★★★★★ 5
Outstanding work of history, one of the best ever
_Guns, Germs, and Steel_ by Jared Diamond is one of the most informative, epic, well-written, and fascinating "macrohistory" books I have ever read. In this book, Diamond discussed the rise of complex human societies in the last 13,000 years, seeking to answer one fundamental question; why did some civilizations come to dominate others? Why did the Fertile Crescent and China for instance develop advanced societies with, as the title suggests, guns, germs, and steel, while other areas of the world, such as Polynesia, Australia, and the Americas, did not? Or in those cases where some civilizations were beginning to acquire such things, why did they get off to such a late start? Why did the Spanish conquer the Incans instead of vice versa?
In a nutshell, he concluded that societies developed differently on different continents not because of racial differences in attitudes or intelligence, but because of differences in continental environments. Advanced technology, centralized political organizations, writing, and professional armies (or simply put the military advantage of simply having large numbers of people), etc. could only emerge in dense, sedentary populations capable of accumulating food surpluses.
Unfortunately, domesticable wild plant and animal species needed for agriculture to arise were very unevenly distributed around the world, with the most valuable species concentrated in only nine small areas of the globe (Southwest Asia, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes and the adjacent Amazon basin, the eastern U.S., Africa's Sahel, West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea), all of which became the earliest homelands of agriculture and thus regions that got a head start on developing guns, germs, and steel.
Animals were vital to a society as a source of meat, milk products, fertilizer, transportation, leather, for military use, plow traction, and wool and those areas that lacked suitable animals to domesticate suffered accordingly in terms of societal development. The Late Pleistocene extinctions of large mammals in the Americas and Australia deprived humanity in those areas of potentially very valuable domesticable species. Of the big (over 100 pound) herbivores and omnivores, 148 potential candidates for domestication, they are mostly located in Eurasia (72 candidate species, versus 51 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 24 in the Americas, and 1 in Australia). Further, out of those candidates, only 14 were actually domesticated, 13 of them in Eurasia; what he called the "Major Five" - sheep, the goat, cow, pig, and horse, and the "Minor Nine" - the Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, mithan (wild ancestor the gaur, found primarily in India and Burma), and the one American one, the llama and alpaca (two well-differentiated breeds of the same species). The other 134 potential candidates were eliminated due to problems with diet, growth rate, problems of captive breeding, nasty disposition, tendency to panic, and/or social structure, any one problem enough to preclude domestication even in modern times. Of further interest, Southwest Asia had seven of the wild ancestors naturally occurring, a huge advantage.
In the world of plants there were similar disparities in distribution; of the 56 species of grass with the heaviest seeds, at least 10 times heavier than median species, Eurasia's Mediterranean zone had 32 of them, with barley and emmer wheat 3rd and 13th respectively in seed size. In contrast, of the 56 species, only 6 were found in East Asia, 4 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 11 in the Americas, and 2 in Australia.
Another set of differences lead to a variation in societal evolution in the case of plant and animal domestications as well as in technological innovations and political institutions, as most societies acquire much more from other societies than they invent themselves (his discussion on the evolution of writing and in particular the alphabet in this regard was fascinating). Diffusion and migration within and between continents played a very important role in the development of a society, and in some continents diffusion and migration was considerably easier, most rapid in Eurasia because of its east-west major axis and its relatively modest ecological and geographical barriers. As crops and animals depended strongly on climate and hence on latitude, huge areas ranging almost from the Atlantic to the Pacific were open to the movement of domesticated plants and animals. Diffusion was slower in Africa and especially in the Americas due to those continents north-south major axes (traveling just a few hundred or a thousand miles north or south can render a society's crops and animals completely unsuitable for use) and much more pronounced geographic and ecological barriers (such as the Sahara Desert in Africa). Similarly, diffusion in the last 6,000 years has been easiest from Eurasia to sub-Saharan Africa, while long completely absent between Eurasia and the Americas (isolated at low latitudes by broad oceans and at high latitudes by geography and by a climate suitable just for hunter-gatherers).
The last set of major factors he analyzed related to continental differences in area or total population size. A larger area or population meant more inventors, more competing societies, more innovations that exist to be adopted, and more pressure to adopt and retain those innovations, as those societies that fail to do so tend to be eliminated or absorbed by competing societies. Among the world's landmasses, area and the number of competing societies were greatest for Eurasia, while considerably smaller for Australia for instance. The Americas, despite their rather large total land area, were in effect fragmented by ecology and geography into a series of poorly connected smaller continents.
Relating to both population size and the "Eurasians' long intimacy with domestic animals" was the development of germs. Crowd diseases could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn farmers, nor perhaps would they develop at all, as only human association with cattle gave us for instance measles (evolved from rinderpest) and smallpox (evolved from cowpox).
Obviously I have just scratched the surface in my review. This is an excellent book that ties together findings in history, archaeology, paleontology, epidemiology, and linguistics in an extremely readable and informative format.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2005
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