Download Reflections: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Elizabeth Hardwick
E. Napp
“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.”
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-foodproducing 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,
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“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…”

*Southwest Asia (known as the Near East or
Fertile Crescent
*China
*Mesoamerica
*The Andes
*The Eastern United States
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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
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:


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
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
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:

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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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)

Growth rate
To be worth keeping, domesticates must grow
quickly.
Think about it.
Modern Asians who want work elephants find it
much cheaper to capture them in the wild and
tame them.
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What would-be gorilla or elephant rancher
would wait 15 years for his herd to reach adult
size?

Problems of Captive Breeding
Some valuable animal species, like cheetahs,
won’t mate in captivity.
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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.
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
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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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.

Tendency to Panic
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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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.

Social Structure
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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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.
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.
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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Only a small percentage of wild mammal species
ended up in happy marriages with humans, by
virtue of compatibility on all those separate
counts.


Second, Australia and the Americas lost most of
their candidates in a massive wave of latePleistocene 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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
So, Eurasia, befitting its large area and ecological
diversity, started out with the most candidates
for domestication
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 northsouth 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-andburn 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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
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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.”
1.
2.
4.
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3.
Continental differences in the wild plant and
animal species available as starting materials for
domestication
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
Also differing rates of diffusion between continents
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
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
Jared Diamond
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different courses for
different peoples because
of differences among
peoples' environments,
not because of biological
differences among
peoples themselves"