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Re: The Western Hemispherre & Elsewhere,
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Thu, 4 Aug 1994 10:30:00 PDT
Hill writes:
"George Michaels makes an important point here. Communication certainly
has great implications for innovation. I would point out the importance of
geographical locations as well. The apparently frequent precocity of
developments in the Near East is a case in point. Its location at the
connection of Africa and Asia and at one important route to Europe
as well meant that new practices or techniques which flowed from one
continent to another almost inevitably became concentrated and available
for recombination in the Near East first."
See Raschevsky, "Looking at History Through Mathematics" MIT Press (1968) for
a putative mathematical theory which attempts to account for different rates
of cultural development (= innovation).
D. Read
READ@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU
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