"Jay Honeck" wrote in message news:2tIie.5050$z_.3694@attbi_s71...
There have been quite a number of books written about why the world's
dominant, most productive and innovative civilizations (at least in the
last
several hundred years) have all been in colder climates.

I always figured it's because they had to stay busy to keep warm.

I don't believe that is quite correct... It's not just colder climates, but
it is climate change... It seems that people who live in places where the
climate doesn't change throughout the year don't have the environmental
incentive to come up with new solutions to problems... In tropical
civilizations, they have nothing to compare it to, so satisfied with doing
the same thing that they've always done... In frozen civilations, there's a
lot of that too... They've found out what works to keep them from freezing
themselves to death and they just keep doing it year after year... At one
extreme, you have a group of people who have become complacent in their
living conditions since it doesn't take as much effort to survive and at the
other extreme, you have a group of people who spend a significant amount of
their effort just surviving the environment and don't have time for other
things...

Of course, I don't have any hard proof of this -- it's just a gut feeling, I
guess...

I suspect that air-conditioning wasn't invented by someone who lives in a
tropical climate, it was probably invented by someone who lived in a place
that was too warm in the summer and he longed for the cooler days of
winter...