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How did the settlers of the Canary Islands survive a millennium of isolation?
- gwern 3y agoSounds like a parallel to Tasmania: the tech level kept ratcheting down, as they lost tech like crops and had no way to regain them, so every loss was permanent. Slowly, by simple drift in small populations, and occasionally abruptly, in environmental or social shocks. (The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently.)
- hyperthesis 3y agoYes, there's an argument that our "increasing returns" are related to population size, not technology itself. So the coming population plateau may be interesting. Perhaps AI's will compensate for this.
- resolutebat 3y agoJared Diamond's Collapse tells the story of how this happened in the far reaches of the Pacific, as Polynesian settlers landed on increasingly distant islands with poor resources, and then their societies collapsed in slow motion when trading stopped and essential imported goods like metal became unavailable.
- facialwipe 3y agoLearning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.
- tareqak 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island for anyone interested.
- anon-sre-srm 3y ago[flagged]
- Vecr 3y agoWell, I mean, technically, but it would absolutely be better if the NSI people could warn them off using similar mathematical and diagram-based signaling techniques as would be used for space aliens.
- huytersd 3y agoIt’s because they aren’t cutting down all the trees there. They’ve found a way to just actually live off the land without destroying. Way more than a millennium, they’ve been doing it for 50,000 years. It’s no joke.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoYeah no wonder they kill anyone who tries to come
- huytersd 3y agoGood for them. Honestly.
- Hucklederry 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jojobas 3y agoThat's not a life you would want to live though.
- huytersd 3y agoNo, but it’s probably a pretty good life if that’s the only thing you know. They have a lot of sex on the beach (actually) and don’t look malnourished.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoReminds me of the parable chiding the fisherman relaxing at the beach to work hard, so he can later retire relaxing at the beach.
- cubefox 3y agoThis doesn't mean it is a "success" in the context above. The population living there might have lost most of its previous technological abilities and stabilized in a permanent "collapsed" state. There is no reason that humans have to go extinct when they lose their cultural achievements, after all, other animals survive without having those in the first place. Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.
- timeagain 3y agoThis is a central theme in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness books. Space travel is slow (100s-1000s of years), so travellers are forced to calculate the likelihood that their destination will have experienced societal collapse by the time they arrive. The idea of a perpetually-sustained civilization is a failed dream. Technology helps societies bet larger and last longer, but also more dependent on the technology to sustain their growth.
- heavenlyblue 3y agoIn real life you could take a ship between two different distant lands and when you arrive it is ravaged by war started a couple of days ago
- cubefox 3y agoBut the population size theory says this is increasingly unlikely the larger the population gets. Even Gran Canaria was large enough to avoid the loss of crops for a thousand years, unlike the populations on the smaller islands.
- tivert 3y ago> Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium. IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.
- AlbertoGP 3y agoWell, they did get a big supply of metal in 1981, and there might have been trading with other islands up to 150 years ago: > Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory. > It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981. > [...] > Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time. > It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-mysterious-shipwreck-off-north-sentinel-island/7UWWHDCA35XKJ2Q3PGRXMBXYNQ/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-m... > Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880. > We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage. https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-about-north-sentinel-island https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-abou...
- jojobas 3y agoThere were never crops in the first place in the modern or even ancient sense. Some tribes figured out that some tuberous plants can be replanted and will regrow after the tuber has been harvested and that's it. Some may have understood how seeds work (that's debated) but at no point did Aborigines clear a plot of land to plant a particular species with seeds harvested last season. This was a reason of total misunderstanding with the arriving Europeans, there was no way to lure them to help farm and get their share of the crops, it just wasn't on their map. In contrast, Maoris just across the ditch understood both growing plants and raising livestock, and a mere decade after wheat and pork were brought from Europe they were widely growing both.
- anon-sre-srm 3y agoSee also: Guns, Germs, and Steel section on Papua New Guinea.
- ttt11199907 3y agoYou honestly don't think they "knew how seeds work"? It's not like you can't turn over leaves and see a literal plant growing out of a seed. Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.
- simonh 3y agoThere’s more to knowing how to manage seeds effectively than knowing plants grow from them. >why…when you get enough.. That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk. >ultimately end up destroying… You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.
- fmbb 3y ago> You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow. Crops destroying native life is immediate, not years in the future. It’s not like there was nothing before on that acre you cleared for planting.
- defrost 3y ago> Sounds like a parallel to Tasmania: the tech level kept ratcheting down, as they lost tech like crops and had no way to regain them, When did the Tasmanian pre colonial people have crops? https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/A/Aboriginal%20life%20pre-invasion.htm https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_histo... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tasmanian-Aboriginal-people https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tasmanian-Aboriginal-people https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-War https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-War They arrived by walking across the Bassian Plain (now the Bass Strait) to a land with highlands locked by ice. There are many sources that discuss their gathering of plants, sea foods, hunting, etc. Which sources talk about their agrarian crop planting? More to the point which sources discuss the loss of crop planting? The big issue in pre colonial studies these recent years appears to be a lack of past recognition of any non "hunter gather" practices - the early settlers destroyed semi permanent infrastructures such as rock pool fish traps (some quite extensive that were blown up to allow river boats through), they didn't recognise non European land and plant tending practices, etc. There's a lack of solid study on what practices were actually taking place in different parts of Australia, and a lot of "imagined" commentary.
- wisty 3y agoSmall scale agriculture and aquaculture has been long understood. The tipping point where the use of labour and soil to create surlus labour, which is then used to conquer more soil is why agriculture led to a "culture" or "civilisation"(according to 19th century hisorians IIRC). 19th century hisorians argued (I think) that superior societies had superior technology, which made them even more superior. If anything, I think modern academics are too concerned about refuting the premise that Western civilisation ended up with superior technology, rather than simply accepting that they did (in most ways) but that this didn't always make them morally superior.
- defrost 3y agoI freely admit to knowing very little about "19th century hisorians" and their ideas about "surlus labour" .. I also am unaware how this relates to the above theory about how pre colonial Tasmanians had and then lost "tech like crops". I do have a notion that metrics such as "superior" tend to be value judgements based on particular axioms .. some people feel that storing their nuts for winter, creating an industrial revolution, eliminating other life forms on the planet through expansion, and altering the atmosphere to be a superior approach. Others seemingly enjoyed a particular quality of life for several tens of thousands of years by spending some time gathering food and most of the time telling stories. Clearly different value systems are at play.
- sidewndr46 3y agoIsn't it the opposite? Technological progress has resulted in the ability to sustain a higher population
- astine 3y agoIt's not necessarily an either-or situation. Increased population can enable increased technological sophistication and increased technological sophistication can in turn enable an even larger population. This can be a self-reinforcing process. Anyway, I think your referencing the rgeen revolution which happened in the last hundred years while the GP is referencing the rise of agriculture.
- eru 3y agoThere's also the (English) agricultural revolution. And the rise of logistics and world trade in general. Bigger markets mean more productivity from specialisation, even if the underlying technology doesn't change. See eg the ancient Roman economy. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... is a good introduction.
- eru 3y agoIt's a feedback loop.
- anon-sre-srm 3y agoMore precisely, many things are roughly modelable as differential equations where aggregate rate of change depends on an amount present.
- eru 3y agoIn that language, I would say that we are dealing with a multi-dimensional differential equation.
- anon-sre-srm 3y ago
- cubefox 3y ago> The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently. Yes, but is strange that this theory wasn't mentioned at all in the article, despite containing clear evidence for its truth: For example, there is the fact that they gradually lost the ability to build boats to trade between islands, and that smaller islands lost some or all crops over time.
- walrus01 3y ago> and occasionally abruptly, in environmental or social shocks Reminds me of the history of what happened to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) after all the trees had been cut down and the ecosystem significantly modified by human presence. The whole island was originally forested.
- hyperhello 3y agoThis was shown to be kind of likely to have been rats that arrived with the settlers destroyed the defenseless palm trees in a matter of years. Since palm is a softwood and not suitable for building boats for deep sea fishing, the islanders switched to agriculture, growing taro and other plants in volcanic soil. They recognized the island had a maximum population capacity and socialized themselves to build statues from the quarry, instead of making babies. Very interesting.
- concordDance 3y ago> They recognized the island had a maximum population capacity and socialized themselves to build statues from the quarry, instead of making babies. That would be bizarre and completely at odds with what I know of human nature. Do you have a source?
- atombender 3y agoAs far as I'm aware, this has been thoroughly debunked, especially by Hunt and Lipo [1], who have argued against the "ecocide" theory, pointing out that the deforestation appeared to have had a positive effective on the islander's agriculture, and that contrary to Diamond's claims, the population was increasing, not falling, at the time of European contact. The deforestation was almost certainly caused by the Polynesian rat, as archeological research has shown that the same type of deforestation happened on other islands where rats where accidentally introduced, but not on settled islands where there were no signs of rats having been introduced. I believe Diamond (or maybe it was Heyerdahl) claims the settlers chopped down the forest in order to make rolling logs for transporting statues, but we now know that statues were transported by "walking" them using ropes [2]. As a pop-sci counterpart to "Collapse", I recommend the podcast The Fall of Civilization's episode on Easter Island [3], which includes this newer research. The podcast is wonderful in general, and that episode is one of the best in the series. As far I'm concerned, Diamond has a lot to answer for in perpetuating these modern myths that get repeated long after they've been debunked. His narratives catch people's interest because they are simple explanations that "make sense", and come with a kind of moral component, one of dramatic irony (the settlers were so stupid to chop down their trees, just to make these useless statues!). Diamond also wrote about Greenland and argued for the same kind of story there, despite evidence to the contrary. There is an entire academic book [4] devoted to debunking Diamond's claims, which should tell you how annoyed real archeologists, anthropologists, and historians are with his books. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2042672 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2042672 [2] https://youtu.be/YpNuh-J5IgE?si=arekVaU6AnwEvQwY https://youtu.be/YpNuh-J5IgE?si=arekVaU6AnwEvQwY [3] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pGCsvdjo344EQ2dALE6dD?si=6J6i-7O4SY-7OEySXiyWGQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pGCsvdjo344EQ2dALE6dD?si=6... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questioning_Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questioning_Collapse
- thehappypm 3y agoMore people = more technological advancement is a really cool observation. And, more technological advancement creates the environment for more people to survive and thrive. Exponential growth, baby!
- 8organicbits 3y agoThe technology loss side of this is a little scary. Imagine a large war or disease that takes out a large portion of population and productivity. With so much interdependence between industries, like agriculture's dependence on computerized equipment, chemical fertilizers, and so on, a collapse of one industry could lead to further collapse. When building cloud infrastructure a practice I've seen used is to avoid creating dependency cycles between systems. Otherwise an outage of one can result in an unrecoverable situation for many systems. We don't avoid cyclic dependencies in our economy; I think we reward it.
- bbor 3y agoFor anyone who thought this comment was interesting or scary, I highly recommend A Canticle For Lebowitz. It’s about nuclear war and its impact on technology, and I recommend you go into it knowing little more than that
- NegativeLatency 3y agoSounds a bit like a more compact version of Foundation
- bbor 3y agoYes, that is a great observation! I’ll have to think about that one… I see the core distinction between CFL and Foundation as pragmatic focused narrative vs idealistic grand narrative, but there’s also a very very interesting element of magical realism and religiosity in the former that I find far more interesting than the more empirical themes of Foundation dealing with institutional structures and their reciprocal relationship to historical developments. But I’ve only read the first book of Foundation, so might be wildly off. Tried to read the second, but accidentally bought the third and never got the time to fix the mistake! Who names their third book “second foundation”??
- RecycledEle 3y ago> The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently. Dr. Robert Zubrin said this in Merchants of Despair, which is the most important book published this century. Just read the first chapter. There are 2 graphs that changed my thinking. It is illogical to ask for green tech to clean up the environment while also asking for population reduction because a smaller population means fewer inventions.
- coolThingsFirst 3y ago[flagged]
- johngossman 3y agoNote actual title of the article is “A THOUSAND YEARS OF SOLITUDE: How did the first human settlers of the Canary Islands survive a millennium of isolation?” Edit: Thanks to whomever updated the title.
- anon-sre-srm 3y agoDamn, that's 10x the output of magical realism. While life finds a way, humans frequently invent new ways to race ourselves into local and global extinction like it's some sort of game of chicken.
- johngossman 3y agoDidn’t get your comment for a second, then lol’d. Well played
- anon-sre-srm 3y agoNescio quid loqueris de. Heus, potestis solveris haec funes? https://translate.google.com/?sl=la&tl=en&text=Nescio%20quid%20loqueris%20de.%20Heus%2C%20potestis%20solveris%20haec%20funes%3F&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=la&tl=en&text=Nescio%20quid...
- DoreenMichele 3y agoCanarian chefs and beermakers have reached out to the scientists about using barley with DNA traced to the ancient Canarian stock I don't even drink beer and I find this charming. My recollection is when scientists tried to replicate ancient Egyptian beer, it wasn't bitter like modern beer.
- simonh 3y agoNo hops. A beer without hops is called Gruit, and before hops various other bittering herbs were often used.
- asymmetric 3y agoI listened to a podcast on ancient Egypt recently[0] and they mentioned that beer was actually sweetened with dates and such things. [0]: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2024/02/01/%f0%93%85%93-episode-18-is-out-now-%f0%93%85%93/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2024/02/01/%f0%93%85%...
- simonh 3y agoThey didn’t have cane sugar, but needed something to fuel fermentation, so honey and dates were commonly used in Babylon and Assyria as well.
- angiosperm 3y agoHops are added to prevent spoilage, in temperate places. They might have a different solution, or a different problem.
- Bloomy22 3y agoSupport that idea. I would say that I have already tried all the local and imported beers of the Canary Islands
- huytersd 3y agoHow did the sentinelese survive 50,000 years?
- cultofmetatron 3y agoyea, people always talk about how violent they are. but thats why they are still around. all the friendly people explorers onto the island and once they left, came back with guns and an army to take what they learned about.
- wolverine876 3y agoLook around your community, or the world: Who is more likely to live a long time, the violent people or the cooperative ones? IME the violent people destroy themselves and others.
- inglor_cz 3y agoThe most long-lived societies seem to be the ones that can suppress violence internally when at peace, but unleash it on a massive scale when attacked from the outside, thus deterring enemies from attempting to conquer them. Semi-isolated geographic location helps. Both England and Japan seem to fit this description.
- wolverine876 3y ago> The most long-lived societies seem to be the ones that can suppress violence internally when at peace, but unleash it on a massive scale when attacked from the outside, That seems pretty fearful: the outside attacks, the inside's violence must be suppressed. Look at the country you live in (probably); internal and external violence is not something that must be suppressed; people are naturally at peace, and growing and building. Violence is also extremely costly, on personal, community, national and international levels. It's not the natural state, as people like to imagine these days. It's at peace when we build things - and look how the world has prospered, unlike anything in human history, in the post-WWII peace.
- aysfrm11 3y agohttps://archive.is/QMJR7 https://archive.is/QMJR7
- cat_plus_plus 3y agoEvery more successful civilization will replace a less successful civilization. In the past it was done by horrible means - initially though genocide, then through enslavement, later through foreign rule that was a bit less terrible for an average resident. Today, it's through economic power, aka gentrification. Visit Silicon Valley if you have any questions. As the means become less brutal, we should perhaps welcome still inevitable outcomes. If populations of Canary Islands had a chance to evaluate Spanish civilization through entirely voluntary means, more and more would choose to adopt a relatively comfortable lifestyle rather than constant struggle with scarcity. And those who do not have to accept that they are practicing a hobby that will gather a limited number of adherents. So long as your individual rights are respected and your individual responsibility for outcomes is emphasized, I don't see a problem with dominant culture changing over time.
- yowayb 3y agoReminds me of this monument in Medellin I just learned about: https://youtu.be/5ZoYy2ZtCCU?t=475 https://youtu.be/5ZoYy2ZtCCU?t=475
- lukan 3y agoThe main answer is probably, because the canaries have a very favorable climate. Some places are quite dry, but others have basically spring all around year. Really interesting is, that that they came there by boat, but lost the ability to build boats or stopped doing so for whatever reasons, that they could not even travel between the islands anymore. Maybe it is culturally, I met someone in La Palma who said La Palma is the best place in the world. And he didn't needed to actually go somewhere else to check. Always just been on the island. And it is a beautiful island. But most old buried bodies showed signs of head injury, from fighting. So it probably was not only paradies back then (or is today). Fun fact, there are now lots of hippies on the islands, living in caves again, eating mostly wild figs and almonds. Some other interesting bit, the islands have lots of deep canyons, so the inhabitants of la gomera have invented a whistling language, to communicate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero
- aivisol 3y ago>Really interesting is, that that they came there by boat, but lost the ability to build boats or stopped doing so for whatever reasons, that they could not even travel between the islands anymore. Maybe due to lack of access to iron?
- lukan 3y agoPossible, but there were tribes who could do sea faring only by simple wooden canoes. The polynesians for example went even so far as New Zealand by wooden boats only. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Model_of_outrigger_boat,_Marshall_Islands,_1891_-_Staatlichen_Museums_f%C3%BCr_V%C3%B6lkerkunde_M%C3%BCnchen_-_DSC08309_(cropped).JPG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Model_of_outrigger_boat,... And the canarian islands are really close to each other, you could probably do island hopping by clinging to some wood (but the currents and waves can be nasty there).
- aivisol 3y agoI think as it was mentioned in the article it was mostly due to lack of need to travel: they were poor and didn’t have things to trade to justify seagoing. And then the other additional factors: lack of iron, the fact that shores were less habitable than mountains ( lack of freshwater), wind and currents between islands.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoMakes me wonder if the same is happening to us right now, through the competence crisis: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377778
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoThe first article is buns. He just mentions some disasters that happened over years and killed a tiny number of people then immediately says this is the fault of diversity or something.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoThere's also the apparent reversal of the Flynn effect in recent years: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-iq-scores-decline-reverse-flynn-effect/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511744
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoThere's one thing that doesn't quite add up. If a gradual loss of seafaring technology was the reason for the islanders' isolation then the people on the African coast must have lost that technology as well. Otherwise people would have continued to travel from Africa and reintroduce the technology to the islands. It seems extremely unlikely that the technology was gradually and seperately lost on both sides.
- pavlov 3y agoThe Canary Islands are off the coast of West Sahara. That’s the most sparsely populated area of Africa today. Maybe, as the desert expanded, the seafaring people moved north and south to more hospitable places. Leaving nobody in West Sahara to recontact the Canaries.
- illusiveman 3y agoThe Canary Islands doesn't belong to Africa.
- zilti 3y agoNobody said otherwise.
- Bloomy22 3y ago…and yet tectonically it is not part of the African plate.
- pavlov 3y agoNobody claimed otherwise…
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoDo you suppose the first Guanches felt the bump when they went over from one plate to the next in their boats?
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> "Europeans arrived at the start of the 14th century. Not long after, conquest and genocide had largely erased them [natives] as a people." always the same shit. should never expect any better.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoNot always that usually didn’t happen (or happened to a much lesser degree) in most of Asia and Africa.
- 0xBDB 3y agoIt happens everywhere. The North African cousins of these Canarians enslaved and presumably killed well over a million Europeans. https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/742848945914609664/barbary-slave-trade-the-selling-of-european https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/742848945914609664/b...
- twelvechairs 3y agoIs "Guanches" a bad word now we are replacing with "Canarian"? So far as I know the latter term is for modern people of the Canary Islands and the former is a clear term not "early Canarians" "the first Canarians" etc as used here
- usrusr 3y agoI just read it as easy language. Guanches is a term few people understand unless they've been at least a visitor, whereas Canary Islands is much more widely known. But apparently there's more to it: in the language the term comes from, it specifically means person from Tenerife. So yes, we might consider it respectful to not refer to people on ancient El Hierro as Guanche. You might want to take a look at how es.wikipedia is linked from en.wikipedia. As a tourist to Tenerife, I didn't know about the nuance myself, before today's wiki dive.
- Bloomy22 3y agoNo countryman from the Canary Islands refers to himself as Guanche, not even those born in Tenerife. Generally, "guanche" is the name that we Canarians use to refer to the ancient inhabitants of the islands (those that the Spanish colonizers encountered during their Conquest).
- torcete 3y agoOn a related note. Watch this demonstration on how these settlers used to use a pole to move in that rough volcano terrain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4fn0VlImq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4fn0VlImq4
- mrangle 3y agoThe history of humanity is defined by isolation on islands, figurative and literal. I don't undestand the question.