Uriah

Feudal communities were practically states within themselves. Because lands and animals were communally owned, they were jealously guarded and interlopers were automatically assumed to be thieves. A peasant spent his whole life in a glorified pen.

Agricultural life in mountains resembled feudalism in that it required constant cooperative activity and geography naturally restricted movement in much the same sense feudal lords did: you only have so far to wander when boxed in mountains.

Peasant life was a thresher. The people who couldn’t cut it were partly those who couldn’t meet the physical demands without succumbing to exhaustion and infection, but also those who felt penned in, who dreamed of what life would be like on the other side of the mountain.

Okay, so life was stressful, but what does that have to do with skull shape? Why do different species of domesticated animals invariably end up with short, broad skulls?

Two researchers at Harvard made note that in animal studies high levels of glucocorticoids inhibit the outward development of the upper jaw. They decided to measure if the same relationship between skull form and stress reactivity occurred in humans: https://sci-hub.se/https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00950.x …

I suspect that the outward development of the jaw is paralleled by outward development of the shoulders because brachycephalized people are usually quite broad, and outside of cold mountains, long limbed in the sense of the stereotypical “European supermodel”.

Just incidentally: one of the authors of that paper, Jerome Kagan, also performed similar work which demonstrated that blue eyed children were considerably more fearful and inhibited at early ages than brown eyed ones: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/dev.420220802 …

If someone had the gall to autopsy people from different European populations with this in mind I think what they would find is that brachycephalic peoples would have smaller adrenal glands in the kidneys, which is the most consistent byproduct of animal domestication

Alpine peoples are resistant to the stressful effects of hard labor partly because they are dull: they do not need constant novelty and stimulation to be happy. They are perfectly content to live in the same place forever, feel no pressure to throw it all away and emigrate.

Slavs are so normal. So many guys I’ve met are described by their friends as: “He is just a nice, regular guy. Normal and unpretentious”. I have to resist the urge to call them “boring”, which they aren’t, but they do talk about a restricted range of practical subjects.

There’s a real monotony to them: every Slav with a blog I read writes exclusively about his own country and often very practical, mundane aspects of it. Every Frenchman takes odd excuses to start talking about France. The Caucasians though, are the absolute worst

The most brachycephalic peoples in Europe (Balkans) and the Middle East (Caucasians) are so ethnocentric and willing to throw down on a moment’s notice that it would probably be beneficial for the UN to forcefully separate them to avoid any more predictable violence.

But you see this in all the broad faced countries, or you used to anyways. The constant revanchism, the racially tinged ultra-nationalism which distinguishes the Germans or Koreans from their neighbors.

These peoples fight so often partly because they are brave, but also because they are not deterred by the hard, boring work of real soldiers, which can be so draining it makes deadly combat seem like a relief. If you could handle feudalism, you can handle war.

The idea that human beings have been self-domesticated is very old, but the execution of the idea is always wrong. Biologists have traditionally imagined domesticated people as being easy going hippies, whereas the truth is that civilization makes you hard, not soft.

It's wolves who are shy and fearful, not bulldogs. Domesticated animals don't piss themselves in fear constantly and lose weight when trapped in captivity. They can take it. A domesticated human isn't Jeff Lebowski, he's Fedor Emelianenko

Biologists are right though, I think, in describing wild humans as “xenophobic”, in the sense that American whites live in constant fear of blacks to the point of reflexively praising them for doing nothing. The Russian attitude toward foreigners is more "civilized", fearless.

Alpine peoples are obviously very different from other (French, North Italian, German, Slavic) but to me the one striking mannerism they all share is a tendency, during argument, to invade the personal space of the other guy and go nose to nose like Tony Soprano.

Everyone has an invisible bubble around them which strangers aren’t supposed to enter without permission. The size of the bubble, dictated by stress, informs a person's intuitions about “rights” and “privacy”, in Norwegians the bubble is huge, in Alpines it’s tiny.

The lack of fear Alpines show makes them willing to boldly approach others, especially in Mediterranean countries, and this sometimes manifests itself as a kind of Pepe LePew rapiness. They're vulgar, laugh loudly at dirty jokes, and speak bluntly about everything.

Some peoples have genuinely unique personalities, like the Jews and Irish, but most national characters were not selected for per se but emerge from unusual combinations of traits. To give one relevant example, the Germans:

Northwest Europeans have a distinctive mental style, an nerdy memory for facts and little details and a way of seeing the world autistically, abstractly, to store facts about human beings in the same mental compartments as fictional characters or animals.

The Germans are uniquely dangerous people because they combine this kind of nerdy facility for organization and planning with a hardness and racial arrogance more typical of Slavs. They are very much like other Alpines with one important exception: they are competent.

The kinds of cruelty, on a national or individual level, that Germans are capable of is related to this sort of crossroads personality. NW Euros are autistic and inhuman, but this is mitigated by their softness. Slavs are hard, but also warm. Germans are neither warm nor soft.

Russians too have a character that is the result of an unusual combination: an Alpine ease around people mixed with a stoic, unemotional harshness shared with other northern peoples like Scandinavians.

Practically anything I have written about the broad faced people of Europe and the Middle East is true, maybe doubly true, of East Asians who also traditionally practiced collectivized agriculture. You can think of Alpines as “domesticated”, but also as “Orientalized”.