Natural Habitat of Mankind; and, does the White Race Exist?

Angocachi Wednesday 30 Jan 2013

Bronze Age Pervert

A man in Siberia,

Fatale Wednesday 30 Jan 2013

I don't exactly enjoy extreme cold, I just despise hot, humid weather. Maybe I'm particularly sensitive to heat because I can't even stand being near a hot stove/oven for more than a few seconds. If the temperature is above 25c I generally prefer to remain indoors, since my skin often becomes itchy and red even without direct sun exposure. Hot weather also totally zaps my energy. It makes me moody, lethargic and indisposed to any sort of physical activity. The ideal climate for my comfort level would be somewhere between 12 and 17c, dry and partly cloudy.

Don Johnson Thursday 31 Jan 2013

Good point. There's a good book about this called Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 by Alfred Crosby. Crosby points out that the areas where European colonialism was most successful were generally "Neo-Europes", areas that are similar to Europe in environment and climate such as North America, southern South America, Australasia, South Africa, etc. The European grains, plants, and animals that the colonists brought over thrived as well in the Neo-Europes and replaced much of the native flora and fauna. Outside of these Neo-Europes, Europeans had difficulty establishing and maintaining colonies. Even today it is difficult for Europeans to live in certain areas such as the interior of Africa or the Amazon for extended periods.

Crosby writes about how the Crusaders failed in the eastern Med due to its environment:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Phtqa_3tNykC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA58#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Over the next two centuries, hundreds of thousands of Western Europeans marched and sailed to the eastern Mediterranean - to a region with peoples, cultures, biota, and diseases quite different from those to which most of them were accustomed..."

"The Crusades...were also the first massive attempts to permanently extend European power outside the boundaries of that continent, and they produced four new states in the biblical lands...Today, the only evidences left of these states are a few massive ruins, usually the stumps of castles. Western Europe's first imperialistic attempts in Asia failed, and failed because of factors similar to those that rendered later European extensions in Asia ephemeral."

"In September and October of 1098, thousands of members of the First Crusade died in some sort of pestilence. It seems to have been infectious: An army of 1,500 Germans, freshly arrived, suffered rapid annihilation, which suggests infection rather than malnutrition, although the latter certainly could have contributed to the rapid rate at which they died....The chief killer during the Seventh Crusade, on the other hand, probably was malnutrition. The symptoms - sore mouth, rotting gums, stinking breath, skin "tanned as black as the ground, or like an old boot that has lain behind a coffer" - suggest a diagnosis of scurvy. But such diagnostic hindsight is largely guesswork. The Crusaders' descriptions of their sicknesses are ambiguous, and no doubt many pathogens were operating at once. The Franks, when they traveled to the East, were subject to a new climate, exposure to all sorts of severe weather, a new diet, malnutrition and occasionally starvation, exhaustion, general disorientation - stress in a host of forms - in addition to new pathogens."

"In contrast to the Franks, the Saracens fought on their own ground. Richard of Devizes noted enviously that "the weather was natural to them; the place was their native country; the labour, health; their frugality, medicine."

When the Crusaders arrived in the Levant, they had to undergo what British settlers in the North American colonies later would call "seasoning"; they had to ingest and build resistance to the local bacterial flora. They had to survive the infections, work out modi vivendi with the Eastern microlife and parasites. Then they could fight the Saracens. This period of seasoning stole time, strength, and efficiency and ended in death for tens of thousands.

It is likely that the disease that affected the Crusaders the most was malaria, endemic in the Levant's low, wet regions and along the coast, exactly where the bulk of the population of the Crusader states tended to concentrate. Crusaders from the Mediterranean and even from northern Europe may have brought with them a degree of resistance to malaria, because the disease was widely distributed in medieval Europe - indeed, it was still present as far north as the English fen country in the nineteenth century - but nowhere north of Italy, certainly, was it as virulent as continually and in so many varieties as in the eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately for the Crusaders, a person immune to one kind of malaria is not immune to all, and immunity malaria is not long-lasting."

"Longevity was not characteristic of Crusaders. Frankish women apparently did better than Frankish men in the East, but they often failed to produce healthy children, or any children at all. It is pertinent to mention that malaria is a great threat to pregnant women, often causing abortions, and it is very dangerous for children. The inability of the women to produce guarantees of the future made all efforts in the present irrelevant. The Crusader states died like bowls of cut flowers."

"Frankish imperialism had its decades of triumph, and the Crusader presence in the Holy Land lasted as long as or longer than European overlords held sway in Algeria and India in our era. But the Crusader states ultimately failed. Not even Latin Christian fanaticism could cancel out the numerical advantage of the indigenous peoples. Europeans might be able to temporarily conquer, but never permanently depose, the more numerous native populations, especially with the disease environment working against the invaders.

Bronze Age Pervert Thursday 31 Jan 2013

Don Johnson said: ↑

Good point. There's a good book about this called Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 by Alfred Crosby. Crosby points out that the areas where European colonialism was most successful were generally "Neo-Europes", areas that are similar to Europe in environment and climate such as North America, southern South America, Australasia, South Africa, etc. The European grains, plants, and animals that the colonists brought over thrived as well in the Neo-Europes and replaced much of the native flora and fauna. Outside of these Neo-Europes, Europeans had difficulty establishing and maintaining colonies. Even today it is difficult for Europeans to live in certain areas such as the interior of Africa or the Amazon for extended periods.

Crosby writes about how the Crusaders failed in the eastern Med due to its environment:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Phtqa_3tNykC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA58#v=onepage&q&f=false

The example given works against the claim you make. Is there proof that Venetian colonies in the Levant and so on were more successful that Frankish ones because of the greater tolerance of the Venetian "race" to the heat and diseases than of the Frankish "race"---both, as we know, different races from each other, and entirely different also from the Levantines; it's not like you'd ever confuse a southern Frenchman for a Venetian, or for a Lebanese Christian, they're totally different animals separated by tens of thousands of years of evolution.

Political and cultural practices probably had a lot more to do with the Crusader's long-term failure; one of the Arab stereotypes about Franks (Europeans) is that they're unclean and never bathe. This is fatal in a hot environment for sure, but it's got nothing to do with cold or heat adaptation. Furthermore, besides the Venetians, there had already been long-term European expansion outside the European continent--the Greeks and Romans did it, and established successful colonies in North Africa, the Middle East, and as far as Pakistan and India. That's why the Crusades were a reconquest.

The basic point though is that it makes no sense to claim that Crusaders (many of whom were also from southern France) were a different race from Genoese or Venetians, or that these were all that different from Levantines, and that this biological difference is what accounts for their long-term failure; somehow the Romans and later the Central Asian Turks managed to maintain centuries-long empires in the area. Turks didn't have much of a problem ruling Arabs.

It also makes no sense to take the Anglo definition of colonization, which is replacing the local population with your own, as the standard for successful colonization, so as to claim that only temperate-zone areas of the world were hospitable to European colonization. Spanish and Portuguese colonization in tropical areas everywhere from the Phillipines to Africa to central America and tropical South America was very successful. Maybe not by Anglo standards, but that was not their aim. As for why Anglos were able to populate the temperate areas, here's another theory: those areas are inhospitable to human population growth as such. They were mostly empty. This includes South Africa, Australia, etc.; that's why they could transplant England's baby boom (facilitated by technology, not by biological cold-adaptation) surplus population to these areas, and not to tropical hot ones that are densely populated.

The example given rather shows that even when you have races that are more or less the same, whether one or another succeeds in a certain environment has a lot more to do with political and cultural factors than biological adaptation to climate; unless you want to claim, again, that Lebanese, Venetians, Genoese are a lot more hot-weather adapted biologically than a crusader from Toulouse.

Bronze Age Pervert Friday 1 Feb 2013

Bob Dylan Roof Friday 1 Feb 2013

Tarzaryan

Stars Down To Earth Sunday 10 Feb 2013

What else should be the standard for successful colonisation?

Anglo colonialism - replacing the natives with one's own people and extending the nation overseas - gave us Australia and the US. Iberian colonialism gave us Mexico and the Philippines.

Bob Dylan Roof Sunday 10 Feb 2013

Bronze Age Pervert

Nietzsche said:

Whether we call it "civilization," or "humanising," or "progress," which now distinguishes the European, whether we call it simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula the DEMOCRATIC movement in Europe--behind all the moral and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense PHYSIOLOGICAL PROCESS goes on, which is ever extending the process of the assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment from the conditions under which, climatically and hereditarily, united races originate, their increasing independence of every definite milieu, that for centuries would fain inscribe itself with equal demands on soul and body,--that is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially SUPER-NATIONAL and nomadic species of man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction.

I wonder which climates he's referring to? Nietzsche refers to Aryans and pre-Aryans in this section of Beyond G&E, and the dominant theories of PIE origins associated them with the Corded Ware or other Norther European populations. He also speaks of the pre-Aryan populations in Germany.

On adaptation in the same section:

Edit:

I hold that many precautions should be taken against German music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it—as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which o'erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself—well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his health anew. Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey... I could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be that it knew nothing more of good and evil; only that here and there perhaps some sailor's home-sickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses might sweep lightly over it; an art which, from the far distance, would see the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible MORAL world fleeing towards it, and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive such belated fugitives

Don Johnson Monday 11 Feb 2013

"Frank" was sort of a catch-all term during the Crusades to refer mainly to the French, English, and Germans, and Western Europeans more generally.

The Venetian colonies in the Levant were more like trading posts for engaging in commerce than beachheads for settlement and expansion. The Greeks and Romans did not leave significant long term demographic legacies in the Maghreb, Middle East, or the subcontinent. And I believe the Turks are mainly descended from Anatolian natives.

This isn't about taking the "Anglo definition of colonization...as the standard for successful colonization". If we're going talk about adaptation to environments, then it's reasonable to consider the demographic results of colonization, rather than, say, the cultural results of colonization.

Don Johnson Monday 11 Feb 2013

Apparently Siberians have certain genetic adaptations for the cold:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/how-to-survive-a-siberian-winter.html

Previous research on cold adaptation included two Siberian populations and implicated a couple of related genes. For example, genes called UCP1 and UCP3 tend to be found in more active forms in populations that live in colder climes, according to work published in 2010 by University of Chicago geneticist Anna Di Rienzo and her colleagues. These genes help the body's fat stores directly produce heat rather than producing chemical energy for muscle movements or brain functions, a process called "nonshivering thermogenesis."

The new study sampled Siberians much more intensely, including 10 groups that represent nearly all of the region's native populations. Graduate student Alexia Cardona, a member of Toomas Kivisild's genetics group at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues analyzed 200 DNA samples collected by researchers at the Institute of Biological Problems of the North in Magadan, Russia, seeking genes that help humans adapt to the cold. Cardona used several techniques that detect signs of natural selection in the human genome—that is, genes that have been favored by evolution because they helped humans to survive and reproduce. She found three genes. One was UCP1, confirming previous studies. Variants of two new genes, called ENPP7 and PRKG1, also appeared to have undergone positive selection.

These findings make sense, Cardona told attendees at the meeting, Unravelling Human Origins. PRKG1, for example, is involved in the contraction of smooth muscle, key to shivering and the constriction of blood vessels to avoid heat loss. And ENPP7 is implicated in the metabolism of fats, especially those in meat and dairy products—a staple of the fat-laden diets of Arctic peoples.

The degree to which cold-friendly versions of these three genes were favored by evolution differed in the various Siberian groups. Thus selection for UCP1 was strongest in southern Siberian groups, while selection for PRKG1 was greatest in northeastern and central Siberia. ENPP7, on the other hand, showed strong selection throughout Siberia.

Taken together, Cardona's findings include the many elements researchers seek when trying to prove natural selection: an identified selection pressure, variation in different populations, specific DNA changes, and a sense of what those changes actually do. Cardona concluded that the study shows how, over the more than 25,000 years that modern humans been lived in Siberia, various peoples have adapted to the region's cold weather and meaty food sources through selection on multiple genes that control several biological mechanisms.

Natural Habitat of Mankind; and, does the White Race Exist?

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