Understanding Human History
by Michael H. Hart
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael H. HartEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-15
ISBN: 1593680260
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Washington Summit Publishers
Book Reviews of Understanding Human History
Book Review: A real Diamond
Summary: 5 Stars
A Real Diamond: Michael Hart's Understanding Human History
By Steve Sailer
The ambitious History of Everything book has been an important genre at least since Sir Walter Raleigh's The Historie of the World.
The most popular example of recent years: Jared Diamond's 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempted to explain the always-interesting question of who conquered whom over the last 13,000 years without mentioning differences in average intelligence among human groups--a factor that he ruled out, a priori, as too "racist" and "loathsome" even to think about.
Now, there's another entry in this genre: Michael H. Hart's Understanding Human History: An analysis including the effects of geography and differential evolution.
Hart's book serves as a comprehensive refutation of Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's an impressive and insightful attempt to provide a more careful and powerful answer to Diamond's question about why some peoples came to rule other peoples.
Unlike Diamond, Hart is also interested in a second, less bloodthirsty question: who gave what to the entire human race in terms of science, technology, and the arts.
This is a fascinating topic--but one that the Diamonds of the world shy away from, since measuring contributions rather than conquests don't present an opportunity for the competitive moralism, the public white-guilt breast-beating afforded by the European expansion of 1400-1900.
Hart sums up:
"The central hypothesis of this book is that genetic differences between human groups (in particular, differences in average native intelligence) have been an important factor in human history."
Hart is a polymath: a rocket scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy who worked at NASA and was a physics professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Along the way, he picked up a law degree.
Every decade or two, Hart publishes a book for a general audience. His best-known: 1978's The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.
Now, in Understanding Human History, Hart changes his focus from individuals to racial groups. He begins with a quick (130 pages) but close to state-of-the-art overview of the human sciences relevant to history--physical anthropology, linguistics, population genetics and psychometrics. This section alone would be worth the price of the book. Hart has mastered the scientific literature through at least 2005.
After reviewing the human sciences, Hart moves on to perhaps the most concise history of the world from the Stone Age to the late 20th Century imaginable.
Hart's judgment, while laconic, is generally quite sound.
In Guns, Germs, & Steel, Diamond purported to explain why Europeans were able to conquer the New World so easily by emphasizing differences between the New and Old Worlds. Thus, Diamond pointed out that Europeans benefited from more exposure (and thus more immunity) to disease; from metal-working technology; from having more species of domesticable animals; and from the broad East-West orientation of Eurasia, allowing Old World crops like Turkey's wheat to spread faster than New World crops like Mexico's corn, which had only been finally adapted to the much shorter growing season of Massachusetts shortly before the Pilgrims arrived.
Unfortunately, Diamond's reasoning, while clever, was ad hoc. It was clearly whipped up to explain away a politically incorrect reality. A real contribution to our comprehension of history could only come from a set of insights that would apply more globally than Diamond's. And that's exactly what Hart attempts.
Refuting Diamond, Hart points out that sub-Saharan Africans, being part of the Old World, were more privileged than New World Indians in terms of the factors that Diamond emphasizes.
In contrast to Mesoamerican Indians, Sub-Saharan Africans had more disease-resistance than Europeans (for example, they had genetic adaptations for surviving malaria). Plus they could make iron; possessed domestic cattle, sheep, and goats; had been exposed to literacy on their northern edge in places like Timbuktu; and possessed a continent that is 4,500 miles wide from Senegal to Somalia--not that much narrower than Eurasia's 6,200 miles.
And yet, Africans didn't build anything close to comparable to the hidden city of Machu Picchu (Incan) or the pyramids of Chichen Itza (Mayan) and Teotihuacán (Central Mexican).
Hart writes: "This book does not contain any suggestions as to what policies should be adopted--with the sole exception that we should attempt to ascertain the facts before deciding on questions of policy."
One important fact that Hart has ascertained:
"Throughout history, most of the instances of people from one region attacking and conquering substantial portions of another region have involved 'northerners' invading more southerly lands."
(The biggest exception: the Arabs of the 7th Century A.D. And the Romans conquered in all directions.)
This overall pattern of north conquering south has long been apparent from the historical record--even though northern lands are generally less populous, due to shorter growing seasons.
Likewise, the man who left the largest footprint yet found on the Y-chromosomes of humanity was Genghis Khan from cold Mongolia. He left roughly 800,000 times more descendants in the direct male line than the average man alive at the time.
Hart offers a simple, deliberately reductionist model for explaining this (and much else): Foresight is needed to survive cold winters. So harsher, more northerly climates select for higher average intelligence. And intelligence is useful in war.
Indeed, there is a positive correlation between latitude and the average intelligence of modern countries, as summarized in Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. (Here's my table listing their data.) In 2006, Lynn found a substantial r = 0.67 correlation between national average IQ and the absolute value of latitude. Similarly, the correlation between IQ and average temperature is r = -0.63.
Understanding Human History brings new clarity to the vast sweep of human history.
I predict, therefore, that it will make only a tiny fraction as much money as Guns, Germs, and Steel.
But in the long run, it will likely matter more.
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