Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Diamond, Jared)
Highlights
Those investigators do not seek to justify murder, rape, genocide, and illness. Instead, they seek to use their understanding of a chain of causes to interrupt the chain.
For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.
fact, as I shall explain in a moment, modern “Stone Age” peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples.
My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.
Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.
Although formerly popular, this type of explanation, too, fails to survive scrutiny.
However, detailed archaeological studies have shown that complex irrigation systems did not accompany the rise of centralized bureaucracies but followed after a considerable lag.
why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?
Naturally, the notion that environmental geography and biogeography influenced societal development is an old idea.
However, boat building and survival in cold Siberia were both still far beyond the capabilities of early Homo sapiens.
During the Ice Ages, so much of the oceans’ water was locked up in glaciers that worldwide sea levels dropped hundreds of feet below their present stand. As a result, what are now the shallow seas between Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali became dry land. (So did other shallow straits, such as the Bering Strait and the English Channel.)
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.
Then came a number of men with armor, large metal plates, and crowns of gold and silver. So great was the amount of furniture of gold and silver which they bore, that it was a marvel to observe how the sun glinted upon it.
The novelty of horses, steel weapons, and guns undoubtedly paralyzed the Incas at Cajamarca, but the battles after Cajamarca were fought against determined resistance by Inca
How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca? Why didn’t Atahuallpa instead try to conquer Spain? Pizarro came to Cajamarca by means of European maritime technology, which built the ships that took him across the Atlantic from Spain to Panama, and then in the Pacific from Panama to Peru. Lacking such technology, Atahuallpa did not expand overseas out of South America.
The first connection is the most direct one: availability of more consumable calories means more people.
they are indigestible (like bark), poisonous (monarch butterflies and death-cap mushrooms), low in nutritional value (jellyfish), tedious to prepare (very small nuts), difficult to gather (larvae of most insects), or dangerous to hunt (rhinoceroses).
In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities.
Those complex political units are much better able to mount a sustained war of conquest than is an egalitarian band of hunters.
Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest; artisans such as metalworkers, who develop swords, guns, and other technologies; and scribes, who preserve far more information than can be remembered accurately.
MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY HAS CONSISTED OF UNEQUAL conflicts between the haves and the have-nots:
why in some areas (such as the southwestern United States) did local hunter-gatherers themselves adopt crops and livestock from neighbors and survive as farmers, while in other areas (such as Indonesia and much of subequatorial Africa) the importation of food production involved a cataclysmic replacement of the region’s original hunter-gatherers by invading food producers? All
Most domesticated plant and animal species differ morphologically from their wild ancestors: for example, in the smaller size of domestic cattle and sheep, the larger size of domestic chickens and apples, the thinner and smoother seed coats of domestic peas, and the corkscrew-twisted rather than scimitar-shaped horns of domestic goats. Hence remains of domesticated plants and animals at a dated archaeological site can be recognized and provide strong evidence of food production at that place and time, whereas finding the remains only of wild species at a site fails to provide evidence of food production and is compatible with hunting-gathering.
But archaeological sites are not always neatly sealed time capsules of materials all deposited on the same day. Materials deposited at different times can get mixed together, as worms and rodents and other agents churn up the ground. Charcoal residues from a fire can thereby end up close to the remains of a plant or animal that died and was eaten thousands of years earlier or later.
Southwest Asia, also known as the Near East or Fertile Crescent; China; Mesoamerica (the term applied to central and southern Mexico and adjacent areas of Central America); the Andes of South America,
Given that they must have had some reason, why did they do so around 8500 B.C. in Mediterranean habitats of the Fertile Crescent, only 3,000 years later in the climatically and structurally similar Mediterranean habitats of southwestern Europe, and never indigenously in the similar Mediterranean habitats of California, southwestern Australia, and the Cape of South Africa?
Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers
hunter-gatherers in some productive areas, including North America’s Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers.
Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, coastal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later.
Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living.
For example, New Guinea peoples who never domesticated sago palms or mountain pandanus nevertheless increase production of these wild edible plants by clearing away encroaching competing trees, keeping channels in sago swamps clear,
Aboriginal Australians who never reached the stage of farming yams and seed plants nonetheless anticipated several elements of farming. They managed the landscape by burning it, to encourage the growth of edible seed plants that sprout after fires. In gathering wild yams, they cut off most of the edible tuber but replaced the stems and tops of the tubers in the ground so that the tubers would regrow. Their digging to extract the tuber loosened and aerated the soil and fostered regrowth. All that they would have had to do to meet the definition of farmers was to carry the stems and remaining attached tubers home and similarly replace them in soil at their camp.
Even in the cases of the most rapid independent development of food production from a hunting-gathering lifestyle, it took thousands of years to shift from complete dependence on wild foods to a diet with very few wild foods.
cereal crops, pulse crops, and livestock simultaneously as a complete package by around 6000 B.C. All three of these elements also spread rapidly through central Europe in the centuries before 5000 B.C. Adoption of food production may have been rapid and wholesale in southeastern and central Europe because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle there was less productive and less competitive.
What were the factors that tipped the competitive advantage away from the former and toward the latter?
Those inventions included sickles of flint blades cemented into wooden or bone handles, for harvesting wild grains; baskets in which to carry the grains home from the hillsides where they grew; mortars and pestles, or grinding slabs, to remove the husks; the technique of roasting grains so that they could be stored without sprouting; and underground storage pits, some of them plastered to make them waterproof.
That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started. A gradual rise in population densities impelled people to obtain more food,
Once people began to produce food and become sedentary, they could shorten the birth spacing and produce still more people, requiring still more food. This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food. Taken together, these four factors help us understand why the transition to food production in the Fertile Crescent began around 8500 B.C., not around 18,500 or 28,500 B.C. At the latter two dates hunting-gathering was still much more rewarding than incipient food production,
not to mention the other advantages associated with food production (including technology, germs, and professional soldiers).
As a result, in most areas of the globe suitable for food production, hunter-gatherers met one of two fates: either they were displaced by neighboring food producers, or else they survived only by adopting food production themselves.
Those few peoples who remained hunter-gatherers into the 20th century escaped replacement by food producers because they were confined to areas not fit for food production, especially deserts and Arctic regions. Within the present decade, even they will have been seduced by the attractions of civilization, settled down under pressure from bureaucrats or missionaries, or succumbed to germs.
Yet all crops arose from wild plant species.
For example, how did they turn poisonous almonds into safe ones without knowing what they were doing?
Many valuable wild plants yielding food prized by millions of people, such as oaks sought for their edible acorns in many parts of the world, remain untamed even today.
As an example of how would-be plant hitchhikers attract animals, consider wild strawberries. When strawberry seeds are still young and not yet ready to be planted, the surrounding fruit is green, sour, and hard. When the seeds finally mature, the berries turn red, sweet, and tender.
Naturally, strawberry plants didn’t set out with a conscious intent of attracting birds when, and only when, their seeds were ready to be dispersed. Neither did thrushes set out with the intent of domesticating strawberries. Instead, strawberry plants evolved through natural selection. The greener and more sour the young strawberry, the fewer the birds that destroyed the seeds by eating berries before the seeds were ready; the sweeter and redder the final strawberry, the more numerous the birds that dispersed its ripe seeds.
But no one would seriously describe this evolutionary process as domestication, because birds and bats and other animal consumers don’t fulfill the other part of the definition: they don’t consciously grow plants. In the same way, the early unconscious stages of crop evolution from wild plants consisted of plants evolving in ways that attracted humans to eat and disperse their fruit without yet intentionally growing them.
Human latrines, like those of aardvarks, may have been a testing ground of the first unconscious crop breeders.
Thus, our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories.
At whichever such “lab” the seeds ended up, they tended to come from only certain individuals of edible plants—namely, those that we preferred to eat for one reason or another.
even though they didn’t understand the genetic principle that big berries have seeds likely to grow into bushes yielding more big berries.
So, when you wade into a thorny thicket amid the mosquitoes on a hot, humid day, you don’t do it for just any strawberry bush. Even if unconsciously, you decide which bush looks most promising, and whether it’s worth it at all. What are your unconscious criteria?
It furnished linen, which remained the chief textile of Europe until it became supplanted by cotton and synthetics after the Industrial Revolution
Still, our list of triumphs lacks many wild plants that, despite their value as food, we never succeeded in domesticating. Notable among these failures of ours are oak trees, whose acorns were a staple food of Native Americans in California and the eastern United States as
Acorns are nutritionally valuable, being rich in starch and oil. Like many otherwise edible wild foods, most acorns do contain bitter tannins, but acorn lovers learned to deal with tannins in the same way that they dealt with bitter chemicals in almonds and other wild plants: either by grinding and leaching the acorns to remove the tannins, or by harvesting acorns from the occasional mutant individual oak tree low in tannins.
It turns out that oak trees have three strikes against them. First, their slow growth would exhaust the patience of most farmers. Sown wheat yields a crop within a few months; a planted almond grows into a nut-bearing tree in three or four years; but a planted acorn may not become productive for a decade or more. Second, oak trees evolved to make nuts of a size and taste suitable for squirrels, which we’ve all seen burying, digging up, and eating acorns. Oaks grow from the occasional acorn that a squirrel forgets to dig up.
Oaks grow from the occasional acorn that a squirrel forgets to dig up.
With billions of squirrels each spreading hundreds of acorns every year to virtually any spot suitable for oak trees to grow, we humans didn’t stand a chance of selecting oaks for the acorns that we wanted.
Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean;
We found that 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.
Europeans today who note that Aboriginal Australians entered the modern world as Stone Age hunter-gatherers often assume that the Aborigines would have gone on that way forever.
I note that regions differed greatly in their available pool of domesticable species, that they varied correspondingly in the date when local food production arose, and that food production had not yet arisen independently in some fertile regions as of modern times.
Thus, the reason for the failure of Native Americans to domesticate North American apples by the time Europeans arrived lay neither with the people nor with the apples. As far as biological prerequisites for apple domestication were concerned, North American Indian farmers were like Eurasian farmers, and North American wild apples were like Eurasian wild apples.
Instead, the reason Native Americans did not domesticate apples lay with the entire suite of wild plant and animal species available to Native Americans. That suite’s modest potential for domestication was responsible for the late start of food production in North America.
But none of them pulled plows or wagons,