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Debunking hereditarian and 'biodiversity' cold climate claptrap,

The standard cold climate mantra of writers like Michael Levin (1997), JP Rushton, Risch, John Derbyshire and Kanazawa (2008) holds that peoples in the colder climates, Europeans and Asians, evolved more intelligently and virtuously than "tropical" breeds. Said "harsh" cold climates was more "difficult" to survive in, and presented a plethora of "challenges" that caused "evolution" into more virtuous peoples, with higher IQs. By contrast, the warm tropics produced passive peoples, enervated by an easy living, that caused less virtuous evolution and less intelligence. So goes the basic mantra. The only thing wrong with it is that it is complete rubbish.

As will be seen below, allegedly "harsh" cold climates were anything but that. Indeed Eurasia is blessed with a favorable East-West axis, that enables numerous key plants and animal domesticates, as well as new technology and ideas to move from east to west productively. Wheat from Anatolia for example could move west to what is today's Germany in the same general climate and grow productively, an immense boon to sedentary human existence and future human civilization. The same with numerous animals. Even in European and Asiatic environments before th Neolithic, the environment was far from the "harsh" wasteland that activated IQ "challenges" - in fact credible mainstream scholars note that in may respects, the abundance of game and plant resources made such environments very productive, with a stable and reliable food supply. In addition, peoples near water- oceans, rivers and lakes - had a rich aquatic base to work with, from mollusks to fish, to marine mammals. Both bases, on land and water, produced a very productive, stable and reliable supply of food and material for shelter and clothing as well. 

Far from the picture of "climatically challenged" Europeans and Asiatics, if anything, the data arguably reverses the "enervating tropics" myth - it is the colder and temperate climes that had any easy run. Jared Diamond in this classic 'Guns, Germs and Steel" lays out such data in detail, showing for example the true harshness of tropical environments. Tropical Africa for example suffers in many places for example from numerous debilitating disease vectors, poor soils, lack of good coastal harbors, navigable rivers, a tsetse fly belt that destroys or hinders movement of key domesticated animals, and a north-south axis that crushes the easy movement of such key crops as wheat, barley etc. Taken together the flow of technology, ideas and key plants and animals was hindered compared to other regions. Where these conditions were somewhat alleviated for tropical Africans, they founded early civilizations such as ancient Egypt and Kush. Later flows of technology and communication enabled the great African Saharan kingdoms to develop. Tropical peoples also founded the Indus Valley civilizations, at Mohenjo-daro, Lothal etc. 

Thus, the question often dodged and ducked by assorted "hereditarian" types - if indeed the cold climate peoples evolved all this virtue and intelligence, and had such a favorable environment, why did they take so long to develop the spectacular advances in human civilization of the tropical peoples of Africa, the Near East and the Indus Valley? Why did it take tropical Neolithics from Africa and the Near East to bring the Neolithic Revolution to Europe and Asia? What happened to the purported "cold climate" superiority for millennia? Why did such cold climate areas depend on the tropical and the sub tropical zones immediately adjacent for such things as metallurgy, plant domestication, alphabets, etc?

Other links:
Egypt- A Tropical Civilizatrion
Mesopotamia-subtropical links to the tropics 
Assorted "cold climate" fantasies further debunked

Alleged cold-climate environmental "deprivation" of ancient cold-adapted Europeans dubious. If anything the environment was often favorable with reliable and predictable food and material resources. Despite this however cold-climate Europeans never pioneered plant or animal domestication even though the species to do this were in place, and a favorable East-West climatic axis. A long tradition of certain scholarship, continuing even today suggests that some cold-adapted peoples were passive, reaching cultural and even genetic dead-ends. 

quote 1- alleged "harsh" ancient European environment is bogus- conditions were actually favorable in many respects:

"About 35,000 years ago, modern human populations apparently entered Western Europe for the first time and found what one pre-historian has described as 'a virtual Garden of Eden.' Southwest France and northern Spain formed a rich environmental mosaic that supported a profusion of animal and plant life. The diversity of animal life is reflected in carvings and cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic Period, spanning from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. at various times, mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, wild horses, wild oxen, red deer, reindeer, ibex and many other species abounded... the Upper Paleolithic people of Western Europe probably enjoyed a greater degree of social-complexity than is projected by the simplistic hunter-gatherer model. "They had a rich diversity of resources, and a high degree of stability and predictability of these resources year to year."

-- Lewin, Roger (1988). In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 196-199

Quote 2- Famous Lascaux area of pre-historic France shows a favorable environment, not much different from other hunting areas on other continents, with plenty of climate variability, contradicting claims of alleged "harsh" venues.

"The physical world inhabited by the painters and engravers of Lascaux was unlike anything known today.. Sea levels plummeted more than 300 feet; dry land connected not only North America and Asia but Britain and continental Europe. Southern Europe was cold, dry and covered with rich grasslands. In regions with some topographical re;lief, like southwest France and northern Spain, vegetation was more varied; sheltered and exposed localities created different micro-climates. Paleolithic animal life in this area was abundant, much more like the plains of modern Africa than anything seen in Europe today. Herds of horses, bison, and aurochs roamed the grasslands, along with reindeer and ibex in the hills...

To judge from discoveries of pollen and seed at some sites, and from engravings at others, peoples of Lascaux and their contemporaries ate blueberries, raspberries, acorns, hazelnuts, and other tubers, nuts, berries and grasses.

The last Ice Age was by no means a period of unrelieved cold, millennium after millennium. Temperatures fluctuated, sometimes coming close to today's balmy interglacial climes, and the animal and plant communities fluctuated in concert with them. Warmer climes brought woodland and forest where only open grassland had existed previously. At the same time, the horses and bison- animals of the plains, were replaced with red deer, wild boar and other confines of a forest habitat.. "

-- Lewin, Roger (1988). In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 144

Quote 3- long before the coming of the Neolithic revolution from the Near East and the Natufians and others, ancient cold-adapted Europeans had more than enough opportunity to pioneer plant and animal domestication. Wild species of the cow, horse, pig and goat were all well known. Wild ancestors of wheat like spelt variants and chick peas were also in place. What took the alleged cold-adapted "pace-setters" so long to advance human civilization?

".. as critics of the climate theory point out, the world has gone through many climate fluctuations in the 100,000 years since modern humans occupied the Old World. Opportunities for cultivation and animal husbandry surely existed earlier than the Neolithic. Yet no evidence has emerged that any plant or animal domestication occurred before this time. More specifically, no potential climatic trigger can be identified in many of those cases in which development of domestication can be documented sufficiently to reveal information about local climatic conditions."

-- Lewin, Roger (1988). In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 193

Quote 4- Even colder northern climes show a rich resource base and substantial material life. Such resources particularly water-based ones of the ocean, river and lake, were relatively stable and predictable, hardly  the picture of cold-climate peoples "deprivation" alleged by JP Rushton, Kanazawa et al.. nor did the supposed evidence of high IQ shine forth. A long tradition of scholarship so the cold climate types of northern Europe as dead enders.

"Similarities appear in societies in which there are rich maritime or lakeside resources from the far north to the Mediterranean. In the far northern latitudes, where for four months of the year the sun does not set, the icy cold but resource-rich northern sea was the focus of settlements with pit houses, with people using elaborate seagoing vessels in their specialised focus on marine foods, probably associated with seal hunting (Bjerck 1995, Bjerck, this volume). Further south, other structured settlements echo the theme of marine or lakeside focus. At Tagerup in Sweden, large houses were constructed in a 'village; at the confluence of two rivers with permanent structures such as jetties and moorings for boats.. coastal and lakeside regions also provide evocative glimpses of societies for whom the sea and water played an important economic and symbolic role. We see richly symbolic pendants of amber and animal teeth, wooden artefacts such as bows, decorated paddles, canoes, and leisters in evidence from submerged sites in the Baltic.. Riverine resources also appear to have been particularly influential in the development of settlements such as Lepenski Vir and Vlasac in the Iron Gates... we see an apparently 'sacred' site at Lepenski Vir, comprising homes with plaster floors, carved figurines, and neonates interred under the floors." [pg 8]

"The Iron gates contain some of the largest concentration of Mesolithic burials in Europe. Burials have been recorded from at least eleven sites, and four of these, Lepenski Vir, Padina, Schela Cladovei and Vlasac each contained very large numbers of graves." [pg 241]

"Even Grahame Clark, excavator of Star Carr and pioneer and champion of Mesolithic studies in Britain, was forced to concede with evident reluctance in 1952 that the archaeological evidence for the coastal Mesolithic peoples of Northwest Europe hardly contradicted the notion of 'a low level of culture' (Clark 1952:63).. Extrapolating the origins of social complexity to certain contexts in Mesolithic Europe marked a powerful departure from ideas of small, marginalised groups apparently 'going nowhere'.. 'Complexity' was built on dense, productive, coastal resources that were available all year." [pg 4]

"Young (2000b:1) concluded that the discipline was still 'waiting for the great leap forwards'. A long-standing story of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers so immersed in their environments and nature, both ecologically and ideologically as to be almost socially inert seems to retain a strong hold on our imaginations." [pg 5]

cold climate debunkery