Copping a Latitude: Genetics Support Idea Cultural Interaction Was More East to West Than North to South
East often meets West and vice versa, but did North frequently meet South when it comes to the history of people and technological innovations migrating across the continents? New genetic analysis suggests the way that continents are oriented may indeed have played a key role in our cultural interactions over time.For decades scientists have suggested that the east-west orientation of Eurasia helped spread ancient culture and technological innovations such as agriculture and writing more rapidly than occurred in the oppositely oriented Americas, with biologist and ecologist Jared Diamond perhaps most famously making this case in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Gun, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999). The idea is that populations at comparable latitudes experience largely similar climates, making it easier to adapt crops and domesticated animals and, consequently, humans and technology to...
