 I'm Salvatore Babonis and today's lecture is Proto-Global Problems. Before the world became a single interconnected place, there were already many processes of globalization occurring. Phenomena like the spread of the alphabet, the consolidation of large societies, the spread of disease, trade were all forms of proto-globalization occurring throughout the Afro-Eurasian continent. Similar processes seemed to have occurred in what would become the Americas. Though the world was not yet globally connected, globalization as a process was already well underway long before Christopher Columbus bumped into the Americas in 1492 to create today's global world. Wherever you go in the world, remember, someone has been there before. You can be trekking through what seems to be a primordial jungle in Central America and find out that there was a massive agricultural civilization there just 300 years ago and that none of the trees around you are more than 300 years old. The complexity of history and the mobility of pre-modern humans are reflected very well in the history of Stonehenge, a prehistoric site that long predates the Celts and the Druids in Salisbury, England. The same spot where prehistoric people built this astronomical calendar was later occupied by the Celtic Britons and then the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, ultimately becoming modern England. Throughout all this time, the site remained while the societies around it changed. In fact, cultural diffusion is so ancient and so widespread that all claims to cultural essentialism have to be viewed very skeptically. This has come to be known as Galton's Problem since the 1888 observation by Francis Galton that similar cultural traits and widely disparate societies might arise by diffusion from a common ancestor or diffusion between societies. Galton's Problem pops up everywhere. One thing to put it in perspective is the knowledge we have that Phoenician sailors circumnavigated Africa in 600 BC. We know that actually happened because Herodotus, the Greek historian, reports on their voyage and tells us that he doesn't believe it could have occurred. The reason he doesn't believe it is that the Phoenicians report that halfway through their voyage when they were at the southern tip of Africa, the sun appeared in the northern half of the sky instead of the southern half of the sky. Herodotus said that everybody knows that the sun is always in the southern half of the sky since Herodotus had never left the northern hemisphere. Well of course we know now that in the southern hemisphere the sun is in the northern half of the sky and so we know now that the Phoenicians actually did the circumnavigation that Herodotus didn't believe. Well if the Phoenicians were able to circumnavigate Africa 2600 years ago people were able to get everywhere in the world and places that we think might have been connected by impossible distances are very likely to have been connected after all. One of the great advocates of the interconnectedness of the world was the Norwegian adventurer Torre Hyerdahl. Torre Hyerdahl believed that the Americas were contacted by Europeans or Semites or Egyptians that is people from somewhere in the Mediterranean in ancient times and that then these people went on to journey to the Pacific islands. Now his theory is not taken very seriously today but you can watch some amazing footage of Torre Hyerdahl's journey in the Contiki raft from Peru to Polynesia, a journey that proved the feasibility that Polynesia was contacted by South Americans even if it doesn't prove that it actually happened. Now I'm not going to click through to these YouTube videos here to create a video inside a video but it's really amazing footage. I strongly encourage you to have a look. The adoption of the alphabet also shows how the world was connected long before the modern era. Most people don't realize that there's only really one alphabet in the world, the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet spread to the west and became the basis of the Greek and then the Etruscan and then the Latin alphabet that's used in the English language and in European languages. But the Phoenician alphabet also spread southward to become the basis of Ethiopia's alphabet and spread to the east eventually via India reaching as far east as Japanese Kana symbols which are based on ancient Sanskrit symbols which are then ultimately based on the Phoenician alphabet. In fact the only alphabet in the world that cannot be traced in some way to the ancient Phoenician alphabet is Korean hangul and Korean hangul was created in modern times as an explicit attempt to create a new alphabet. All other alphabets that arose organically through people's adoption of existing alphabets, all other alphabets in the world spread from Phoenicia from an alphabet that was invented 3,000 years ago. Of course it wasn't just the alphabet that spread. If useful cultural ideas like the alphabet could spread to cover all of Afro-Eurasia, so could germs. Viral epidemics spread across the entire Afro-Eurasian landmass at least as early as the beginning of the current era, the first two centuries AD. Records simply say plague and we don't know exactly what viruses were called plague in ancient Rome and ancient China, but we do know that in China, the Mediterranean and Africa there were contemporaneous plagues that hit at the same time and seemed to present in the same way. An epic disease like the plague that spreads to cover the entire world or at least all major accessible populations in the world is called a pandemic. As a result of multiple pandemics, the people of Afro-Eurasia have come to share a partly integrated biology. All of the peoples of Afro-Eurasia share something in their bodies that was not shared by people of the New World, of the Americas with tragic consequences for the people of the Americas and also the people of many Pacific islands and of Australasia who did not have resistance to these Afro-Eurasian diseases. Epidemics may have been among the first global social problems, but they weren't the only ones. Climate change in Central Asia regularly set waves of nomads in motion, immigrating or attacking depending on your perspective, China, India and Europe at the same time. In fact, the speakers of the Indo-European languages, languages like English, French and German, were at the center of some of these earliest migration crises. The people who now populate Europe, those who speak Indo-European languages, were at one time invaders who displaced or slaughtered, nobody knows the details, the people who built Stonehenge and the rest of the Neolithic inhabitants of Europe. They also invaded India where Hindi is an Indo-European language as is Persian, the language of Iran. The spread of global religions, which some people consider very positive, could also be seen as a major global social problem from the perspective of people who already lived in and already had religions in the places where those religions spread. So for example, the spread of Islam in the 8th and 9th centuries to cover an area from the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the Pacific Ocean was a major global social problem for the existing powers in the places that Islam spread to. Other religions that spread and displaced local religions were Buddhism, which spread from India to China, Korea and Japan and of course Christianity, which has been imposed on many areas throughout the world often at the point of a sword or of a gun. What makes a global social problem is that it's conceptually global in scope even if it is not always global in the physical scale of the areas affected. A global social problem is definitively a problem, something that's viewed by at least some people as not good, that is social related to the interconnections among human beings and is global in scope that is driven by global forces and or carrying global implications. The ancient Roman playwright Terence is credited with the line, I am human and nothing of that which is human is alien to me, but not all human problems are global social problems. There are many individual human tragedies that we do not study as global social problems. A global social problem is a problem that is best understood using global level theories and comparative analyses. There are problems that cannot be localized to a particular area or particularized to one individual. There are problems that are generalized that impact the world simultaneously. A problem also should be considered a global social problem if experience from similar problems in other places can be used to help solve them. Some key takeaways. First, Gauntlin's problem means that no part of the world can be studied in isolation. The whole world has to be studied as a whole. Second, this has been true for a long time. At least for 2000 years, epidemic diseases have spread rapidly to affect the entire Afro-Eurasian land mass. And third, global social problems may not always be global in scale, but they are nonetheless global in scope. Thank you for listening to this lecture on Proto-Global Social Problems. For more information about me, please see my website at Salvaturbabonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.