Various Noble Savages

Maybe there are actual places which support only limited variation among resident humans: gambling cities (Macao, Vegas, Monaco), DC, LA, Guantanamo, Diego Garcia, Vatican, Mecca… maybe. Maybe personality doesn’t parallel among Inuit and Maasai. Maybe. There’s reason to believe the character of northern, wheat-eating Han Chinese differs from that of southern, rice- eating Han Chinese, but I don’t expect one could measure the difference.
Once “dementia praecox” was considered a known condition, covering catatonia, hebephrenia, and paranoid schizophrenia. Then understandings evolved. Perceptions of national, or regional, character have made for many jokes. Blondes were stereotyped, as were professors.
The impact of the circumstances of observation on observations became misunderstood. It was widely accepted that observation changed that which was observed - as if widely viewed lunar-eclipses leave us with a changed moon. Lots of nonsense was, and is, presented as true and even important, regularly, in the hallowed halls of academia. Poseurs in anthropology, psychology, economics, history, physics and literature remain abundant, and at Yale they still sing, “We're poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa, baa, baa.” The BS is so rampant and pervasive as to undermine confidence even in test-verifiable sciences, like biology – after all, our understanding of genetics was recently turned on its head through epigenetics. Everything changes.
Given choice between Space Aliens and Noble Savages I’ll go with the noble savage myth and hope that proximity to nature might provide the kind of revitalization we’re going to need to survive. Plus, I’ve found the literature invigorating.
Just a few years after it came out my mother started reading to me from Margaret Mead’s book for kids, “People and Places” (1959). I enjoyed it, and “Trappers and Traders of the Old West” (out of print and mostly forgotten). Mead’s 1928 “Coming of Age in Samoa” – wrong but considered right – was the most widely read anthropology book until Napoleon Chagnon’s “Yanamamo: The Fierce People” (1967 – like with Mead’s first book, the anthropologist is able to ‘verify’ a pre-conceived notion, seeing what he or she wants to see and disregarding the rest). Chagnon followed “Lost World of the Kalahari” (by Laurens van der Post, 1958, tough guy stuff á la Hemmingway. Sir Laurence notes cartilage in !San Bushman dicks, but I don’t think anyone else ever did) and Colin Turnbull’s engaging and charming “The Forest People” (1961). Farley Mowat’s “People of the Deer” (about some inland Inuit, right but long considered wrong) came out in 1952 but didn’t gain acceptance until its re-release in ’75. Marcel Griaule’s Dogon myths (they claimed to have come to Mali from a planet orbiting the Dark Star B Sirius, clearly yanking Griavle’s chain as some Hopi did to Frank Waters, as any knowing eye can see from his enjoyable 1963 “Book of the Hopi”) appeared in French well before that, but still aren’t well known by monolingual English-speakers. Castaneda’s “Yaqui Way of Knowledge” (pure fantasy far too widely accepted as having anthropological value) appeared in 1968, Turnbull’s distressing and depressing (and misguided) “Mountain People” in 1972; “The Education of Little Tree” started charming people in 1976 and the New Age “Mutant Message Down Under” came out in 1990 (in it a White woman is taught by Aborigines to clean herself by standing in a swarm of flies. This book was soon followed by a barrage of other fun nonsense). “People of the Whistling Waters” by Mardi Oakley Medawar (1993) and a slew of other idealistic depictions of tribal life in the form of novels, almost always involving horses, followed. “The Years of Rice and Salt” by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002 ‘sci-fi’) has a Rönin Samurai walk halfway across a huge continent, get a wife chosen for him and then elected tribal chief. Coulda happened…
In 1964 sci-fi king Philip K. Dick gave us “Clans of the Alphane Moon”… from it I got an idea of differentiation of the tribes along lines of psychological inclinations, with all psychological types represented by tribes. Andre the Giant and Michael Clarke Duncan are representative of early Patagonians. Or something. I still see mountain people and beach people as widely separate, psychologically.
Going a surreal step beyond all this, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Good_(anthropologist)

Chenla, Funan, the Cham and Khmer, genotypes and Covid

As we continue to come to terms with Covid, reflection on the effects of past pandemics might help at least give sense of context.
The Spanish flu (aka the 1918 influenza pandemic, a virus of avian origin), the much more recent Avian Influenza (bird flu), Bubonic Plague, septicemic plague… polio, smallpox, malaria… these have affected human history more than war. They have even affected the human genotype.
A genotype, an organism’s complete set of genetic material, is adaptive, as recent studies in epigenetics have shown. So are human choices (at least sometimes).
Written records from outside the eastern Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent of Iraq areas from over 1000 years ago being rather rare, remnant stone carvings afford great value to investigations of social roots; those of far southeast SE Asia often depict quite Negroid heads which we can assume were meant to depict or at least represent rulers. (see https://www.pinterest.com/pin/475692779372835771/ and https://www.pinterest.com/pin/677017756471798663/).
But as happened elsewhere, rulers got replaced by new ones of a bit different genotype. Changes happened in the lower classes too. Kinky hair remains, but has clearly become less common.
In about 1000 CE the continental coast of SE Asia was largely malarial mangrove swamp. We know there were inhabitants because we know there was shipping trade, but we still know very little about who they were. It was thought that south Burma was Mon Dvaravati, but that’s been shown incorrect. It’s also clear that more northern, mountain peoples on occasion found necessity of refuge from invaders in said mangrove swamps.
Draught followed by heavy rains and flooding surely aggravated disease, as also did warfare, malnutrition from other factors, unintentional results of foreign trade, and man’s inhumanity to man, especially in terms of class conflict. War was much more about taking captive slaves than land, and removal and resettlement was surely unsettling and undermining of health. Attractive slaves were taken for use by the elite, and many of the less fortunate surely found it difficult to successfully breed. Seizing slaves from elsewhere may well have been seen as more efficient that “breeding”…
At any rate, over time the overall appearance of general populations changed, be it more from natural selection, coercion, or migrations. Genocidal activity hardly seems to have been rare, but also the health of the elite ALWAYS had advantages over that of the ruled. Local understandings among the ruled surely were often of help to them, but forced relocations put limits to that!
Socio-economic factors have proven important in the Covid epidemic. Dying from COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly and people from less advantaged socio-economic groups. Infection and death rates are high among racial/ethnic minorities, the poor, those with less education, and veterans. The coronavirus has disproportionately affected African Americans; lower education level has been strongly associated with both cases and fatalities.
Surely our newly homeless will prove more susceptible to Covid than those less stressed and more protected.