The myth of the uninhabited habitable area

Many seem to have trouble grasping how populated the world is.  Areas not built up or clearly fenced in are mistaken for unpopulated.  At worst parts of countries are believed to be entirely uninhabited.  There is in fact always a population if it is possible to live there.  Members of this population can be hard to come across.  However, they can always be found somewhere.

Historically people have imagined entire countries to have been uninhabited.  Then I mean areas of mainland and not distant islands.  May myths of “we were here first” presupposes such an idea.  A great deal of wishful thinking is part of such myths.  The Zionists even became disappointed when they found the Holy Land was still inhabited.  Why would it not be?

It gets even worse when people imagine hunter-gatherers.  People imagine our ancestors would have lived in groups of villages.  Such are supposed to have been separated by uninhabited areas the size of entire countries.  (Or states/provinces if one compares to the largest ones.)  In reality there were few areas enabling permanent villages.  The rest had too low concentrations of life-forms eatable to humans.  The very most of the population was by necessity nomads.  Groups of a few dozen such rarely met by accident.  They met up in a certain place at a certain time of the year.  I think this was done at the season when there was especially plenty of food there.

Typical hunter-gatherers were no self-conceited ethnonationalists.  Anything such would be self-destructive if one live at the whims of nature.  Consequentially people took all chances when the possibility turned up.  Was there accessible land able to sustain them they gradually spread to it.  In this way all ice-free continents became inhabited by hunter-gatherers.  So I am sorry, Xhosas.  Your land was inhabited by Khoisans before agriculture arrived with your ancestors.

Islands relatively near mainland have been populated this way too.  To reach other islands lying far out in the oceans ones needs a sailboat.  Such were first invented after agriculture arose.  Consequentially such islands were the last to be populated.  Many such has been populated by Austronesians and other peoples.  The later includes Arabs and people from South Asia.  But some were uninhabited when Europeans first found them.  I would say those islands lack an indigenous people.

Uploaded on the 28th of November 2024.