Is culture the culprit?

I just finished the first chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel book by Jared Diamond. He talks about a theory of how humans evolved from apes and how they migrated from their place of origin in Africa to the rest of the world. It is a synopsis of years of research and hypothesis done by various scientists, archeologists, historians and anthropologists. Basically the chapter says that the species called the Humans or Homo Sapiens evolved from other earlier species such as apses, homo erectus etc. and they started to migrate from Africa to the rest of the habitable parts of the planet at various points in time in the last few million years.

I am not sure if there is a convincing explanation as to why humans evolved only in Africa and not in other continents. I am yet to do that research but not keen as my thoughts lie elsewhere.

The basic argument in his book is that the humans are as they are because of the environment around them. This might look like a simple and obvious statement but proving them convincingly and with facts and researches takes hell of an effort. He spent the last 30 years trying to answer this convincingly. So, lets not take the statement lightly. He tells a story that prompted me to write this blog today.

Sometime in the 18th century, the native settlers in New Zealand called Maori took a boat and about 400 of them landed on a nearby island which was inhabited by another native tribe called the Moriori. Note that the Maori and Moriori are decendents from the same earlier settlers of Australia and New Zealand. When the Maori settled in New Zealand and later started to grow in numbers some of them started moving out of the island and landed in another very small island and they later became the Moriori tribe.

Back to the story, the Maori who landed on the island in the 18th century were armed with guns, clubs and other weapons and walked around the island telling the Moriori that the island now belongs to them and they are in-turn slaves of the Maori tribe. One has to note that the number of Maori who landed were out numbered by Moriori by atleast 3 to 1. If a fighting had ensued in that place, the Maori would have been slaughtered and the course of Moriori history would be quite different today. But the Moriori did not fight back. For one they did not have a fighting army of people, they were not as organized as Maori nor did they posess any of the sophisticated weapons that the Maori brought with them. As the Moriori's did not have any the skills required to fight, they quitely accepted their fate and decided to share their resoources and accept the Maori as their masters and avoid bloodshed. To make the long story of occupation short, the Maori's in-turn killed the defenceless Moriori as if they were cattle and cooked and ate the people. The Moriori's in turn ran for their lives and hid in caves, pits and bushes to escape the blood thirsty Maori. Finally the occupation was successful and Maori started ruling the left over Moriori.

Jared Diamond makes a hypothesis here as to why the Moriori were under equipped to fight the Maori when both the tribes were from the same decendents and Moriori were in fact people of the earlier generation of Maori who migrated to the tiny island off the coast of New Zealand. His hypothesis is thus: New Zealand was a large island and it had a varied climatic conditions suitable for different types of food production. When the early Maori stepped into New Zealand they had suitable conditions for farming, cattle raising etc and thus had surplus food. When a society has surplus food then a portion of population of the society have the opportunity to focus on things other than food production. Like for example they can develop art and crafts and tools while another part of the society was busy working to feed them. This also gives opportunity to have another group to train as fighters to attack nearby settlements and takeover their resources thereby becoming more stronger. All this then requires leadership and bureaucrats to organize the food production, tools production, maintaining the fighters etc. Thus over centuries the Maori became more stronger and organized.

The small group of people who left the earliest Maori settlement and reached the tiny island off the coast of New Zealand found the place to be too cold for any agriculture. Being a small island there was not much variation in the entire island area. Hence they started hunting for food source. If you are a small group in a cold island with only souce of food being the native animals then there are a few things you want to do. To start with you do not want to fight each other and try to stay united, secondly, you do not want the population to grow so much that you start to exhaust the natural food source. And that's exactly what the Moriori did. They reached a concences that they will stay united. They castrated some of their male children to keep the population in control. Since the kind of animals they were killing where passive in nature such as seals and fish they did not need sophisticated weapons. And since they did not fight each other they were passive in their natural qualities and slowly forgot the concept of fighting and war. And also since hunting was the only source of food everyone had to be engaged in the good gathering process and obviously no one had the time to focus on other developmental activities.

Now wouldn't you call this the ideal candidate for a takeover. If you said 'yes' then you thought just like the Maori and that is exactly what they did.

The thing that I noted was the effect the environment was having on the behaviour of the people of Moriori. Maori + few centuries of cold weather conditions + No farming opportunities + Simple animal source for food = passive people who do not want war and willing to accept the fate thrust upon them. But also note that they were smart enough to recognise that they have to castrate some portion of the male off-springs in order to maintain a balance in their society which I am certain that the Maori never thought of.

The behaviour of people over centuries becomes their culture. What we fail to recognize is the fact that the culture had a reason when the practice began and over time the reason could no longer be valid for the culture to continue. The culture could be a boon and a bane - for Moriori tribe it turned out to be a bane.

Do we consider culture as a culprit for the people of the east for not showing progress from what their ancestors developed?