Collapse: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond

[Temujin]

Was wondering if any one caught this on NatGeo Saturday night (it will of course will be replayed over the next week).

I haven't read the book yet, but it was pretty interesting. Nothing that hasn't really been discussed multiple times on the board, but what I found refreshing was the was they ripped apart the delusion that renewable energy will replace fossil fuels, and put forward the idea that we will need to rely upon nuclear energy to survive.

[Broomstick]

Poo. I'd like to see that, but I don't get NatGeo. Oh, well, eventually it will reach a station I can see.

I've read the book. It's interesting and thought-provoking.

[Temujin]

I only got around to reading Guns, Germs an Steel just under a year ago (despite owning the book for a few years); though I had previously seen the PBS special and read the equivalent of cliff notes online.

And NatGeo is pretty awesome. Much more like PBS and far better than the Discovery Network.

[Kanastrous]

Discovery and History have descended to the realm of sub-crapulence. Hauntings and ghosties and 'histories' of Heaven and Hell and pseudo-documentaries wherein people who write crap Christian millenialist novels are interviewed about 'the end times' as though it were possible to be an 'expert' on an imaginary topic...

...yes, NatGeo is overall head-and-shoulders, chest-abdomen-and-groin above the shit that passes for programming on History and Discovery.

Except for that show about catching crabs in the northern Pacific. That one is kind of fun. Even though I don't care for crab.

[Thanas]

Except for that show about catching crabs in the northern Pacific. That one is kind of fun. Even though I don't care for crab.

I love that show. I watch it together with my brother, who is a merchant mariner. Great fun.

[Kanastrous]

My uncle was a merchant mariner (and a US Navy officer). Saw him last month; he always has great stories. And I was able to find pictures of some of his ships on-line, which was fun.

[Zinegata]

I like Deadliest Catch too.

Back to the original topic though... I thought Collapse wasn't as well regarded as Guns, Germs, and Steel? I dunno why though - I haven't read Collpase yet save for the intro.

[Thanas]

I am not a huge fan of Diamond in general, because he tends to oversimplify things.

[Bakustra]

I like Deadliest Catch too.

Back to the original topic though... I thought Collapse wasn't as well regarded as Guns, Germs, and Steel? I dunno why though - I haven't read Collpase yet save for the intro.

Among the general public or among historians/other experts? Because Thanas gives the general reason why Diamond would be disliked in the second case. Collapse uses the Greenland colonies as an example of ecological collapse triggering societal collapse, but the evidence that he uses has been disputed. The same has been advanced for Easter Island, and probably for several of his other examples.

In the case of the general public, Collapse deals with environmental collapse, and uses several modern-day examples in the first few chapters. So it's more upsetting and more immediate than Guns, Germs and Steel was.

Out of curiosity, Thanas, is there anything in particular in G,G&S that you objected to, or was it mainly the methodology?

[Zinegata]

I was referring more to the experts.

[Thanas]

Out of curiosity, Thanas, is there anything in particular in G,G&S that you objected to, or was it mainly the methodology?

This article does a good job of explaining what I feel is wrong.

Basically, it rubs me the wrong way that many of the conclusions should be self-evidentiary already (for example, large populations tend to expand) and that the book at its core has a rather simplistic one-size-fits-all approach.

For example, Egypt was stable and had no strong competitor for ages. Same for the Roman Empire. Yet neither example really fits into Diamonds model, which states that natural barriers (which the Romans did not adhere to anyway for their borders were political and ideological) preventing strong superpowers to form and thus force competition, while stable superpowers who exist are stagnant. Thus, according to Diamond, we should expect to see a stagnant and non-technological advance by both Egypt, Persia and Rome, but the opposite is the case, especially where Rome is concerned.

In fact, the dark ages directly contradict his model - here we have intense competition but it is actually harmful to the technological advance due to destroying peaceful innovation and centers of learning. Natural barriers are also a pretty bad explanation for those ages, because by then natural barriers did not exist that prevented any state to expand. It made it harder (as in the case of the alps), but it did not prevent powers back then to expand (see: Carolus magnus expanding into Lombardia - alpes breached - and into Germany - Rhine and the woods breached) etc.

Nevermind that when we come to the Holy Roman Empire, we have states which are split into several pieces due to the political landscape, but these same states are also the source of astonishing innovation and strength (Brandenburg - Prussia, for example).

Also - why is political fragmentation a competitive advantage? In history, an organized state has always won over disunited enemies. See for example France vs the HRE, Rome vs Gaul, Britain vs the Indian states.

[Bakustra]

Out of curiosity, Thanas, is there anything in particular in G,G&S that you objected to, or was it mainly the methodology?

This article does a good job of explaining what I feel is wrong.

Basically, it rubs me the wrong way that many of the conclusions should be self-evidentiary already (for example, large populations tend to expand) and that the book at its core has a rather simplistic one-size-fits-all approach.

For example, Egypt was stable and had no strong competitor for ages. Same for the Roman Empire. Yet neither example really fits into Diamonds model, which states that natural barriers (which the Romans did not adhere to anyway for their borders were political and ideological) preventing strong superpowers to form and thus force competition, while stable superpowers who exist are stagnant. Thus, according to Diamond, we should expect to see a stagnant and non-technological advance by both Egypt, Persia and Rome, but the opposite is the case, especially where Rome is concerned.

In fact, the dark ages directly contradict his model - here we have intense competition but it is actually harmful to the technological advance due to destroying peaceful innovation and centers of learning. Natural barriers are also a pretty bad explanation for those ages, because by then natural barriers did not exist that prevented any state to expand. It made it harder (as in the case of the alps), but it did not prevent powers back then to expand (see: Carolus magnus expanding into Lombardia - alpes breached - and into Germany - Rhine and the woods breached) etc.

Nevermind that when we come to the Holy Roman Empire, we have states which are split into several pieces due to the political landscape, but these same states are also the source of astonishing innovation and strength (Brandenburg - Prussia, for example).

Also - why is political fragmentation a competitive advantage? In history, an organized state has always won over disunited enemies. See for example France vs the HRE, Rome vs Gaul, Britain vs the Indian states.

His argument essentially falls apart at anything lower than the global or perhaps the continental level. While it works well for the general, broad trends, using it to explain why one nation won out over another is faulty, for the reasons you mention, and for many others. It honestly seems that for Ch. 20 he tried valiantly to come up with an explanation on geographical factors and ended up resorting to the coastlines as his explanation.

What's odd is that Collapse relies heavily on ideological factors, yet Guns, Germs, and Steel disavows them almost completely.

[Samuel]

Weren't the ideological explanations in Collapse wrong? I remember Thanas pointing out that the population of Viking Greenland did eat fish and so you couldn't claim that a refusal to eat fish was part of the reason for their downfall.

I can't think of an example he gave of ideological factors causing a collapse that was valid. Am I miss remembering or did the arguement not really hold up?

[Bakustra]

Weren't the ideological explanations in Collapse wrong? I remember Thanas pointing out that the population of Viking Greenland did eat fish and so you couldn't claim that a refusal to eat fish was part of the reason for their downfall.

I can't think of an example he gave of ideological factors causing a collapse that was valid. Am I miss remembering or did the arguement not really hold up?

I'm contrasting the two, not necessarily commenting on the accuracy. I don't know if anybody has gone after the Polynesian islands he studied (apart from Easter Island), so those might hold up. The same might work for the Anasazi, perhaps.

To be perfectly fair to Diamond, was the presence of fish in the Viking diet known when he wrote Collapse?

The argument holds up, though, because it's a no-brainer argument (ecological collapse can predicate further collapses) but the examples he uses have been heavily challenged (at least, the negative ones!).

[Samuel]

The Polynesian islands was based on political structure, not ideology. Islands with a single leadership because they were large or small managed to husband their resources effectively while those who were medium scale and split into multiple groups screwed up. I don't know if it has been supported or not, but it sounds like the tradgedy of the commons. Except the commons is shared between you and people you are trying to kill so solutions tend to be harder.

[Broomstick]

Weren't the ideological explanations in Collapse wrong? I remember Thanas pointing out that the population of Viking Greenland did eat fish and so you couldn't claim that a refusal to eat fish was part of the reason for their downfall.

I can't think of an example he gave of ideological factors causing a collapse that was valid. Am I miss remembering or did the arguement not really hold up?

I'm contrasting the two, not necessarily commenting on the accuracy. I don't know if anybody has gone after the Polynesian islands he studied (apart from Easter Island), so those might hold up. The same might work for the Anasazi, perhaps.

To be perfectly fair to Diamond, was the presence of fish in the Viking diet known when he wrote Collapse?

The argument holds up, though, because it's a no-brainer argument (ecological collapse can predicate further collapses) but the examples he uses have been heavily challenged (at least, the negative ones!).

If I recall the book correctly (it's been a few years since I read it, and I can't be bothered to look for it at the moment) Diamond does mention the Greenlanders eating fish - but ONLY as a last resort. And they never developed the fishing technologies of the their neighbors the Inuit. So, they kept trying to raise land quadrupeds, pouring time, energy, and resources into animals that weren't that well adapted to the landscape, instead of investing in fishing skills. Thus, when things got really bad they simply didn't have the boats and tools to really exploit the sea efficiently for food and wound up starving to death.

Meanwhile, the Inuit where hunting things both small and large (up to whales) in their kayaks. So they didn't (usually) starve, at least not en masse (localized starvation has always been a problem for arctic peoples)

[Thanas]

If I recall the book correctly (it's been a few years since I read it, and I can't be bothered to look for it at the moment) Diamond does mention the Greenlanders eating fish - but ONLY as a last resort. And they never developed the fishing technologies of the their neighbors the Inuit. So, they kept trying to raise land quadrupeds, pouring time, energy, and resources into animals that weren't that well adapted to the landscape, instead of investing in fishing skills. Thus, when things got really bad they simply didn't have the boats and tools to really exploit the sea efficiently for food and wound up starving to death.

Meanwhile, the Inuit where hunting things both small and large (up to whales) in their kayaks. So they didn't (usually) starve, at least not en masse (localized starvation has always been a problem for arctic peoples)

Yes, that is the same explanation that makes no sense. For once, we already have plenty of fish bones in viking settlements. Also, the vikings were fishing extensively in Norway, Denmark etc, so Diamond's argument turns the vikings into idiots.

Even further, where is the proof that the inuit fishing techniques are more efficient than the Viking ones practiced in Scandinavia?

Also, he disregards inuit attacks, when so far they are the best explanation - a population that had trouble sustaining itself, where the majority of people had already left would be the perfect target for Inuit attacks. And we do have sources mentioning Inuit raids before...

[PainRack]

Yes, that is the same explanation that makes no sense. For once, we already have plenty of fish bones in viking settlements. Also, the vikings were fishing extensively in Norway, Denmark etc, so Diamond's argument turns the vikings into idiots.

Even further, where is the proof that the inuit fishing techniques are more efficient than the Viking ones practiced in Scandinavia?

Also, he disregards inuit attacks, when so far they are the best explanation - a population that had trouble sustaining itself, where the majority of people had already left would be the perfect target for Inuit attacks. And we do have sources mentioning Inuit raids before...

Errr..... did he promote some other explaination in some other source?

cause for his book, what he stated was that they didn't discover fish bones in the Greenland settlement, thus, its likely that they didn't eat fish there and then.

For the second, he never argued that the unuit fishing techniques were more efficient. What he argued was that the Vikings ran out of the tools/manpower to mount such seal hunting expeditions...... especially if and as hostile Inuit blockaded the vulnerable routes. There was a blurb about the Inuit kayaks and their ability to hunt whales. But it formed the basis for comparing the Inuit resource exploitation vs the Vikings.

Ditto to inuit attacks. He never did abandon the inuit attack. What he stated was that the Greenland colony was successful because they went there when the weather was mild and thus enjoyed "great" food yields, it later failed because the weather changed and their resource yields plummeted.

[Bakustra]

Yes, that is the same explanation that makes no sense. For once, we already have plenty of fish bones in viking settlements. Also, the vikings were fishing extensively in Norway, Denmark etc, so Diamond's argument turns the vikings into idiots.

Even further, where is the proof that the inuit fishing techniques are more efficient than the Viking ones practiced in Scandinavia?

Also, he disregards inuit attacks, when so far they are the best explanation - a population that had trouble sustaining itself, where the majority of people had already left would be the perfect target for Inuit attacks. And we do have sources mentioning Inuit raids before...

Errr..... did he promote some other explaination in some other source?

cause for his book, what he stated was that they didn't discover fish bones in the Greenland settlement, thus, its likely that they didn't eat fish there and then.

For the second, he never argued that the unuit fishing techniques were more efficient. What he argued was that the Vikings ran out of the tools/manpower to mount such seal hunting expeditions...... especially if and as hostile Inuit blockaded the vulnerable routes. There was a blurb about the Inuit kayaks and their ability to hunt whales. But it formed the basis for comparing the Inuit resource exploitation vs the Vikings.

Ditto to inuit attacks. He never did abandon the inuit attack. What he stated was that the Greenland colony was successful because they went there when the weather was mild and thus enjoyed "great" food yields, it later failed because the weather changed and their resource yields plummeted.

But since then, fish remains have turned up in archaeological work on the Viking colonies. There is also the problem that he attributes the lack of fish/fishing to cultural reasons, which does not hold up particularly well given that fish were eaten in other Norse areas.

[Broomstick]

He never said the Norse in Greenland REFUSED to eat fish - just that fish were seen as inferior, something you ate when you didn't have sheep or cows. Diamond's position certainly does allow for fish remains to be found in Greenland colonies, particularly when times got hard.

It's in no way bizarre for a culture to value certain types of food over others. It's pretty common, in fact. That doesn't mean the lesser valued food is never eaten, just that the culture will only consume large amounts of it when the more valued food is scarce.

According to Diamond, because the Norse Greenlanders valued land animals over seafood they put their time and resources into developing those resources. When the land animals started to decline/die out they certainly DID eat fish - but fishing for sustenance isn't an idle hobby for a lazy afternoon, it's work and effort as much as any other form of hunting/gathering and requires knowledge, technology, and skills. These weren't absent among the Norse Greenlanders, they just weren't as well versed in it as the neighboring Inuit so the Norse were much less efficient at exploiting the sea. And while the Norse certainly did have seafaring technology and boats, boats for long-distance travel aren't necessarily the ideal boats for subsistence fishing.

The Inuit focused a lot of their resources on boat-building, fishing, and hunting. Yes, they were good at it. Probably didn't know squat about farming, but so what? Farming in Greenland isn't a very good way to survive. It's not that Greenlanders haven't heard of the concept of planting and gardens, it's just that climate isn't very conducive towards it. Meanwhile, the Norse - who had not only heard of fishing but actually did some - were plowing their efforts into trying to farm and herd. Possible in good years during a warm period, but not so much during cold years and bad years. When the climate shifted the Norse kept trying to farm and herd until they reached a point of no return and no longer had the resources/manpower/whatever to switch tactics.

And there WAS revulsion towards the Inuit and their lifestyle, we know this from records the Norse kept. It may have been sufficient to bias them against things associated with the Inuit, such as seafood, much more than their European or Icelandic cousins.

Which is not to say I agree with Diamond, but several of you ARE grossly distorting his argument by saying "we have fishbones in Viking settlements, that proves he's wrong". No, it doesn't. Diamond's speculation allows for the presence of fish and seal bones. In fact, his theory holds such as proof of decline and desperation.

Diamond also argues that the Inuit clothing was more appropriate to the climate than the Norse attire (which followed European traditions and fashions) and the Inuit built better homes for the climate and heated them more efficiently as well. It's not just a matter of food. Diamond maintains the Norse had to work harder to build shelters, and expend more effort to heat their homes and themselves, and thus experienced another disadvantage because they were resistant to modifying their habits to suit the climate and local resources.

Contrast this with the settlement of North America, where pioneers often adopted native attire and other practices. Certainly, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone weren't natives and would never be mistaken for such, but the buckskin outfits and coonskin caps didn't come from Europe, they used local resources. North American frontiermen not only were willing to learn from the Natives, quite a few of them married into local tribes. Diamond speculates that this is one reason why English and French invaders were better able to survive in North America than the Norse were in Greenland (the Norse seem to have reached North America, too, but only used those locations as seasonal fishing camps, and never established a permanent foothold).

Personally, I think firearms had a lot to do with the successful settlement of North and South America. The Greenland Norse didn't have guns. The British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the New World did have guns. If the Europeans of the 16th Century and onwards had still been relying on bows+arrows and swords I suspect the contest between invader and Native would have been a bit more equal. That was a problem the Greenland Norse had - their weaponry wasn't as far ahead of the Inuit as it would be for later Europeans. Armed confrontation with the neighbors was more risky for them, and numbers more important. When the Norse Greenland colonies got below a certain size they were really at the mercy of the neighbors. It certainly only added to their troubles.

[Bakustra]

The problem is that he takes the lack of fish as a premise. Then he suggests that this is due to cultural reasons. This is flimsy because the progenitor cultures had no taboos against fish and ate fish regularly. He then concludes that cultural reasons destroyed the Norse colonies. So his argument is flimsy enough that the presence of fish destroys it. As Thanas has pointed out, it's at least equally plausible to attribute the lack of fish to the collapse- as fish becomes less prevalent the later in the life of the colony you go. So as the population dropped, for reason x, then fish and seals, which require sufficient manpower to launch expeditions and maintain or build boats/sledges, became less and less prevalent because the colony could no longer support the industry. In other words, his argument can be turned on its head without dying, and we do have two problems that would have caused the population to drop regardless of the actions of the settlers- worsening climates and conflict with the Inuit. Both of those would have killed people and wrecked farms, and induced people to leave while they could. Both of those could have then precipitated a full collapse, in combination or in isolation, as the colony slipped below the level necessary to sustain life.

The secondary problem is that there is the assumption that the Norse never "went native" with regards to the Inuit. In this scenario, though, we can't tell whether some did or didn't. Those that did would have vanished from our ability to see, as they wouldn't have left permanent traces behind that were any different from the Inuit. In other words, the colony is doomed regardless of whether the inhabitants went native or died off or left.

Hostility to the Inuit might work to make fish taboo, except that we have other examples where European settlers encountered people for whom they had an immediate distaste: the settlement of North America. The Pilgrims hated the natives, and yet they still ate maize and turkey. If you can provide examples of settlers refusing foods because of their association with natives (for that matter, consider the readiness with which the Spanish ate chocolate), that would be one thing, but pure speculation is weak.

[Thanas]

He never said the Norse in Greenland REFUSED to eat fish - just that fish were seen as inferior, something you ate when you didn't have sheep or cows. Diamond's position certainly does allow for fish remains to be found in Greenland colonies, particularly when times got hard.

Again, this does not make sense. Not only for the reasons Bakustra pointed out already, but also because we know the Norse themselves always kept a steady diet of fish even when they had land animals. If he wants to argue the Norse did not like fish, then he should really, really provide an argument looking at the Nordic culture and then trying to find support that the Norse did not like to eat fish in sources or pictures of the period. Unless he can show why the Norse of Greenland are a culturally distinct group that did not like fish, I see no reason not to apply the preferences of the "normal" norse to Greenland.

Anyway, this argument that they abandoned fish in favor of land is not a good one. The original norse never did, despite having far better farm land than greenland. Even more, it posits the Norse would willingly abandon a method of food-gathering where they already had the resources for in favor of a method that required substantial investment before it paid off. I am not buying that either.



Back to the OP: Diamond has the misfortune that starting with Delbrück, the discipline of history has evolved very much in favor of detailed models. Historians as a whole distrust large-scale models, especially ones that try to explain humanity from the beginning to the end. He might have fared better had the tried to develop his model on one particular nation alone. For example, one can explain the rise of the USA far better with a single model than the rise of Europe, for the variations just become too much.

Also, historians are a bit elitist - they do not like outsiders trying to but in. With good reason in this case, for he really makes a lot of mistakes and is quite easy to accept the truth when the evidence is disputed.

[Broomstick]

Do keep in mind I"m taking the devil's advocate role here.

The problem is that he takes the lack of fish as a premise.

Have you read the book? Nowhere did Diamond say the Greenland colonies "lacked" fish. They certainly did have fish, they ate fish, they preserved fish, there is even evidence they fished the Grand Banks for cod (which were then preserved, in part as an emergency food store). Evidence of fish is present throughout the entire span of the Norse Greenland colonies. I don't know where you are getting this idea that Diamond thought the Norse colonies were a "fish free zone". The Norse of Greenland PREFERRED land animals - sheep, cattle, probably pigs, too, whatever. Land raised meat was higher status, higher valued, and eaten in preference to fish.

For example, if the local bigshot was coming over to dinner you wouldn't serve him fish, you'd serve him mutton or beef. If it was late winter and food was running low you would crack open that barrel of salt cod over there and eat that for breakfast and lunch and save the mutton for dinner (or whatever the main meal of the day was). In a bad year you'd eat saltcod three times a day every day but that didn't mean you liked it or wouldn't prefer something else to eat. If you were a wealthy colonist you'd seldom eat fish, if you were poor you'd probably eat it a lot. There would always be some fish (and seal, and other seafood) in the colonies. The presernce of of seafood does not test Diamond's position. The test of his position is how much seafood was consumed - if less fish was eaten in years of plenty and more in bad years then Diamond's position has merit. If the rate of seafood consumption is the same regardless of wealth or poverty then Diamond's assertion would be disproven.

Now, does anyone have some good data on seafood consumption in Norse Greenland year by year?

Then he suggests that this is due to cultural reasons. This is flimsy because the progenitor cultures had no taboos against fish and ate fish regularly.

Again, saying the Greenland colonies had a "taboo" against fish is a distortion of his position. There was no sort of ban on fish In fact, given that the colonies were Christian (with perhaps some Pagan holdouts in the early years) they were probably REQUIRED to eat fish at certain times such as Fridays.

Here's a comparison - American love of meat imposes some pretty nasty environmental costs on the landscape, and food that would otherwise feed people is fed to these animals. That doesn't mean the US has a ban on vegetables or a taboo against fruit, it does mean that culturally the US places a high value on meat and is willing to make sacrifices for it. Results include various sorts of pollution which lower the quality of life for those near factory farms, and increased food prices that hurt the poor.

Likewise, Norse Greenland also put a cultural premium on certain types of food. That cultural trait imposed certain costs on the colonies. Diamond believes that those costs were contributing factors in the demise of the colonies, NOT the whole of the reason they vanished.

He then concludes that cultural reasons destroyed the Norse colonies.

No, actually, it was climate change according to Diamond. That, and cultural resistance to change which encompassed more than just dietary preferences.

So his argument is flimsy enough that the presence of fish destroys it.

Only if you make Diamond's position into a caricature of itself.

As Thanas has pointed out, it's at least equally plausible to attribute the lack of fish to the collapse- as fish becomes less prevalent the later in the life of the colony you go.

Except that fish become MORE common as things become worse, Diamond even says so, and points out that this means things were getting bad enough that the colonists were subsisting on food that was second choice for them. In other words, NO ONE says that the Norse lacked fish not even Diamond says that.

Other indications of desperation are things like evidence the Norse were eating dogs - which was definitely not a common thing in any European culture and usually a sign of famine.

Other factors - because NO ONE is arguing that any ONE thing killed the colonies - were insistence on European style clothing which may not have been ideal for the climate, and their boat-building technology. The Greenland Norse built wooden boats that required trees - which, by the later years of the colonies, Greenland lacked so they had to import the raw materials for their boats. Meanwhile, the Inuit were building kayaks based largely on hides and requiring little or no trees (all arctic Inuit do make use of driftwood), in other words, they were getting their boat-building materials locally. Thus, it's not enough to say "they both had boats" - the technolgy used to build the boats was so widely different that a Norse boat and an Inuit boat were pretty different things and imposed different resource costs. Trouble is, no matter how good you are at building wooden longboats, once the wood is gone you're screwed - your tools, techniques, and experience won't carry over to kayaks.

Again - later North American colonists adopted the canoe and the kayak, the Greenland Norse did not.

we do have two problems that would have caused the population to drop regardless of the actions of the settlers- worsening climates and conflict with the Inuit. Both of those would have killed people and wrecked farms, and induced people to leave while they could.

And Diamond in no way excludes those factors. He addresses both. He just doesn't think they are the entire explanation. One of his arguments is that climate change alone would be insufficient to explain the Norse collapse because the Inuit survived - clearly, although the climate did worsen it never got so bad that human survival was impossible. Conflict is certainly another factor, but why did the Inuit win in the end? Particularly when evidence suggests that there were no Inuit when the Norse arrived, that the Inuit showed up only a couple centuries after the founding of those colonies. The Norse had a head start, they did have better metal working technology, a lot more metal tools, strong organization, and back up from Europe, or at least Iceland.

Well, if towards the end the Norse were malnourished and often cold the Inuit might have been more effective fighters just because they had enough to eat. That, and the Inuit may have hunted/raided Norse livestock. Let's face it, killing domestic sheep is probably a LOT easier than hunting seals, walrus, and other wild animals. Is Inuit hostility the only explanation? No - Diamond gives five reasons for the end of the Norse colonies and says ALL of them were factors.

Just for the record, here are Diamond's five reasons the Norse disappeared from Greenland:

1) cumulative environmental damage - there is evidence from both written records and archaeological evidence that at the beginning of the Norse colony there were extensive stands of birch trees and lots of greenery. No trees today, and evidence of erosion in colonial areas.

2) gradual climate change - lots of evidence for this one. A colder climate with a longer winter does make any sort of farming harder. The Norse were farmers/herders.

3) conflicts with hostile neighbors - again, both written and archaeological evidence exists for this, such as written accounts of Inuit raids that left some settlers dead and others captive of the Inuit.

4) the loss of contact and support from Europe - the Norse did rely on imports of things like worked metal and tools, boat building materials once the native trees were gone, and so froth. Loss of these would be a hardship on the colony.

5) cultural conservatism - we've been beating this one to death, but as I said, not even Diamond is holding this out as the only explanation. So let's get past the "Diamond says they didn't eat fish hur hur he's stupid" meme, OK?

The secondary problem is that there is the assumption that the Norse never "went native" with regards to the Inuit. In this scenario, though, we can't tell whether some did or didn't. Those that did would have vanished from our ability to see, as they wouldn't have left permanent traces behind that were any different from the Inuit.

Untrue.

First of all, there are written accounts of Norse settlers being carried off to captivity among the Inuit during conflicts. This is also confirmed by Inuit oral tradition, which does match up somewhat with Norse written accounts. Not all of those people returned, so presumably they lived out their lives among the Inuit and probably, at some point, raping and/or consensual fucking occurred.

Second, Norse religious leaders in Greenland were always ranting in near-hysterical tones about how nasty the Inuit were, they were evil pagans, unchristian, uncouth... while to some extent this was normal-for-the-time European hysteria in regards to other peoples this was at a level that suggests, to me at least, that the social leaders needed to exert some pressure to keep people from running off to join the natives. Not that the higher up types in the colony would be so inclined, but not everyone was wealthy and if you were some poor schmuck who couldn't afford to eat sheep and was living on seafood and turnips and hungry and cold a lot of time and you see these other people who seem warm and well fed... well, yeah, it's tempting to jump over the fence and go native. ALL colonies have had that issue.

Third, modern science has determined that yes, there IS in fact a certain amount of European ancestry in modern Greenland Inuit. I've seen numbers like "5%" or whatever. I'm not a geneticist so I can't speak for how something like that is determined, but I've seen it in multiple sources so there seems to be a consensus of sort.

I think it's important to keep in mind that the Norse colony lasted five hundred years - it wasn't some dinky effort that died off in a generation. The Norse were in Greenland a hundred years longer than the current wave of Europeans have been in North America! The colony wasn't a failure - but it did fail. Why did a colony endure centuries, only to disappear?

And yes - some probably did go elsewhere, and some probably did go native at the very end rather than starve to death or die of old age alone amidst crumbling ruins. Even if some starved to death they didn't all starve. There was probably a century of slow decline and shrinking Norse population before the end came, a time period during which scientific analysis of skeletons showed that the Norse, who up until that time got most of their food from the land, ate more and more from the sea. Maybe, at the end, they did try to adapt. If so, it wasn't enough, or it was too late.

The Pilgrims hated the natives, and yet they still ate maize and turkey.

Only because the alternative was starving to death. Even up until my parents' generation corn was "poor people food" - my in-laws ate maize because, first of all, half to three quarters of them were Eastern Band Cherokee, and second, they were poor as dirt, but my family NEVER ate cornmeal or hominy or grits. City folk avoided maize-based products, they bought more expensive stuff made of wheat when they could. Sure, on the frontier people ate maize - again, it was largely what they had, it was that or go hungry. Turkey was also considered inferior, they had it at the first Thanksgiving because they ran low on other food. If you couldn't eat deer or cattle well, chicken or pig would do but turkey, again, wasn't something people sought out. It was like opossum and squirrel - edible if you were desperate but if you ate by choice you were seen as sort of nutty. Turkeys were "rescued" from that ultimate low status by the custom of eating them at Thanksgiving (and to a lesser extent other holidays - their chief virtue being that one bird could feed a lot of people).

Likewise, lots of people in the American colonies wore buckskin. The wealthy didn't, but the frontiersmen and the poor folk did because that's what was available to make clothes. It like sod houses on the prairies - people made houses of sod because that's what they had to build with, not because they were in love with the idea. In fact, as rapidly as they could they built wood frame houses, never mind they were much more expensive, required importing lumber from forested areas, and were significantly harder to heat in winter and much hotter in summer.

Cultural preferences (NOT "taboos"!) certainly do affect how people live and the choices they make, in some cases (such as moving from sod to wood houses) those choices even work against their best interests, nonetheless they make them.

If you can provide examples of settlers refusing foods because of their association with natives (for that matter, consider the readiness with which the Spanish ate chocolate), that would be one thing, but pure speculation is weak.

1) I like to think I have demonstrated that NO ONE said the Greenland Norse didn't eat fish. They did. They preferred land-based meat, but they ate fish (and seals, and other marine life).

2) Chocolate was believed to be an aphrodisiac and a sort of Meso-American Viagra. That alone is enough to induce men to drink it. (And back then, you drank chocolate, the Aztecs only used it as a beverage, and that was the case when it was initially introduced to Europe).

3) It's not a matter of "refusing" food - all cultures value some foods more than others. I have already given the example that certain corn products in the US have long been considered low-class, poor peoples' food, or black/slave foods and thus were not featured at high-status occasions and large segments of the population avoided them. The Norse considered fish/seal/seafood to be lower status than cattle/sheep/goat/pig. I don't know why this is surprising to you, or why you continually feel a need to twist this into some sort of "taboo" when it was no such thing.

[Broomstick]

He never said the Norse in Greenland REFUSED to eat fish - just that fish were seen as inferior, something you ate when you didn't have sheep or cows. Diamond's position certainly does allow for fish remains to be found in Greenland colonies, particularly when times got hard.

Again, this does not make sense. Not only for the reasons Bakustra pointed out already, but also because we know the Norse themselves always kept a steady diet of fish even when they had land animals. If he wants to argue the Norse did not like fish, then he should really, really provide an argument looking at the Nordic culture and then trying to find support that the Norse did not like to eat fish in sources or pictures of the period. Unless he can show why the Norse of Greenland are a culturally distinct group that did not like fish, I see no reason not to apply the preferences of the "normal" norse to Greenland.

The idea that the Norse prefered land to sea based meat is based on two things:

1) trash heaps or middens - for the first several hundred years of the colony kitchen waste was composed largely of land-based food items, like cattle, sheep, goats, and even the occasional pig. Yes, a few fish and seal bones show up, but they are distinct MINORITY of trash. This would seem to indicate that the Norse liked their meat on the hoof, not on the fin.

Here's another thing - the higher the status of the farm/homestead, the less seafood in the midden. Chieftans' homes have almost none. Farms known to be poor or on marginal land had more. There is at least one farm from the "middle settlement" that had NO bones of domestic animals at all, just fish and seals. There was also a lack of European made items such as worked tools, which would seem to indicate poverty. It was also one of the first areas abandoned.

That's all consistent with seafood being lower status than land-based foods. It's not based on Diamond's opinion, it's based on research performed by other people. Of course, using other peoples' research is something people get pissy about in regards to Diamond. From what I gather, apparently he cherry picks, or fails to properly credit people or does something gauche that outsiders don't always pick up on.

2) analysis of skeletons - because maybe the Norse were hiding their fishbones over the next hill, right?

Apparently there is a means of analyzing human skeletons to determine if the person's diet over a lifetime is predominately land-based or sea-based. I'm assuming it's based on some sort of isotope ratio, but again I'm not an expert. Anyhow - and again, this is not Diamond's opinion but results of research performed on skeletons from Greenland - in the early part of the colony the skeletons all show that people ate predominantly from the land. Roughly 80/20 land/sea foods. While this might be explained for the first settlers as due to a life started in Europe, this carries on for generations throughout the colony. Again, the upper class Norse showed a diet with more land-based foods, and the lower class with more seafood. Everyone ate some fish, but everyone ate mostly land based foods.

Until the final couple generations.

At a certain point, which corresponds with the decline of the colony, seafood comes to predominate more and more. Finally, the last generation of Norse colonists have skeletons that indicate a diet of roughly 80% from the sea, 20$ from land. Now, this still doesn't mean "fish" - in fact, most of the midden remains are seal bones. Even at the end, it seems the Norse preferred something else over fish. They certainly ate fish, but it was never a mainstay of their diet.

So, it appears that while the Norse ate some food from the sea they sure seemed to eat a lot more of other animals. Even when they were eating a predominately sea-based diet most of the kitchen trash is from seals. I dunno - doesn't that look like maybe they didn't care much for fish as such? If they liked fish wouldn't there be more physical evidence of it in their colonies?

Anyway, this argument that they abandoned fish in favor of land is not a good one.

Again, they did not abandon fish so much as prefer to eat something other than fish.

Even more, it posits the Norse would willingly abandon a method of food-gathering where they already had the resources for in favor of a method that required substantial investment before it paid off. I am not buying that either.

Then explain why there is so little physical evidence of fish in their trash. Even when they did switch to a sea-based diet they seemed to prefer seals to fish. Do you have an explanation for that? Is Norway and/or Iceland a nation where seal is particularly popular? Or are fish more frequently consumed in those countries than seal?

Maybe they ate seals because they were hungry and that's what they could catch. Maybe they were more successful at hunting seals than fishing off Greenland? Maybe they were able to kill seals on land and thus not need boats, whereas subsistence fishing might have required boats that, towards the end, they didn't have or were ill-suited to the task? Maybe they ate the fishbones?

Clearly, the Norse could eat fish. There is even evidence that they ate fish from time to time. However, the physical evidence seems to indicate that they ate less fish than people in Iceland and Norway. Why? I don't know. "Cultural preference" doesn't seem outrageous to me. Yes, they were Norse, from Iceland and Norway, but that doesn't mean they were absolutely identical to people in those places, especially not after a couple hundred years of being a separate colony. It's like arguing that people in Boston should have the same fondness for tea that the English do because so many of their ancestors came from England. Yes, there are a lot of cultural similarities between people in Boston and London, but you wouldn't say they're identical and you wouldn't mistake a Bostonian for a Londoner or vice versa for very long, would you? The City of Boston is 470 years old - and the Greenland Norse lasted 500 years. Why would it be shocking that they developed some differences than their founding culture?

Given that the Greenland Norse started with just a few people (I think it was 12 or 14 boats - enough for a colony to avoid inbreeding with regular European contact, but in any case not a lot of people) it would only take a few families with a preference for sheep over fish to set a cultural pattern in the new colony that lead to land food being favored strongly over seafood. Is that what happened? I don't know, but it strikes me as being possible.

Also, historians are a bit elitist - they do not like outsiders trying to but in. With good reason in this case, for he really makes a lot of mistakes and is quite easy to accept the truth when the evidence is disputed.

Yes, but if you're going to dispute his conclusions I personally think it would have been better to attack his suppositions and conclusions about the Mayans rather than the Greenland Norse.

Diamond tries to make things accessible to the average reader. Unfortunately, the average reader is pretty fucking stupid. That requires oversimplifying to an enormous degree. Add to that recent accusations out of Papua New Guinea about some other things he's written which, apparently, have really pissed off the folks he wrote about once they got their hands on a copy, and I treat all of Diamond's works with suspicion these days. They are thought-provoking, but I seek independent verification. Unfortunately, the average fucking stupid reader isn't going to do that.

So - why the Greenland Norse disappeared after 500 years is an interesting question. There is undisputed evidence of things like climate change. There is undisputed evidence of conflict with the Inuit who arrived later. And there are the "missing" fish bones - for some reason the Norse in Greenland didn't seem to eat much fish. Well, OK, maybe they really did prefer seal when they had to eat seafood. Maybe Greenland seals taste better than those available in Norway. Maybe in Greenland the seals taste better than the fish. Maybe they all had fish allergies. I don't know. Thing is, no one else seems to have come up with a bulletproof explanation, either.

Diamond is going out on a limb by saying "cultural preference, the Norse preferred goat to cod" but I don't see anyone else supplying a definitive answer.

[Surlethe]

Back to the OP: Diamond has the misfortune that starting with Delbrück, the discipline of history has evolved very much in favor of detailed models. Historians as a whole distrust large-scale models, especially ones that try to explain humanity from the beginning to the end. He might have fared better had the tried to develop his model on one particular nation alone. For example, one can explain the rise of the USA far better with a single model than the rise of Europe, for the variations just become too much.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/posting.php?mode=post&f=52