Introduction

Why are inhabitants of some nations freer than others? An easy answer is that the countries’ elites make all the difference, and that the masses just follow the overarching choice whether or not to institutionalize freedoms. A more serious, Nobel-Prize-winning answer (Sen, 1999), adopted by the United Nations (see for example, United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2004), is that economic prosperity provides freedoms. A third view has it that “good institutions” cause both economic prosperity and cultural freedoms (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012; Fukuyama, 2012; North, Wallis, & Weingast, 2009).

A joint problem of all three of these approaches is that they might falsely attribute habits of freedom to the characteristics of inhabitants rather than their habitats (Jones & Nisbett, 1971). Accordingly, these explanations neglect the possibility that thermal features of climate (Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2001; Van de Vliert, 2013a), as well as precipitational features of climate (Welzel, 2013, 2014), have remotely shaped the more proximate impact of both wealth and institutions on contemporary freedoms. A look at climatically selective settlement patterns during colonial history illustrates why this is likely to be a crucial omission.

Indeed, the role of climate is apparent in the colonial settlement strategies of European emigrants over the last five centuries. Western Europeans preferred to migrate from their home country to overseas areas with a similar climate because this meant that they encountered familiar hardships and resources and could pursue a similar mode of how to make a living (e.g., North America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand). This also meant widespread settlement of these emigrants, which came at the cost of mass displacement and marginalization of the native population (although not needed from a colonial perspective). On the flip side, Western Europeans settled in much smaller numbers in tropical areas with unfamiliar existential threats and challenges.

Climatic circumstances not only shaped settlement patterns but also shaped institutional legacies after settlement had happened (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012; Engerman, 2007; Sokoloff & Engerman, 2000; Welzel, 2013). In the Europe-like climate zones characterized by cold winters, steady rain, and high seasonality, European emigrants could easily marginalize native populations and then replicate and advance their home-style liberating institutions, designed to grant rights and freedoms to the settlers. In sharp contrast, in climatically demanding and often life-threatening zones characterized by hot summers, unsteady rain, and low seasonality, the relatively small number of privileged European colonizers set up coercive institutions, designed to enslave the native populations and to efficiently extract resources.

A similarly intriguing case of selective migration unfolded around 6,500 years ago, when climatic conditions allowed Neolithic peoples to start to establish well-developed dairy economies in western and northern Europe. Curry (2013), who calls it the milk revolution, concludes in Nature: “When a single genetic mutation first let ancient Europeans drink milk, it set the stage for a continental upheaval” (p. 20), the remnants of which are thought to still be visible today. In essence, Curry postulates that the unique combination of dairying climates and the ability to drink milk throughout the adult life is a long-term precursor of economic development and human empowerment. This is, however, a far-fetched idea in need of closer scrutiny as climates and genes only set boundary conditions for societal development, rather than completely determining developmental trajectories.

The present empirical exploration is not limited to Europe. It is limited, though, to Old World civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe because societal development in the Americas and Oceania unfolded on a playing field that is categorically different from the Old World. The reason is that colonialization and mass immigration by Europeans has fundamentally revamped the demographic setup of the New World, with large-scale replacement and marginalization of the local populations and the establishment of derivatives of European settlement patterns and institutions that protected the rights and freedoms of the settlers (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Diamond, 1997; Sokoloff & Engerman, 2000). Hence, population history places the New World out of comparison with the dynamics differentiating the civilizations of the Old World.

We begin with a systematic exploration of the millennia-long coevolution of dairying cultures and lactose tolerance in particular local climates around the globe suitable for dairy farming. Building on the results, we continue with a historical process analysis of lactose tolerance at the eve of the colonial era (i.e., around 1500 CE), empowering resources in early industrial times (i.e., around 1800), and encultured freedoms in the information age of today (i.e., around 2000). Both parts of this conceptual and empirical research trajectory, conveniently indicated as Study 1 and Study 2, are in essence analyses of gene-culture coevolution and niche construction (Durham, 1991; Laland, Odling-Smee, & Myles, 2010; O’Brien & Laland, 2012; Richerson & Boyd, 2008).