Makes one wonder how human history would have played out on a different geography from the past. Say we evolved on a super continent with no oceans in between, just one big one around the connected landmass.
Some of the lakes will look like seas. Water is relatively easy to cross, provided you avoid storms or can cope with them. A storm on land isn't too much fun for a traveller either.
Until fairly recently, water was generally the quickest route from A to B, if it was available. That helps to explain why the UK and Ireland's island disposition was not an obstacle to the same continuous series of colonisation events throughout history as the rest of Europe.
Anyway, your super continent will have quite a lot of fresh water on it and will probably involve some very impressive rivers and inland lakes/seas. That single coastline will mean that all sea faring will be coastal until someone notices that they can nip across through what would look like a worm hole to begin with!
I suspect things would play out in a similar fashion anyway and some nutter will sail or row straight away from land and keeps on going - and the mad idea of a spherical earth eventually takes hold. Perhaps it will be too far and powered flight is developed first and is able to stay aloft and move quickly enough. Perhaps airships are invented before trans ocean shipping.
In another mad world, where sea or air "shipping" is not good enough, mankind straps themselves to giant fireworks, invent an amazing G-suit after some unfortunate efforts involving the pilots being smeared to the back of their clothing and then invent amazing parachutes (after a few hard landings). There are a few other details to sort out, such as how to mount the ash trays and where to put the cabin crew for first class.
There is a very rich set of sci-fi and fantasy novels/stories/novellas/films/stories told around a campfire/streamed stuff that cover what might happen "if things were the same but different", for a given value of same and different.
Mr Pratchett and some of his mates called us humans: "The Story Telling Ape". It's high time you started listening to those stories, or even better, telling some of your own - you do that wondering you mentioned.
It would have been completely different: geography has been an enormous factor in human history and culture. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" book makes the case that the main reason for Europe's historical success as a seat of civilization over other places is mainly due to geography: stable, warm-enough (but not too warm) climate with a very large amount of arable land for farming.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is not well-received by actual historians.
It cherry-picks and manipulates facts to make its Euro/Anglo-centric perspective work, and even attempts some Anglo-exceptionalism. It completely disregards the vast majority of human civilisation where Europe was—for lack of a better word—a decayed backwater.
Europe saw several civilisational collapses, including as recently as ~1500 years ago with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Six hundred years ago Europe was still reeling from the effects of the Black Death, and it took another five hundred for hygiene to be taken seriously by Europeans, which they had forgotten all about since the Romans.
By sheer population numbers, the various river systems South, Southeast, and East of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau have been the most successful and productive human civilisations. Nearly half of humanity lives in and around these river valleys. (And it can be argued from a biological perspective that population quantity is the only factor contributing to 'success'). These civilisations have endured for significantly longer than the European.
It's an alright book to read with a fairly critical lens, but its claims should not be taken as gospel. There's something to be said about a slippery slope leading from the claims in that book to outright Übermensch/Untermensch racism.
Completely different, but probably still full of the same basic wars, bigotry, tribalism, brutality and all the other shining facets of our basic human nature.
Maybe, maybe not. Human history has been drastically shaped by geography, causing humans to leave wherever they first evolved and travel across the world, becoming by far the dominant species.
Perhaps with different geography, humans would have gone extinct long before figuring out how to make fire or the wheel.
I was wondering how difficult it might be to modify Earth's geography to ensure humans went extinct, while still having them evolve in the first place.
I think the answer is barely, if at all. Using the power of known population bottlenecks (e g. [0]) and chaotic dynamics we can say that any trivial change might lead to a brief existence for humanity. Specifically I'm thinking of something like Lotka-Volterra leading to Gambler's Ruin.
