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Elizabeth Hardwick

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts,

it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”

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GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL Title: “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of

Human Societies” Written by Jared Diamond Published by W.W. Norton & Company, New

York and London Copyright 1999, 1997

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REFLECTIONS Ultimately, to read is to think And for every reader, there is a different

perspective What follows is a selection of passages that

captured this humble reader’s attention

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YALI’S QUESTION

Diamond’s book begins with a question posed by a local politician from the tropical island of New Guinea

The question: Why peoples of Eurasian origin, especially those still living in Europe and eastern Asia, plus those transplanted to North America, dominate the modern world in wealth and power

Or as Diamond also offers: Why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

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OR THE ENTIRE QUESTION CAN BE REPHRASED

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?

After all, until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 B.C.E., all peoples on all continents were still hunters-gatherers

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C.E. to1500 C.E., were what led to the technological and political inequalities of 1500 C.E.

So, what accounted for those different rates of development?

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Human history took off between about 100,000 and 50,000 years ago

Diamond refers to this as humanity’s Great Leap Forward

The earliest definite signs of that leap come from East African sites with standardized stone tools and the first persevered jewelry

Most scholars believe the leap occurred specifically in Africa but some findings suggest parallel evolution and multiregional origins of modern humans – the issue is unresolved

A major extension of human geographic range occurred as sea levels dropped during the Ice Ages creating greater access to new lands

But by 11,000 B.C.E., an observer could not have predicted on which continent human societies would develop most quickly

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But only within the last 11,000 years did some peoples turn to food production

Or domesticating wild animals and plants Different peoples acquired food production at

different times in prehistory and some never acquired it all

But according to Diamond, food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel

Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates

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WHY WAS DOMESTICATION SUCH A CRITICAL FACTOR?

Food production led to the availability of more consumable calories which meant more people

By selecting and growing those few plants and animals that humans can eat, far more calories per acre were produced

A separate consequence of a settled existence was that it permitted people to store food surpluses – stored food is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists and for supporting cities

Specialists like kings and bureaucrats emerged once food was stockpiled, a political elite gained control of food production and could engage in full-time political activities

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Big domestic mammals also became the main means of land transport until the development of railroads in the 19th century

Eurasia’s domesticated horse made a profound contribution to wars of conquest

Also deadly germs evolved in human societies from close contact with domestic animals

While the humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victims to newly evolved germs, those humans then evolved substantial resistance to new diseases

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As Diamond writes,

“In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence more denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia, and later, or not at all, on other continents. The military uses of horses and camels, and the killing power of animal-derived germs, complete the list of major links between food production and conquest…”

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The five areas for which evidence is at present detailed and compelling where food production arose altogether independently, with the domestication of many indigenous crops…before the arrival of any crops of animals from other areas were

*Southwest Asia (known as the Near East or Fertile Crescent

*China *Mesoamerica *The Andes *The Eastern United States

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In addition to these five areas where food production definitely arose independently, four others – Africa’s Sahel zone, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea – are also considered candidates for that distinction

However, there is some uncertainty in each case

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BUT OF ALL OF THOSE ZONES, THE FERTILE CRESCENT HAD SOME SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGES:

Western Eurasia (where the Fertile Crescent is located) has the world’s largest zone of Mediterranean climate and therefore it has a high diversity of wild plants and animal species

Among Mediterranean zones, western Eurasia's experiences the greatest climatic variation from season to season and that favored the evolution of a high percentage of annual plants

The zone provides a wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance which ensures a variety of environments and thus, a high diversity of potential ancestors of crops

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The zone also had a number of domesticated big mammals (the goat, sheep, pig, and cow – were domesticated very early in the Fertile Crescent)

It may have faced less competition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than that in some other areas and the food production package quickly became superior to the hunter-gatherer package

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CHARACTERISTICS NECESSARY FOR ANIMAL DOMESTICATION

In all, of the world’s 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals – the candidates for domestication – only 14 passed the test

Why? What characteristics must a mammal possess to be a candidate for domestication?

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THE CHARACTERISTICS:

Diet No mammalian carnivore has ever been

domesticated (the nearest exception is the dog but the dog is not generally raised for food consumption and dogs are not strict carnivores)

Why is diet so important? Well, it takes 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a

1,000-pound cow. But to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, it would take 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn.

That would be an inefficient use of resources.

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Growth rate To be worth keeping, domesticates must

grow quickly.

Think about it.

What would-be gorilla or elephant rancher would wait 15 years for his herd to reach adult size?

Modern Asians who want work elephants find it much cheaper to capture them in the wild and tame them.

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Problems of Captive Breeding

Some valuable animal species, like cheetahs, won’t mate in captivity.

The vicuña, an Andean wild camel whose wool is prized as the finest and lightest of any animal’s, will not mate in captivity and the male vicuña has a fierce intolerance of other males, and the animal’s requirement for both a year-round feeding territory and a separate year-round sleeping territory has made the animal impossible to domesticate.

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IT IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DOMESTICATED ANIMAL AND A TAME ANIMAL

Some animals have been tamed, but never domesticated

Hannibal’s elephants were tamed but not domesticated

To be domesticated means to be bred in captivity

A domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal’s breeding and food supply

Domestication involves wild animals’ being transformed into something more useful to humans

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Nasty Disposition

Some large animals have much nastier dispositions and are more incurably dangerous than others. Tendencies to kill humans have disqualified many otherwise seemingly ideal candidates for domestication.

Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zookeepers each year than do tigers.

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Tendency to Panic

Some animal species are nervous, fast, and programmed for instant flight when they perceive a threat. Other species are slower, less nervous, seek protection in herds, stand their ground when threatened, and don’t run until necessary.

Naturally, the nervous species are difficult to keep in captivity. If put into an enclosure, they are likely to panic, and either die of shock or batter themselves to death against the fence in their attempts to escape.

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Social Structure

Almost all species of domesticated large mammals prove to be ones whose wild ancestors share three social characteristics: they live in herds; they maintain a well-developed dominance hierarchy among herd members; and the herds occupy overlapping homes ranges rather than mutually exclusive territories.

That social structure is ideal for domestication, because humans in effect take over the dominance hierarchy. Domestic horses of a pack line follow the human leader as they would normally follow the top-ranking female.

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So, it is now evident that 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.

Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans, by virtue of compatibility on all those separate counts.

But Eurasian peoples happened to inherit many more species of domesticable large wild mammalian herbivores than did peoples of other continents.

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So, Eurasia, befitting its large area and ecological diversity, started out with the most candidates for domestication

Second, Australia and the Americas lost most of their candidates in a massive wave of late-Pleistocene extinctions – possibly because the mammals of these continents had the misfortune to be first exposed to humans suddenly and late in our evolutionary history, when our hunting skills were already highly developed

Finally, a higher percentage of surviving candidates proved suitable for domestication on Eurasia than on other continents

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AND DON’T FORGET THE AXES OF THE CONTINENTS

Food production’s spread proves as crucial to understanding geographic differences in the rise of guns, germs, and steel as did its origins

The main spreads of food production were from Southwest Asia to Europe, Egypt and North Africa, Ethiopia, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley

From the Sahel and West Africa to East and South Africa

From China to tropical Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan

And from Mesoamerica to North America Moreover, food production even in its areas of

origin became enriched by the addition of crops, livestock, and techniques from other areas of origin

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WHY WAS THE SPREAD OF CROPS FROM THE FERTILE CRESCENT SO RAPID?

The answer depends partly on that east-west axis of Eurasia

Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its season variations

To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation)

And the germination, growth, and disease resistance of plants are adapted to precisely those features of climate

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CONTINENTAL AXES

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Animals too are adapted to latitude-related features

That’s part of the reason why Fertile Crescent domesticates spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading

Thus, Eurasia’s west-east axis allowed Fertile Crescent crops quickly to launch agriculture over the band of temperate latitudes from Ireland to the Indus Valley, and to enrich the agriculture that arose independently in eastern Asia

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But contrast the ease of east-west diffusion in Eurasia with the difficulties of diffusion along Africa's north-south axis

Most of the Fertile Crescent founder crops reached Egypt very quickly and then spread as far south as the cool highlands of Ethiopia, beyond which they didn’t spread

South Africa’s Mediterranean climate would have been ideal for them, but the 2,000 miles of tropical conditions between Ethiopia and South Africa posed an insuperable barrier

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And contrast also the ease of diffusion in Eurasia with its difficulties along the America’s north-south axis

Yes, the cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs, and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the South American Andes

Yet the northward spread of those Andean specialties was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America

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However, latitude is not the only determinant Topographic and ecological barriers, much

more pronounced on some continents than on others, were locally important obstacles to diffusion

For instance, crop diffusion between the U.S. Southeast and the Southwest was very slow and selective although these two regions are at the same latitude due to the intervening area of Texas and the southern Great Plains, lands too dry and unsuitable for agriculture

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Continental differences in axis orientation affected the diffusion not only of food production but also of other technologies and inventions

For example, around 3,000 B.C.E., the invention of the wheel in or near Southwest Asia spread rapidly west and east across much of Eurasia within a few centuries, whereas the wheels invented independently in prehistoric Mexico never spread south to the Andes

In general, societies that engaged in intense exchanges of crops, livestock, and technologies related to food production were more likely to become involved in other exchanges as well

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DISEASE

From a human’s point of view, coughing is a symptom of disease but from a germ’s point of view, it is a clever evolutionary strategy to broadcast the germ

Yet infectious diseases that visit humans as epidemics share several characteristics: they spread quickly and efficiently; they’re “acute” illnesses – a person either dies or recovers completely; those who recover develop antibodies that leave them immune to a recurrence of the disease for a long time; finally, these diseases tend to be restricted to humans

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Crowd diseases could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunters-gatherers and slash-and-burn farmers

Of course, small human populations do have infectious diseases but usually these diseases are caused by microbes capable of maintaining themselves in animals or in the soil, with the result that the disease doesn’t die out but remains constantly available to infect people

Still other infections of small human populations are chronic diseases like leprosy and yaws – since these diseases may take a very long time to kill infected people, infected people remain alive as reservoirs of microbes to infect other members

But the rise of agriculture launched the evolution of crowd infectious diseases

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Agriculture sustains much higher human population densities

In addition, hunter-gatherers frequently shift camp and leave behind their own piles of feces with accumulated microbes and worm larvae

But farmers are sedentary and live amid their own sewage, thus providing microbes with a short path from one person’s body into another’s drinking water

And if the rise of farming was a bonanza for our microbes, the rise of cities was a greater one, as still more densely packed human populations festered under even worse sanitation conditions

Another bonanza was the development of world trade routes which increased contact and spread disease

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Thus, when the human population became sufficiently large and concentrated, crowd diseases could evolve and be sustained

When humans domesticated social animals, such as cows and pigs, they were already afflicted by epidemic diseases just waiting to be transferred to humans

An example is measles which is most closely related to the virus causing rinderpest

The close similarity of the measles virus to the rinderpest virus suggests that the latter transferred from cattle to humans and then evolved into measles virus by changing its properties to adapt to humans

Humans lived in close proximity to their domesticated animals

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And while over a dozen major infectious diseases of “Old Word” origins became established in the “New World” with the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, not a single major killer reached Europe from the Americas

But it is important to remember that Eurasian crowd diseases evolved out of diseases of Eurasian herd animals that became domesticated

The extreme paucity of domestic animals in the “New World” reflects the paucity of wild starting material

Eurasian germs played a key role in decimating the Native American Indians as well as native peoples in the Pacific islands, Australia, and southern Africa

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However, germs did not act solely to Europeans’ advantage

Germs posed the most serious obstacle to European colonization of the tropics

Nonetheless, germs played a significant role in the European conquest and colonization of the Americas and those germs evolved from Eurasians’ long intimacy with domestic animals

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WRITING Writing brings power to modern societies, by

making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times

Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest

History’s oldest writing system is Sumerian cuneiform

Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica

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With the possible exceptions of the Egyptian, Chinese, and Easter Island writing, all other writing systems devised anywhere in the world, at any time, appear to have been descendants of systems modified from or at least inspired by Sumerian or early Mesoamerican writing

Thus, the vast majority of societies with writing acquired it by borrowing it from neighbors or by being inspired by them to develop it, rather than independently inventing it themselves

Therefore, the history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions

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And this is not just true of writing, for much of most new technology is not invented locally but is instead borrowed from other societies

Depending on their geographic location, societies differ in how readily they can receive technology by diffusion from other societies

And because technology begets more technology, the importance of an invention’s diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention

Therefore, time of onset food production, barriers to diffusion, and human population size led to observed intercontinental differences in the development of technology

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Over the past 13,000 years the predominant trend in human society has been the replacement of smaller, less complex units by larger, more complex ones

Of course, a centralized decision maker has the advantage of concentrating troops and resources

And food production, which increases population size, also acts in many ways to make features of complex societies possible

Thus, food production, and competition and diffusion between societies, led as ultimate causes, via chains of causation that differed in detail but that all involved large dense populations and sedentary living, to the proximate agents of conquest: germs, writing, technology, and centralized political organization

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Diamond’s conclusion: “I would say to Yali: the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.”

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1. Continental differences in the wild plant and animal species available as starting materials for domestication

2. Differing rates of diffusion and migrations which were affected by Eurasia’s east-west major axis and relatively modest ecological and geographic barriers and Africa’s and the America’s primary north-south axes and geographic and ecological barriers

3. Also differing rates of diffusion between continents

4. Finally, continental differences in area or total population size – a larger area or population means more potential inventors, more competing societies, more innovations available to adopt – and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies

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These four sets of factors constitute big environmental differences that can be quantified

And of course, there are policies within states – When the Ming Dynasty, a politically unified state, ended the voyages of Zheng He, the expeditions ended whereas Columbus, in a politically fragmented Europe, could request ships from Spain when the king of Portugal refused him

In fact, precisely because Europe was fragmented did Columbus get his ships

But even Europe’s political fragmentation has roots in its geography with its highly indented coastline, five large peninsulas, and many independent languages

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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"

Jared Diamond