Why the West Rules--For Now (150 page)

^*Some people think Chinese sailors even reached the Americas in the fifteenth century, but, as I will try to show in
Chapter 8
, these claims are probably fanciful. The closest thing to evidence for these imaginary voyages is a map of the world exhibited in Beijing and London in 2006, purporting to be a 1763 copy of a Chinese original drawn in 1418. The map is not only wildly different from all genuine fifteenth-century Chinese maps but is also strikingly like eighteenth-century French world maps, down to details like showing California as an island. Most likely an eighteenth-century Chinese cartographer combined fifteenth-century maps with newly available French maps. The mapmaker probably had no intention of deceiving anyone, but twenty-first-century collectors, eager for sensational discoveries, have happily deceived themselves.

^*Wong left Irvine in 2005, but moved only forty miles, to the University of California’s Los Angeles campus; and Wang had a co-author, James Lee, but he, too, teaches just forty miles from Irvine, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

^*Academic biology is a vast field; I draw on its ecological/evolutionary end rather than its molecular/cellular end.

^*I use “sociology” as a shorthand term for the social sciences more generally, and draw primarily on those branches that generalize about how all societies work rather than those that focus on differences. This definition cuts across traditional academic distinctions among sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, and puts great emphasis on areas where biology and the social sciences meet, especially demography and psychology.

^*Geography, like biology and sociology, is a huge and loosely defined field (so loosely defined, in fact, that since the 1940s many universities have decided that it is not an academic discipline at all and have closed their geography departments). I draw more on human/economic geography than on physical geography.

^*What, since the nineteenth century, people have rather confusingly called the “Middle East.”

^*Mesopotamia is the ancient Greek name (literally meaning “between the rivers”) for Iraq. By convention, historians and archaeologists use Mesopotamia for the period before the Arab invasion of 637
CE
and Iraq after that date.

^*I borrow this term from the economist Alexander Gerschrenkon (although he used it slightly differently).

^*I present more technical accounts in the appendix to this book and on my website,
www.ianmorris.org
.

^*The word “ape-man,” with its Tarzan-and-Jane connotations, was much favored in schoolbooks when I was young. Nowadays paleoanthropologists tend to think it condescending, but it seems to me to capture nicely the ambiguities of these prehuman hominins, and is certainly less of a mouthful.

^*In practice they probably jumped a few miles at a time to find good new foraging spots, then stayed put for several years.

^*Although we now normally transliterate the name of the Chinese capital as Beijing, by convention paleoanthropologists still speak of Peking Man.

^*That said, Heidelberg Man did live in Africa as well as Europe. Some paleoanthropologists envisage a European origin followed by a spread back into Africa, but others assume that Heidelberg Man, like
Homo habilis
and
Homo ergaster
, evolved in Africa in response to local climate changes, then spread north. Bones rather like Heidelberg Man’s have also been found in China, but that evidence is more disputed.

^*And, of course, an unknown number of hominin species like the Flores hobbits that died out without leaving modern descendants. Another new species was identified in the mountains of central Asia in 2010, and was predictably labeled “the yeti.”

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