Shape of countries appears to have had an impact on cultural diversity
(Phys.org) -- Back in 1997 Jared Diamond published a book called Guns, Germs and Steel. In it, he argued that Eurasian civilizations tended to dominate their neighbors throughout history because they were broader, east to west, than others around them, and because of that, more culturally homogenous. The reasons for that he wrote, were due to agricultural similarities between its peoples as opposed to those from other countries that were taller north to south, which would have them spanning several types of climates. There has been a lot of discussion regarding Diamonds ideas over the years, but no real testing of them, until now. David Laitina, Joachim Moortgatb and Amanda Lea Robinson have constructed a test by correlating cultural diversity with language diversity. They then counted language diversity for a number of countries comparing that data with geographical data and found, as they describe in their paper published in the...