Many human phenomena and characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies,
genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things – are influenced both by geographic
factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological
factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal
species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under
the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual
people. . . .
[T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea . . . cannot be
attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them] . . . They are instead due
entirely to the different [government] policies . . . At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other
traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no
agriculture, while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur
clothes but often did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic,
rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography. . . . Aboriginal Australia
remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous
farming or herding . . . [Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has
no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead,
the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all
non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia
by overseas colonists.
Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices
play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don’t react to cultural, historical, and
individual-agent explanations by denouncing “cultural determinism,” “historical determinism,”
or “individual determinism,” and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any
explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing “geographic determinism” . . .
Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some
geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic
explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other
than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological
explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist
genetic etc. explanations is widely accepted today.
Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a
tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among
historians) based on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted . . . But
often, too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit
living north of the Arctic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other
Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.
A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of
geography and other fields of scholarship . . . Most historians and economists don’t acquire
that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.

Answer- 4 how physical circumstances can dictate human behaviour and cultures.