Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In many ways Africa subsidised America and Europe's development.
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.
Long after this wonderful event in the Earth's history, when the human species was spread over a good deal of Asia, Europe, and Africa, migration to the American continents began in attempts to find new feeding grounds and unoccupied areas for hunting and fishing.
I don't think human beings have changed in 2,000 years.
I think that Africa has made quite rapid progress and a lot of the conflicts that we saw on the continent have abated.
The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.
The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.
Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era.
The Malthusian Theory - that mankind, for biological and sociological reasons, is so fertile, so fecund, that if you started out with the new continent and plenty of land for everybody, in several generations we would multiply our numbers.