center is run by our former colleague here at Columbia Roger Bagnall ah but the easiest place to get access to this is a book by David Anthony called uh doesn't called the name that David Anthony gave it language horses anyway I'll get it for you and Nathan will email it to you it's a stunning book because it tells you that everything you thought you knew about the beginnings of civilization has to be modified how long it will take for it to trickle down into textbooks I don't know but when it does it will raise the question of why the the growth of dense human settlements based on grain and grain agriculture did not succeed in perpetuating itself in Southeast Europe while it did in Egypt and Mesopotamia not only that but it turns out that how old Europe has roots that go back or outshoot offshoots I should say that go up the Danube River toward further into Europe as you move east across the northern edge of the Black Sea let's say here's the Black Sea and here's the Caspian Sea here's the Caucasus Mountains you've got a little connection here and here's the Aegean Sea the connects to the Mediterranean Sea there are great great issues having to do with this with this area one of them is the hydrology of the area the Danube flows into the Black Sea then the Kenya the gesture flows into the Black Sea then the Boog then the de Knepper then the dawn and you have a whole bunch and then over here the Volga and the Ural these rivers flow from north to south across Central Asia and Russia and Ukraine and empty into the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea that was not always the case it appears that when you go back to two glacial times when northern Europe was buried under under vast quantities of ice these rivers didn't flow in this direction it's when you get the melting of the ice witches around 12,000 BC the last ice age that the the weight of the ice as it melts the disappearance that weight allows the land to sort of spring back and so these rivers start to flow into the Black Sea and the Caspian and larger amounts but during the Ice Age the the sea level fell so much that the Black Sea was not connected with the world's oceans and in fact the Black Sea appears to have been a very fairly shallow lake if you go back further into the ice ages you'll find that the Mediterranean Sea was almost dry when you look at cross sections of the Nile Valley you see that you know here you have the Nile flows in the Mediterranean but if you look at the cross section you find that at one time so flowing into the sea here flowing through a very deep canyon to get down to the level of the Mediterranean Sea because the Mediterranean Sea was almost dry and what you have now places like Cyprus and Crete Sicily Islands and Mediterranean were once mountaintops and it helps explain why you have certain species of animals that get isolated on these islands and are left over from the time when you could walk across the area that becomes Mediterranean Sea so you got like dwarf elephants and cypress elephants were stranded on what became an island and gradually became you know three or four feet tall instead of twelve feet tall but that was that was long long ago the issue of the Mediterranean and the RIT and the Black Sea may go back to around 5,000 BC in other words within the same very broad time horizon of when the old European civilization came into being and you have different theories to scholars at the lamont-doherty Earth Observatory the Columbia Center for studying oceanography and all aspects of geology that's located across the river just north of the George Washington Bridge to scholars there Pittman and his colleague the gentleman who is not Pittman they wrote a book called Noah's Flood I remember some titles Noah's Flood says that sometime around maybe 5500 BC the something happened that allowed the water from the Aegean and the Mediterranean to break through at this level and to fill the Black Sea and their argument is that that great filling of the bathtub is what came in legend to be called Noah's Flood because at the time that the Black Sea was filling up on the northern edges of the Black Sea you had people who were growing wheat and barley on on low low-lying land and they gradually were flooded out and they all had to leave there's a very controversial thesis you have some people who hold to it very strongly on the number of technical grounds and some people who dispute it on technical grounds of a similar argument saying that something here called the Caspian depression at one point the Caspian Sea of the Black Sea were we're linked together and then the sea levels changed and the link between them disappeared so there's a lot of controversy unlike the Nile where there is broad agreement that that is the river and that's where the river has been and that's where the river is going to stay and you could pretty much count on there being a Nile River there it doesn't mean that there weren't other rivers in North Africa is just that all the others dried up and only the Nile survived if you the dryness of North Africa the dryness of the Sahara Desert reached if the maximum at which it is still situated around 2500 BC before that it was moisture and any and instead of having desert from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean you had grassland and in some areas probably a savanna forest if you fly over the Sahara Desert you can see the river valleys in the most dramatic way you can say ah there was a great waterfall there's where two rivers flow together when you see now is simply rivers of sand water is all disappeared but the Nile because it connected with why resources in central Africa denial survive same thing with the Tigers new freight ease the Tigers new freight ease have been there changing their beds some what over thousands of years but by and large they have been there all the way along and the water there unlike in the Nile where comes from Central Africa the water there comes from the snowfall in Turkey that melts and flows into the Tigris and Euphrates valleys that go through Turkey Syria and Iraq and end up in the Persian Gulf now that hydrology in other words is one where you can say we know where the rivers were and we can see the whole area getting drier over time but up here it's it's controversial you know what constituted a river system or an agricultural system along a lake was the water in the lake sweet water or say line what is the the situation there the linkage between Old Europe and the broad hydrology of the region hasn't really been been thoroughly worked out at this time however old Europe is from here over and to save from the Don River to the westward none of that wheat and barley cultivation extends over here and when you get over here Central Asia east of the Volga River and the Ural River you don't even get any people to speak up cadenza very just foragers so there was a clustering in this direction and where these various river valleys were and that is where the old European civilization located as I say if if this had been known in the 19th century European historians fixated upon the history of Western civilization would have said civilization began with white Europeans in Romania and was borrowed by the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians who really weren't quite plain enough to qualify as Europeans this kind of thinking is linked to a to a school of theorizing known as diffusion ISM diffusion ISM is based on the idea that it is more likely that something will happen once and spread then that it will happen in a similar or identical fashion in different places that are not connected with each other one of the is one of the great areas of a controversy both in archaeology and in history is what do you do when you see a phenomenon that occurs in different areas the diffusion as' usually say that there must be a single point of origin and that everything spreads from there this is really why we have this this concept of Western Civ up to Mesopotamia is that the earliest place has to be the place from which everything else spread we don't go it's not used methodically in other words if you take much more recent things you can say oh the but the computer was invented the West and diffused from the West to transform the rest of the world but then when you say well gunpowder was invented in China and diffused from China to the rest of the world then you say the really important thing isn't where gunpowder was invented it's what the people who borrowed it did with it because again there's a effort to sort of give special attention and special primacy to what the Europeans did but when you go to this earlier period diffusion ISM is a very a very difficult issue to deal with some things clearly diffused and the most obvious ones are plants and animals that show up in geographical spaces where they are not indigenous they had to get there somehow and if those plants and animals are domestic the presumption is that they came in conjunction with humans so horses are not native to China are not native to the Middle East are not native to Southeast Asia but they show up in those places and so you can talk about the diffusion of horse culture in some sense similarly wheat and barley are not native to northern China the grains initially you know grown there were local grains foxtail millet and pearl millet not wheat and barley but they come there so you can look at products that move from one place to another and there's a great deal of of scholarship devoted to this movement of plants and animals on the other hand in the area of domestication the the tendency now is to argue that certain species are domesticated in more than one place it's it's an argument you can't prove it very well you can you can prove through DNA analysis that let us say all dogs belong to the same species but there's a huge argument over whether all dogs descend from you know from Adam dog and Eve dog who were first you know brought as puppies into the house by you know some cave lamb dogs are problematic where they the best they become domestic in several different locales or in one and if in one why do the divides of the function of dogs seem to differ there is very little support for the idea the dogs you know become domestic animals because they help it hunting this is the standard notion when you have the idea that hunters go to herders now that generally is not accepted some people would argue that dogs were became domestic because they were good to eat and in certain parts of the world dog is really a choice food you know dog restaurants in Korea render great pressure at the time of the World Cup there because you have the globalists in Korea saying we have to close the dog restaurants because it'll gross out you know everyone else and the Korean saying no no our national pride demands that we keep the dog restaurant open well you know you can still get dog in Korea it's supposed to be very very good I haven't had any but and nobody suggested that you know there should be dietary changes on the other part of the world because of the World Cup or the Olympics or something of that sort but but we don't know about dogs cats another problematic animal unlike dogs there is a fairly strong argument that's made that cats were domesticated in became domestic in one place probably Egypt and not a terribly long time ago the number of chromosomal differences that you have in caps from wild cat for the most closely related wild cat to the domestic cat is negligible with both dogs and cats you have a theory that is called self domestication which maintains that under certain circumstances some animals will seek out living with humans those circumstances are primarily related to first in the case of dogs - all of the leftover food from the animals of the humans killed in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic period that there were just you know heaps of you know juicy bones that the humans really couldn't eat very well you know as long and and you could just go there and eat those bones like a bear going to a garbage dump and if the humans thought you were dangerous they would kill you and eat you but if they thought you were safe they would let you stay because you were policing up the campsite that's fear yourself to investigation for for dogs nobody knows whether it's correct or not self-sufficient desmith domestication for cats maintains that in Egypt perhaps elsewhere but Egypt is the most likely when you had grain agriculture people started to collect large quantities of grain and store it and where they stored large quantities of grain they attracted large quantities of mice and where they had large quantities of mice they had large quantities of cats because the cats preferred to eat the mice or anything else so they didn't say let's live in this human encampment they said let's live in Mouse appleís you know let's just go in there like Godzilla and eat every Mouse we can find because they're just scurrying around all over the place and we're we're the cats we mice now the humans as hypothetically with the dogs would kill the cats if they felt they were dangerous no scratch my baby I bring you no but if the if the cat was was docile they would permit it to live because it was clearing out the mice and this gets into the crucial issue of the definition of what is a domestic animal and which I've talked about in what I was saying for you to read by my definition a domestic animal is an animal that belongs to a population of a given species in which you have docility inherited from generation to generation has nothing to do with taming animals or you know getting puppies or cubs and raising them among humans it has to be inherited so that you go from generation to generation and each generation is as docile and the way that occurs in the experimental studies that have been done in the 20th century is that if you take a population of wild animals and you force them to hang around with people so that there are people over the place or in the cage and a lab or something like that most of the wild animals will not be able to have sex they'll just be too anxious la OH who's looking you know oh Jesus yeah there's Bob again looking you know they they just won't do it so in the early 20th century took a hundred rats 80% of them did not reproduce because their fight-or-flight reaction with respect to to reproduction was so high that they were agitated all the time and the only ones that reproduce were the sort of stoners the the laid-back rats said oh all right Bob yeah cool I'll watch you too you know it's you know the next generation had a higher proportion of those that have the laid-back fight-or-flight reactions because most of the parents were in that subset of the natural distribution of hormonal stimuli by the time you get to twenty or thirty generations you have a population that has adrenaline glands that are seventy five percent smaller than those of the wild population and they no longer run away they no longer become startled they no longer have any difficulty reproducing they are docile and interestingly enough they look different this has not been fully analyzed but they were certain that as you change the hormonal balance there are certain physical changes that that occur one of them is albinism that almost all domestic animals in the early stages of education start to have white spots here and there like on the forehead or something like that pig a cow a horse a dog a white blaze on the forehead is an early appears to be associated with domestication pure white animals some of them of course like polar bears are obviously environmentally influenced but pure white animals are more likely than not to be domestic so domestic rabbits are white wild rabbits are not domestic geese are white wild geese are not domestic ducks are white wild ducks are not Donald Duck is domestic Daffy Duck is wild it's you know and one of the big challenges to Judaism whatever happened to the white mice I mean here you had Mickey he was black and somehow they should have gotten white mice into that story but they never did anyway so the development of of a domestic population has more to do with the continuous breeding over numerous generations in a particular locale or restricted area in which the the most wild offspring were killed or driven away and the most docile ones were kept until you had a population that was essentially all docile and this seems to apply to a whole bunch of animals although it may have come about in different ways according to different specific species but the thing is it's not the fusion the the older work done with domesticating animals as with plants said that once somebody figured out how to how to domesticate an animal then they can go and domesticate another animal of course they never did figure out how to investigate an animal you let's say you have domestic a domestic cow and you think of thirty generations you say gee 300 years ago that was a wild cow good thing we kept careful records it was public of course they didn't keep careful as they didn't know what was happening domestication in most cases I believe is an unanticipated outcome that isn't even recognized necessarily when it has occurred there are other theories lady Strauss for example famous structuralist anthropologist maintained that prior to the Neolithic Revolution humans had a scientific spirit and were avid experimentalists and they thought they simply experimented with keeping animals and crossbreeding them just to see what happened and then as soon as they got a domestic animal then they quit being scientists and they became barbecue mavens they you know he he argued that there was a primitive scientific mentality that disappears in the Neolithic and does not reappear until the modern scientific revolution I think that's wrong but lady Strauss is very famous so what can I do I won't you know be as harsh on him as I will and Jared Diamond who no manners has got almost everything wrong um okay so you have this this problem of diffusion ISM we have a master narrative that says that the Queen and barley will begin to be domesticated wheat and barley show up in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia and they spread from there if you go to the website for Jared Diamond's books book Guns Germs and Steel you will actually have an animated map that will show here's where wheat and barley start and they sprint and here's where potatoes start to let no no potatoes no yams no corn no anything just wheat and barley because that's the whole story diffusion is emizner on sense but it has to be you know looked at very carefully when it comes to the question of Old Europe this is a hot debate one of the dominant theories about the end of Old Europe by one of the first archaeologists to to show that this had been a dynamic civilization by 4000 BC Maria Jim butis she said that this civilization was destroyed by horse-riding mace wielding you know chariot driving warriors from from the east and of course there's a corollary that Old Europe is seen in this theory as being matriarchal that because we have many many little figurines thousands of little figurines of a pregnant or at least overweight females and then we stop having those so it's the idea that the beastly heavily-armed testosterone driven men and their chariots and horses came in to destroy the peace-loving matriarchal women of Southeast Europe who had actually created civilization and then they it got stolen from them because that's just what men do you know that they're just beastly um well you know David Anthony who's written the book the name of which I can't remember goes into this argument in quite some detail because he's particularly interested in the origin of of these horse riders and chariot drivers and particularly of the relation of horse riding and chariot driving to the indo-european languages and this goes into another chapter in this sort of big history story of you have archaeology you have study of bones of implements of climate change and you have language and this is one of the hardest things to to deal with in a world historical context because to study language it kind of means you have to know some language and generally we can make no assumptions about foreign languages in particular there's a question of when does language arise and why does it get divided up of geographically and by social group in the way that it comes to be divided up I know okay power of Babel that explains it all but it really is a problem and it's a problem that relates to not simply the surviving evidence of language and language difference but also to scientific theories about how language comes to be produced now here the most controversial argument has been that that syntax the ability to link sounds together in a meaningful fashion which is seen to be essential to define a language that syntax comes about because of a genetically established capacity of the human brain that no other animal has and this is the idea of a syntax gene or a language gene of know'm tramps key is the primary author of this theory who was almost unquestionably the most famous and brilliant American scholar of linguistics before he switched to two left-wing polemic writing where he is now America's perhaps foremost and most brilliant writer of left-wing palomeque's but nevertheless Chomsky's notion of the language gene encountered the question of the physical capacity to to create - to create language in other words the the great apes who are our closest relatives do not have a physical capacity - to create linguistic sounds or modulate them in their throat of their lips and so forth to create speech so at some point you have a physical capacity that comes into being and according to Chomsky at some point you have a a genetic capacity to make use of the physical capacity now one could argue that the physical capacity to make the sounds must have come first because it would be sort of silly to have a syntax gene say you know I really want to recite the Iliad out [Music] oh if you couldn't make the sounds so that's why had a conversation with one of our anthropologists who's made his reputation on studies of the brain and the physiology of the of the skull and and we talked about this and he said well chimpanzees can have the physical capacity to hum have the physical capacity to hum but they don't and and that was sort of interesting you know [Music] bananas mm-hmm but but they don't choose to as if you say well there was a physical capacity but the the will wasn't there then you get to the debate over Neanderthals the Oh humans from before 40,000 BC could they speak and you get disagreements on that one of the interesting findings of archaeology in Neolithic a Neanderthal sites has been a small number of flutes first there was one and two now there have been several these are bones that are perforated with the perforations spaced in such a way that you could play it as a flute initially

Channel: Columbia University

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Keywords: columbia university, richard bulliet, history

Id: zRqYx25iPeg

Length: 70min 11sec (4211 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2010