When I first read "Guns, Germs, and Steel," I was blown away by Jared Diamond's ability to weave together history, geography, and ecology into a compelling narrative about the rise of human civilization. I´ve always been fascinated by the complexities of human history, and I found Diamond's arguments to be insightful and thought-provoking.
One of the things that I found most compelling about the book was Diamond's argument that geography (which I have never taken a special interest in) played such a crucial role in shaping the course of human history. Being someone who see history through a capitalist/tech lens, I had always assumed that the development of human civilization was largely determined by human ingenuity and innovation.
But Diamond's argument adds one factor that drives home this point further: that the availability of certain resources, such as domesticable plants and animals, played a critical role in determining which societies developed more quickly was eye-opening.
More resources, more people flocking to an area. And the larger the population size, the larger the role in determining the level of technological advancement achieved by different societies.
According to Diamond, a larger population provides several advantages for a society:
Division of labor: A larger population allows for a greater division of labor, with individuals specializing in different tasks. This specialization leads to increased efficiency and productivity, and allows for the development of more complex technologies.
Innovation: A larger population provides a larger pool of potential inventors, increasing the likelihood that a society will develop new technologies.
Competition: A larger population leads to increased competition for resources, which can drive innovation and technological advancement.
Eurasian societies, which had a larger population and more productive agricultural systems, were able to develop more advanced technologies than societies in other regions. This, in turn, gave them an advantage in terms of military power and economic growth.
Diamond poses the question:
💡 “Some New World cities like Tenochtitlán were among the world’s most populous cities at the time. Why didn’t Tenochtitlán have awful germs waiting for the Spaniards?”
Diamond also discusses the impact of disease on population size and technological advancement. Since Eurasian societies had lived in close proximity to domesticated animals for centuries, they developed immunities to a wide range of diseases. When these societies came into contact with societies in the Americas, which had not been exposed to Eurasian diseases, the resulting epidemics devastated the indigenous populations and paved the way for European colonization.
What´s refreshing is that Jared Diamond does not present a racial explanation for the differences in technological advancement among different societies in "Guns, Germs, and Steel."
Instead, he argues that environmental factors such as geography, access to domesticable plants and animals, and the availability of trade routes and transportation technologies were the primary drivers of technological advancement.
Diamond explicitly rejects the idea that some societies are inherently more intelligent or capable than others based on their race or genetics. He acknowledges that there is no scientific basis for race as a biological concept and argues that differences in intelligence or capability among different societies are the result of historical, cultural, and environmental factors rather than genetics.
These things really need to be affirmed in the 2020s!
In fact, Diamond emphasizes that technological development and achievement are not solely the result of individual or group effort, but rather are influenced by a wide range of factors, including geography, history, and culture. He argues that technological progress is not linear or deterministic, but the result of complex and often unpredictable interactions between different societies and their environments.
Overall, Diamond's argument about the role of population size in technological advancement challenges the idea that some societies are inherently more innovative or industrious than others. Instead, he argues that population size and environmental factors played a crucial role in determining the level of technological advancement achieved by different societies, highlighting the role of environmental factors and historical contingencies rather than genetics or inherent differences between races.
Whether you are a history buff, a student of ecology, or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, I highly recommend this book.
Some of my favorite quotes:
Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 B.C., all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native Americans remained hunter-gatherers, most of Eurasia and much of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa gradually developed agriculture, herding, metallurgy, and complex political organization. Parts of Eurasia, and one area of the Americas, independently developed writing as well. However, each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia than elsewhere. For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier. The stone technology of the Tasmanians, when first encountered by European explorers in A.D. 1642, was simpler than that prevalent in parts of Upper Paleolithic Europe tens of thousands of years earlier. Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern.
A SUITABLE STARTING POINT FROM WHICH TO COMPARE historical developments on the different continents is around 11,000 B.C.* This date corresponds approximately to the beginnings of village life in a few parts of the world, the first undisputed peopling of the Americas, the end of the Pleistocene Era and last Ice Age, and the start of what geologists term the Recent Era. Plant and animal domestication began in at least one part of the world within a few thousand years of that date. As of then, did the people of some continents already have a head start or a clear advantage over peoples of other continents?
The variations among Polynesian societies associated with different population densities and sizes were as follows. 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. The latter two islands supported hereditary part-time craft specialists, including canoe builders, navigators, stone masons, bird catchers, and tattooers.
As a result of all this environmentally related variation in subsistence, human population densities (measured in people per square mile of arable land) varied greatly over Polynesia. At the lower end were the hunter-gatherers of the Chathams (only 5 people per square mile) and of New Zealand’s South Island, and the farmers of the rest of New Zealand (28 people per square mile). In contrast, many islands with intensive agriculture attained population densities exceeding 120 per square mile. Tonga, Samoa, and the Societies achieved 210–250 people per square mile and Hawaii 300. The upper extreme of 1,100 people per square mile was reached on the high island of Anuta, whose population converted essentially all the land to intensive food production, thereby crammed 160 people into the island’s 100 acres, and joined the ranks of the densest self-sufficient populations in the world. Anuta’s population density exceeded that of modern Holland and even rivaled that of Bangladesh.
Population size is the product of population density (people per square mile) and area (square miles). The relevant area is not the area of an island but that of a political unit, which could be either larger or smaller than a single island. On the one hand, islands near one another might become combined into a single political unit. On the other hand, single large rugged islands were divided into many independent political units. Hence the area of the political unit varied not only with an island’s area but also with its fragmentation and isolation.
For small isolated islands without strong barriers to internal communication, the entire island constituted the political unit—as in the case of Anuta, with its 160 people. Many larger islands never did become unified politically, whether because the population consisted of dispersed bands of only a few dozen hunter-gatherers each (the Chathams and New Zealand’s southern South Island), or of farmers scattered over large distances (the rest of New Zealand), or of farmers living in dense populations but in rugged terrain precluding political unification.
A political unit’s population size interacted with its population density to influence Polynesian technology and economic, social, and political organization. In general, the larger the size and the higher the density, the more complex and specialized were the technology and organization, for reasons that we shall examine in detail in later chapters. Briefly, at high population densities only a portion of the people came to be farmers, but they were mobilized to devote themselves to intensive food production, thereby yielding surpluses to feed nonproducers. The nonproducers mobilizing them included chiefs, priests, bureaucrats, and warriors. The biggest political units could assemble large labor forces to construct irrigation systems and fishponds that intensified food production even further. These developments were especially apparent on Tonga, Samoa, and the Societies, all of which were fertile, densely populated, and moderately large by Polynesian standards. The trends reached their zenith on the Hawaiian Archipelago, consisting of the largest tropical Polynesian islands, where high population densities and large land areas meant that very large labor forces were potentially available to individual chiefs.
Political complexity was greatest on Tonga and Hawaii, where the powers of hereditary chiefs approximated those of kings elsewhere in the world, and where land was controlled by the chiefs, not by the commoners. Using appointed bureaucrats as agents, chiefs requisitioned food from the commoners and also conscripted them to work on large construction projects
At the time of Europeans’ arrival in the 18th century, the Tongan chiefdom or state had already become an inter-archipelagal empire. Because the Tongan Archipelago itself was geographically close-knit and included several large islands with unfragmented terrain, each island became unified under a single chief; then the hereditary chiefs of the largest Tongan island (Tongatapu) united the whole archipelago, and eventually they conquered islands outside the archipelago up to 500 miles distant. They engaged in regular long-distance trade with Fiji and Samoa, established Tongan settlements in Fiji, and began to raid and conquer parts of Fiji. The conquest and administration of this maritime proto-empire were achieved by navies of large canoes, each holding up to 150 men.
At the time of Hawaii’s “discovery” by Europeans in 1778, political unification had already taken place within each Hawaiian island, and some political fusion between islands had begun. The four largest islands—Big Island (Hawaii in the narrow sense), Maui, Oahu, and Kauai—remained independent, controlling (or jockeying with each other for control of) the smaller islands (Lanai, Molokai, Kahoolawe, and Niihau). After the arrival of Europeans, the Big Island’s King Kamehameha I rapidly proceeded with the consolidation of the largest islands by purchasing European guns and ships to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu.
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. All those differences among Polynesian societies developed, within a relatively short time and modest fraction of the Earth’s surface, as environmentally related variations on a single ancestral society. Those categories of cultural differences within Polynesia are essentially the same categories that emerged everywhere else in the world.
Polynesia offers us a small slice, not the full spectrum, of the world’s human social diversity. That shouldn’t surprise us, since Polynesia provides only a small slice of the world’s geographic diversity. In addition, since Polynesia was colonized so late in human history, even the oldest Polynesian societies had only 3,200 years in which to develop, as opposed to at least 13,000 years for societies on even the last-colonized continents (the Americas). Given a few more millennia, perhaps Tonga and Hawaii would have reached the level of full-fledged empires battling each other for control of the Pacific
Polynesia furnishes us with a convincing example of environmentally related diversification of human societies in operation.
One of the key factors in world history: diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, by decimating many peoples on other continents.
I do not mean to imply, however, that the role of disease in history was confined to paving the way for European expansion. Malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases of tropical Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea furnished the most important obstacle to European colonization of those tropical areas.
PIZARRO’S CAPTURE of Atahualpa illustrates the set of proximate factors that resulted in Europeans’ colonizing the New World instead of Native Americans’ colonizing Europe. 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.
Long before anyone began manufacturing guns and steel, others of those same factors had led to the expansions of some non-European peoples.
For most of the time since the ancestors of modern humans diverged from the ancestors of the living great apes, around 7 million years ago, all humans on Earth fed themselves exclusively by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants, as the Blackfeet still did in the 19th century. It was only within the last 11,000 years that some peoples turned to what is termed food production: that is, domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops. Today, most people on Earth consume food that they produced themselves or that someone else produced for them. At current rates of change, within the next decade the few remaining bands of hunter-gatherers will abandon their ways, disintegrate, or die out, thereby ending our millions of years of commitment to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
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.
Availability of more consumable calories means more people. Among wild plant and animal species, only a small minority are edible to humans or worth hunting or gathering. Most species are useless to us as food, for one or more of the following reasons: 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). Most biomass (living biological matter) on land is in the form of wood and leaves, most of which we cannot digest. By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.
Plant and animal domestication led to denser human populations by yielding more food than did the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. A more indirect way involved the consequences of the sedentary lifestyle enforced by food production. People of many hunter-gatherer societies move frequently in search of wild foods, but farmers must remain near their fields and orchards. The resulting fixed abode contributes to denser human populations by permitting a shortened birth interval. A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed. The birth interval for many farm peoples is around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats and hereditary chiefs, and to have small-scale political organization at the level of the band or tribe. That’s because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers are obliged to devote much of their time to acquiring food. 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. Hence moderate-sized agricultural societies are often organized in chiefdoms, and kingdoms are confined to large agricultural societies. Those complex political units are much better able to mount a sustained war of conquest than is an egalitarian band of hunters.
A stored food surplus built up by taxation can support other full-time specialists besides kings and bureaucrats. Of most direct relevance to wars of conquest, it can be used to feed professional soldiers. That was the decisive factor in the British Empire’s eventual defeat of New Zealand’s well-armed indigenous Maori population. While the Maori achieved some stunning temporary victories, they could not maintain an army constantly in the field and were in the end worn down by 18,000 full-time British troops. 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.
Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much 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
MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY HAS CONSISTED OF UNEQUAL conflicts between the haves and the have-nots: between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times. It should come as no surprise that food production never arose in large areas of the globe, for ecological reasons that still make it difficult or impossible there today.
What cries out for explanation is the failure of food production to appear, until modern times, in some ecologically very suitable areas that are among the world’s richest centers of agriculture and herding today. Foremost among these puzzling areas, where indigenous peoples were still hunter-gatherers when European colonists arrived, were California and the other Pacific states of the United States, the Argentine pampas, southwestern and southeastern Australia, and much of the Cape region of South Africa.
Only a few areas of the world developed food production independently, and they did so at widely differing times. From those nuclear areas, hunter-gatherers of some neighboring areas learned food production, and peoples of other neighboring areas were replaced by invading food producers from the nuclear areas—again at widely differing times. Finally, peoples of some areas ecologically suitable for food production neither evolved nor acquired agriculture in prehistoric times at all; they persisted as hunter-gatherers until the modern world finally swept upon them. The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history.
There exist many actual cases of hunter-gatherers who did see food production practiced by their neighbors, and who nevertheless refused to accept its supposed blessings and instead remained hunter-gatherers.
Still other hunter-gatherers in contact with farmers did eventually become farmers, but only after what may seem to us like an inordinately long delay.
What actually happened was not a discovery of food production, nor an invention, as we might first assume. There was often not even a conscious choice between food production and hunting-gathering.
Food production evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences.
The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways.
Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. They concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods.
People seek food in order to satisfy their hunger and fill their bellies. They also crave specific foods, such as protein-rich foods, fat, salt, sweet fruits, and foods that simply taste good. All other things being equal, people seek to maximize their return of calories, protein, or other specific food categories by foraging in a way that yields the most return with the greatest certainty in the least time for the least effort. Simultaneously, they seek to minimize their risk of starving: moderate but reliable returns are preferable to a fluctuating lifestyle with a high time-averaged rate of return but a substantial likelihood of starving to death.
We should not suppose that the decision to adopt farming was made in a vacuum, as if the people had previously had no means to feed themselves. Instead, we must consider food production and hunting-gathering as alternative strategies competing with each other. Mixed economies that added certain crops or livestock to hunting-gathering also competed against both types of “pure” economies, and against mixed economies with higher or lower proportions of food production. Nevertheless, over the last 10,000 years, the predominant result has been a shift from hunting-gathering to food production.
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. In places where they were already numerous or where geography retarded immigration by food producers, local hunter-gatherers did have time to adopt farming in prehistoric times and thus to survive as farmers.
With so few major crops in the world, all of them domesticated thousands of years ago, it’s less surprising that many areas of the world had no wild native plants at all of outstanding potential. Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.
I don’t subscribe to the obvious fallacy that every society promptly adopts every innovation that would be useful for it. The fact is that, over entire continents and other large areas containing hundreds of competing societies, some societies will be more open to innovation, and some will be more resistant. The ones that do adopt new crops, livestock, or technology may thereby be enabled to nourish themselves better and to outbreed, displace, conquer, or kill off societies resisting innovation. That’s an important phenomenon whose manifestations extend far beyond the adoption of new crops
Consider all the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa living within the range of wild zebras and buffalo. Why wasn’t there at least one African hunter-gatherer tribe that domesticated those zebras and buffalo and that thereby gained sway over other Africans, without having to await the arrival of Eurasian horses and cattle? All these facts indicate that the explanation for the lack of native mammal domestication outside Eurasia lay with the locally available wild mammals themselves, not with the local peoples.