Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

This was categorically refuted by bone analysis showing that Vikings did eat seaborne food[0]. The current hypothesis is that the fish bones were used to feed animals or burnt.

The more important point that the thesis was absurd in the first place. The Vikings were seafarers, and we have no record of any such taboos. You can't invent a food taboo completely against their way of life and with absolutely no written evidence out of thin air. At the very least, there was an extremely high level of proof needed, and Diamond doesn't even try to get near.

Moreover, We have a 5000 years history of human food taboos, and as a rule when people face starvation or just illness, the taboos get shunted aside. Even the fanatically devoted Ghandi compromised and drunk milk. The one exception I can think of in all of human history is Nongqawuse, and even that was: not a food taboo but based on existing faith, encouraged by a foreign power and disobeyed by a non-trivial faction. You didn't get complete extinction even there.

[0] https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn...

As for Easter Islands, there are serious arguments that there wasn't any environmental problem and the population survived well enough (e.g. [1]). More importantly, the Europe slave raids are documented to have carried off a third-to-half of the population, the more educated part. In other contexts of similar casualty levels, downplaying that would be called way worse.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/w...

This quote[0] sums up things well for me:

> Look through any r/history thread mentioning Diamond and you will see dozens of people who find our critiques pedantic, and that, in a general sense, Diamond’s thesis makes sense. This is a very difficult attitude to address, because it’s rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how social sciences work. The attitude evaluates the ideas of popular authors from a utilitarian, practical approach: if the thesis is useful and helps makes sense of the world, it has value. We researchers take an inductive approach: if your methodology and facts are wrong, your thesis can't be right, no matter how much it "makes sense."

> For this reason, I’m kind of sick of talking about Diamond’s theoretical bents and ideologies. The standards by which scholars and the public evaluate them are so different that we have to address an entire epistemological orientation.

The "Diamond is a racist" argument is not one that historians care about. What they take issue with is:

* not questioning primary source bias (e.g. he takes Pizarro, Cortez, etc. at face value),

* exaggerating the role that disease alone played, as opposed to how disease amplified vicious cycles[2][3]

* made-up facts[0]:

> In a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world where Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/comme...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/

[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/

(Disclaimer: I haven't read GGS, nor am I familiar with the underlying theses. I just find myself fascinated by the controversy around the book.)

The relevant passage:

> While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters.

It has nothing to do with pack animals. Pack animals are not and never were a prerequisite for putting wheels to practical use. Across all of humanity, perhaps as few as two individual people ever had the idea to invent the wheel; at least once in China and at least once again in Mexico; all other uses of the wheel plausibly descent from these two instances of invention. So obviously the wheel wasn't an obvious invention, and neither were practical applications for the wheel obvious, except seemingly so in retrospect. Chariots appeared about 4000 years ago, but wheel barrows only appeared about 2000 years ago. You can't explain that gap with environmental circumstances. The gap is explained when you realize these aren't obvious inventions. Searching for environmental reasons for the invention or non-invention of such things is folly, because the greatest hurdle to clear is simply having the incredible luck of somebody on your continent having such an idea in the first place.