Guns, Germs, Steel

 

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We all know that those who possessed superior weapons were able to wipe out whole civilizations, and what the guns didn't do, disease finished off. But why? Why did European germs generally kill off new world people and not the other way around? Why did weapons become more lethal in some places and not others? Diamond methodically tracks back civilizations and comes up with some plausible answers that have nothing to do with the people living in different area, and everything to do with geography, weather and native plant and animal species. The second part of the book did not promise to be as interesting, with histories of each of the major landmasses--who conquered whom and why--but that also turned out to be interesting as he delves into how they know which people invaded whom by language and tool artifacts. This book could probably be easily condensed, but the information was insightful for me.

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“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”

Writing has evolved de novo only a few times in human history, in areas that had been the earliest sites of the rise of food production in their respective regions. All other societies that have become literate did so by the diffusion of writing systems or of the idea of writing from one of those few primary centers. Hence, for the student of world history, the phenomenon of writing is particularly useful for exploring another important constellation of causes: geography’s effect on the ease with which ideas and inventions spread.

By enabling farmers to generate food surpluses, food production permitted farming societies to support full-time craft specialists who did not grow their own food and who developed technologies.

Part One: From Eden to Cajamarca

That Great Leap Forward poses two major unresolved questions, regarding its triggering cause and its geographic location.

As for its cause, the perfection of the voice box and hence for the anatomical basis of modern language, on which the exercise of human creativity is so dependent.

modern Cro-Magnons somehow used their far superior technology, and their language skills or brains, to infect, kill, or displace the Neanderthals, leaving behind little or no evidence of hybridization between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.

The settlement of Australia / New Guinea was perhaps associated with still another big first, besides humans’ first use of watercraft and first range extension since reaching Eurasia: the first mass extermination of large animal species by humans.

on every one of the well-studied oceanic islands colonized in the prehistoric era, human colonization led to an extinction spasm whose victims included the moas of New Zealand, the giant lemurs of Madagascar, and the big flightless geese of Hawaii.

most big mammals of Africa and Eurasia survived into modern times, because they had coevolved with protohumans for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. They thereby enjoyed ample time to evolve a fear of humans, as our ancestors’ initially poor hunting skills slowly improved.

Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might otherwise have been candidates for domestication, and left native Australians and New Guineans with not a single native domestic animal.

Economies remained simplest on islands with low population densities (such as the hunter-gatherers of the Chathams), low population numbers (small atolls), or both low densities and low numbers. In those societies each household made what it needed; there was little or no economic specialization. Specialization increased on larger, more densely populated islands, reaching a peak on Samoa, the Societies, and especially Tonga and Hawaii

Social complexity was similarly varied.

Political organization followed the same trends.

THUS POLYNESIAN ISLAND societies differed greatly in their economic specialization, social complexity, political organization, and material products, related to differences in population size and density, related in turn to differences in island area, fragmentation, and isolation and in opportunities for subsistence and for intensifying food production.

literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history.

Immediate reasons for Pizarro’s success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing.

Part Two: The Rise and Spread of Food Production

availability of more consumable calories means more people.

what arrived to launch food production in Egypt was foreign crops and animals, not foreign peoples.

One factor is the decline in the availability of wild foods.

an increased availability of domesticable wild plants made steps leading to plant domestication more rewarding.

development of technologies. two-way link between the rise in human population density and the rise in food production.

Thus, farmers selected from among individual plants on the basis not only of perceptible qualities like size and taste, but also of invisible features like seed dispersal mechanisms, germination inhibition, and reproductive biology.

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

these local failures or limitations of food production cannot be attributed to competition from bountiful hunting opportunities.

big domestic mammals were crucial to those human societies possessing them. Most notably, they provided meat, milk products, fertilizer, land transport, leather, military assault vehicles, plow traction, and wool, as well as germs that killed previously unexposed peoples.

This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.

Humans and most animal species make an unhappy marriage, for one or more of many possible reasons: the animal’s diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization.

Just as some regions proved much more suitable than others for the origins of food production, the ease of its spread also varied greatly around the world.

Eurasia provides the world’s widest band of land at the same latitude, and hence the most dramatic example of rapid spread of domesticates,

Africa and the Americas are thus the two largest landmasses with a predominantly north–south axis and resulting slow diffusion.

Part Three: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel

from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are “symptoms of disease.” From a germ’s point of view, they’re clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ.

Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.

Let’s begin by comparing the acceptability of different inventions within the same society. It turns out that at least four factors influence acceptance. The first and most obvious factor is relative economic advantage compared with existing technology.

A second consideration is social value and prestige,

factor is compatibility with vested interests.

On any continent, at any given time, there are innovative societies and also conservative ones.

Sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions.

the size of the regional population is the strongest single predictor of societal complexity.

FOOD PRODUCTION, which increases population size, also acts in many ways to make features of complex societies possible.

large society that continues to leave conflict resolution to all of its members is guaranteed to blow up.

large society must be structured and centralized if it is to reach decisions effectively.

Goods in excess of an individual’s needs must be transferred from the individual to a centralized authority, which then redistributes the goods to individuals with deficits.

Considerations of conflict resolution, decision making, economics, and space thus converge in requiring large societies to be centralized.

Part Four: Around the World in Six Chapters

New Guinea swamps thus provide a clear instance of an environment where people remained hunter-gatherers because farming could not compete with the hunting-gathering lifestyle.

With a mere 1,000,000 people, New Guinea could not develop the technology, writing, and political systems that arose among populations of tens of millions in China, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes, and Mesoamerica.

Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia’s ENSO-driven resource unpredictability.

Thus, we have identified three sets of ultimate factors that tipped the advantage to European invaders of the Americas: Eurasia’s long head start on human settlement; its more effective food production, resulting from greater availability of domesticable wild plants and especially of animals; and its less formidable geographic and ecological barriers to intracontinental diffusion.

But food production was delayed in sub-Saharan Africa (compared with Eurasia) by Africa’s paucity of domesticable native animal and plant species, its much smaller area suitable for indigenous food production, and its north–south axis, which retarded the spread of food production and inventions.

It’s true, of course, that some large African animals have occasionally been tamed. Hannibal enlisted tamed African elephants in his unsuccessful war against Rome, and ancient Egyptians may have tamed giraffes and other species. But none of those tamed animals was actually domesticated—that is, selectively bred in captivity and genetically modified so as to become more useful to humans.

only about one-third of its area falls within the sub-Saharan zone north of the equator that was occupied by farmers and herders before 1000 B.C. Today, the total population of Africa is less than 700 million, compared with 4 billion for Eurasia. But, all other things being equal, more land and more people mean more competing societies and inventions, hence a faster pace of development.

the Japanese environment is so productive that it was one of the few locations where people could settle down and make pottery while still living as hunter-gatherers.

there was little social stratification into chiefs and commoners