GUNS GERMS AND STEEL

THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES

JARED DIAMOND

YALI’S QUESTION

• "Why is that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

• MEANING - Why did wealth and power become so unevenly distributed in the world ?

• Dismisses Eurocentric thinking and racist explanations because they are not proved and wrong.

• Modern stone age peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples.

• Jared uses personal experience to call them more intelligent, more expressive and more interested in things and people around them.

FROM EDEN TO CAJAMARCA

• African apes evolved into upright standing ancestors of human beings began 4 million years ago

• The Great Leap Forward - 50,000 years ago when standardized stone tools and cave paintings of modern skeleton of people appeared appeared. 

• Cro-Magnons moved into Europe 40,000 years ago and brought Technologies: Tools, needles, fishhooks, harpoons, bows and arrows, houses, carefully buried skeletons, art, hunting big prey.

They Displaced or killed the natives Neandertals.

• Around the same time with a major extension of the range of humans to Australia and New Guinea using watercraft 40,000 years ago.  Mass extinctions of large mammals there occurred simultaneously. 

• The Americas were colonized with the Clovis culture 11,000 BC. This corresponded to the end of the Pleistocene Era, the recession of the last Ice Age, and the beginning of the Recent Era, and was also associated with mass extinctions

Natural History Experiment

• MORIORI and MAORI history is clear indication of influence of environment on human societies.

• Both the Maori and Moriori descended from the same Polynesian farmers who settled New Zealand.

The Moriori 

• moved to the Chatham islands hundreds of years earlier

• could not farm due to the cold climate, and became hunter/gatherers.

• live peacefully and in harmony because of limited resources.

The New Zealand Maori

• Warmer climate suitable for farming, thus surplus was produced and stored.

• dense populations with more complex technology and political organization

• Was technologically advanced and was at constant war with neighboring populations

The BASIC difference was geography.

Francisco Pizarro

 

IN 1532, Francisco Pizarro and a few hundred men DEFEATED the Inca emperor Atahuallpa and 80,000 soilders at Cajamarca Peru,

• by means of superior steel weapons, horses and early guns (harquebuses). 

 • new diseases (that wiped out 95% of Native Americans),

 • Much advanced maritime technology (ships with sextants and

compasses brought them there),  • writing facilitating better communication (Atahuallpa had heard little

about the treacherous Spanish whereas Pizarro had heard from Cortés on his success in Mexico),

 • centralized political organization (Holy Roman Empire of Charles V). 

Still, why was it that the Europeans had all of the advantages instead of the Incas?

Funeral of Atahualpa

 

THE RISE AND SPREAD OF FOOD PRODUCTION

This diagram gives a schematic overview of factors from ultimate to proximate which led to the dominance of present day Western cultures. Eurasia’s East-West axis gave it an advantage for spreading crops, farm animals and new technologies.

• the major independent sites of food production (with their major primary domesticates [imported domesticates in brackets]) include:

• The Fertile Crescent of SW Asia, 8500 BC: emmer & einkorn wheat, barley, pea, lentil, chickpea, flax, muskmelon, olive, sheep, goat

• China, by 7500 BC: rice, millet, soybean, mung bean, hemp, pig, silkworm

• Mesoamerica, by 3500 BC: corn, beans, squash, cotton, yucca, agave, jicama, turkey

• Andes and Amazonia, by 3500 BC: potato, manioc, quinoa, lima, bean, peanut, cotton, sweet potato, oca, squashes, [corn], llama, guinea pig

• Eastern US, 2500 BC: sunflower, goosefoot (chenopod), Jerusalem artichoke, squash; no animals, pulses, nuts, or fruits

• Sahel [sub-Sahara], by 5000 BC: sorghum, African rice, guinea fowl • Tropical W Africa, by 3000 BC: African yams and rice, sorghum,

millet, oil palm, cotton, watermelon, bottle gourd, no animals • Ethiopia: coffee, teff, millet, no animals • New Guinea, by 7000 BC: sugar cane, yams, taro, banana; no

animals (except dogs), grains, or pulses.

TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM

• The decision to convert from hunter-gatherer to the alternate strategy of food producer is a gradual one.

• Early farmers were smaller and less-well-nourished and worked harder than the hunter-gatherers they replaced.

• Reasons shift competitive advantage:o Decline availability of wild foods.o Increase in availability of domesticable wild plants.o Cumulative development of food production technology.o Rise food production results in rise population density.

• Hunter-gatherers have persisted to modern times in Khoisan, California, and Australia.

Advantages of Agricultural Societies

• More food, more people.

• Uses of Domestic animals o Meato Pull plows, cartso Transportation, waro Furs, fibero Fertilizero Deadly germs

• Grain Storage Supports specialists: Kings bureaucrats soldiers priests artisans.

• The rise of food production in the Fertile Crescent was facilitated by• the Mediterranean climate.• favoring annuals plants.• a large number of abundant and highly productive crops.• hermaphroditic self-pollinators.• a high percentage of plants suitable for domestication. • many domestic-able mammals. • Less competition from hunter gatherers.

• In contrast, Mesoamerica, New Guinea, and the Eastern US had

• limited available large seed grasses.• fewer domestic-able animals.• lesser edible pulses, & high protein domestic plants.

• Many qualities must be present in an animal species before people can domesticate it. The requirements for domestication are:

– Diet : omnivore or herbivore.

(2) Growth rate: only animals with rapid growth are worth keeping (elephants too slow).

(3) Problems with captive breeding.

(4) nasty disposition : tendency to kill humans. E.g grizzly bear, hippo, onager, zebra, and African buffalo.

(5) Tendency to panic: deer, gazelle, and antelope panic and are difficult to keep captive.

(6) Social structure: have a developed social structure and hierarchy so can accept subordinate role and herding (e.g., cats and ferrets don't herd).

FROM FOOD TO GUNS GERMS AND STEEL

• The most of the major infectious diseases or "killers of humanity" were acquired from animals like smallpox , flu , tuberculosis , malaria , bubonic plague, measles , and cholera.  

• The sequence of creation of epidemic illnesses confined to humans is: (1) Infections in animals which occasionally infect humans. (2) These are then communicated between persons but then die out. (3) sustained epidemic human diseases that have not yet been shown to

die out. (4) exclusively human epidemics eg small pox.

• The "trade" in diseases was a little more balanced in Africa and southern Asia: endemic malaria and yellow fever became the most notorious of the tropical killers. 

• The lack of domesticated animals prevented New World acquisition of human epidemic diseases from their own domestic animals.

THE WRITING

• Writing in its intial form was used in fertile crescent to keep account of domesticated animals and grains.

• Writing was initially used in complex stratified societies by an elite few to maintain palace records and manage bureaucratic accounts, collect taxes, facilitate enslavement, promulgate propaganda and myths, promote religious practice etc. 

• Writing was not used by hunter-gatherer societies because it lacked the institutional uses of early writings.

• Thus food production and years of societal evolution was essential for evolution of writing.

• Importance of writing is clearly shown bt Francisco Pizarro’s conquest over the Inca emperor Atahuallpa.

THE INVENTIONS

• Necessity is the mother of all inventions.

• Food production and large population and land mass favor more rapid technological development, e.g. in Eurasia.

• Technology is autocatalytic, begetting more technology, and the rate of development can accelerate dramatically. For example Printing is a combination of advances in 6 other technologies- paper, movable type, script , ink presses and metallurgy.

• The main factors leading to the difference in technological development between the conquering Europeans and the New World inhabitants were: level of food production, barriers to diffusion, and differences in human population.

EURASIA

• It was easier for domestic plants, animals and later, technology like wheels, writing to spread East-West in Eurasia than North- South in Americas.

• THUS,o Fertile Crescent crops

spread to Egypt, N. Africa, Europe, India and eventually to China.

o Rapid spread of same or similar domestication.

• Movement of people and cargo from north to south was hindered by drastic changed in climate and length of day as we move through different latitudes.

• Thus, no exchange of crops, animals, writing, wheel.

The New World

AROUND THE WORLD IN FIVE CHAPTERS

• Penetration of Europeans in New Guinea was slow due to malaria, etc. as well as due to the poor thriving of their cattle and crops.  Australia was easier to settle, allowing the decimation of aborigines by Europeans who imported their technologies, guns, epidemics, etc.

• One of the most significant movements of human history was the Austronesian expansion into Southeast Asia and the Pacific, starting from Taiwan and Southern China around 3000 BC.

• Equipped with outrigger canoes, domestic animals and agriculture, Austronesian-speaking peoples overran and replaced the hunter-gatherer populations of Indonesia and the Philippines, and eventually expanded into the Pacific in the Polynesian diaspora. But the Austronesians failed to penetrate far into New Guinea, or to have any significant impact on Australia.

• In Africa, Iron-working and agriculture powered the Bantu expansion into southern Africa, displacing the pygmies and the Khoi-San.

• The answer to Yali's question is that accidents of geography and environment brought about the domination of whites of Eurasian origin: differences in

• (1) animal and plant domestication. • (2) rates of diffusion and migration due to

ecological and geographical barriers including between continents.

• (3) continental differences in population and areal size.

Thank you