Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond, “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” W. W. Norton & Co, 1999, 425 pp. (Paperback)


This book attempts to answer questions about inequality in the modern world: Why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians? (p. 15). (This book really should be read before “Civilization”—a book I read and posted my review of just before this one). Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? The short answer to this is that history followed different course for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.

Diamond, a UCLA physiologist, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals & the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government & communication, & increased resistance to disease. 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 most important point of the book concerns the difference between the Eurasian continent east-west axis orientation versus the Americas and African north-south axis orientation. p. 176: Looking at a world map you will notice that the Americas span a much greater distance north-south (9,000) miles than east-west: only 3,000 miles at the widest, narrowing to a mere 40 miles at the Isthmus of Panama. The same is more or less true of Africa: the primary axis in north-south. Therefore when you are on the same latitude for great distances, what works for crops in one area should mostly work the same along that latitude as the climates will be similar. This is not true when going north-south: a couple 100 miles can cause vast differences in types of crops and knowledge of those crops is somewhat useless to pass along.

My notes:
p. 16: Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 B.C., all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers even though some village life began in a few parts of the world and it is undisputed that peopling of the Americas was occurring (the oldest unquestioned human remains in the Americas are at sites in Alaska dated around 12,000 B.C). 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.

p. 36: Fossils indicate that the evolutionary line leading to us had achieved a substantially upright posture by around 4 million years ago, then our ancestors began to increase in body size and in relative brain size around 2.5 million years ago. Although Homo erectus, the stage reached around 1.7 million years ago, was close to us modern humans in body size, its brain size was still barely half of ours. All of that human history, for the first 5 or 6 million years after our origins about 7 million years ago, remained confined to Africa.

p. 40: Some 40,000 years ago, into Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their modern skeletons, superior weapons, and other advanced cultural traits. Within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe for hundreds of thousands of years.

p. 46: About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa’s Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs. Just as in Australia/New Guinea, in the Americas most of those large mammals became extinct around 11,000 B.C. It appears they were hunted to extinction.

p. 77: 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. Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600s, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River. Archaeological excavations and descriptions left by the very first European explorers on our coasts suggest that around 20 million Indians inhabited North America—mostly disease reduced this to 1 million in the century or two following Columbus’s arrival. The same happened in South Africa, Australia, Pacific Islands, and Hawaii. On the other hand, 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. Humans who first domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly evolved germs which came from the animals. Thus Europeans had already experienced natural selection vis- a-vis these germs before they invaded areas having no animals to domesticate.

p. 112: By 8,000 B.C. population density had increased in the Fertile Crescent and hunter-gathering no longer could provide enough food. Wild cereals were now more abundant and inventions necessary for collecting, processing, and storing cereals efficiently were available: food production began.

p. 157: The Anna Karenina principle: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By this Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness. This principle applied to Eurasian domestication of large animals and the failure of the southern hemisphere to domesticate large animals such as the zebra (which to this day has not been domesticated).

p. 176: Looking at a world map you will notice that the Americas span a much greater distance north-south (9,000) miles than east-west: only 3,000 miles at the widest, narrowing to a mere 40 miles at the Isthmus of Panama. The same is more or less true of Africa: the primary axis in north-south.

p. 195: The ultimate cause of abandoning hunter-gathering to a dominance of food production led to the proximate causes of germs, literacy, technology, and centralized government. The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans. Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War. The bubonic plague killed one-quarter of Europe’s population between 1346 and 1352.

p. 215: Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest. Commands of monarchs were conveyed in writing, fleets set their courses by maps and written sailing directions prepared by previous expeditions, written accounts of earlier expeditions motivated later ones. With the possible exceptions of the Egyptian, Chinese, and Easter Island writing, all other writing systems devised anywhere in the world appear to have been descendants of systems modified from Sumerian or early Mesoamerican writing. Here, again, the east-west axis orientation allowed a rapid spread of the technology.

p. 268: The author provides an interesting table describing types of societies:

The band has 5 to 80 people, are usually related by blood, typically nomadic, have 1 language and ethnicity, have egalitarian government with informal leadership, no bureaucracy, no formal structures for conflict resolution, no economic specialization (e.g., Bushmen, pygmies).

The tribe has hundreds of people, often fixed settlements, consist of kin-based clans, still 1 ethnicity and language, have egalitarian or "big-man" government, informal and often difficult conflict resolution problems (e.g., much of New Guinea, Amazonia).
Chiefdoms have thousands of people, have 1 or more villages possibly with a paramount village, have class and residence relationships, still 1 ethnicity, have centralized often hereditary rule, include monopoly and centralized conflict resolution, justify kleptocracy and a redistributive economy (requiring tribute), have intensive food production, early division of labor, luxury goods, etc.... (e.g., Polynesia, sub-Saharan Africa, etc.)
States have over 50,000 people, have many villages and a capital, have class and residence based relationships, 1 or more languages and ethnicities, centralized government, many levels of bureaucracy, monopolies of force and information, have formalized laws and judges, may justify kleptocracy, have intensive food production, division of labor, pay taxes, public architecture, etc.

Kleptocrats maintain power by disarming the populace and arming the elite, making the masses happy by redistributing the tribute, keeping order and curbing violence (compared to bands and tribes), promoting religion and ideology that justifies kleptocracy (and that promotes self-sacrifice on behalf of others), building public works, etc.
States are especially good at developing weapons of war, providing troops, promoting religion (fanaticism) and patriotic fervor that makes troops willing to fight suicidally. States arise not just from the natural tendency of man (as Aristotle suggested), but by social contract, in response to needs for irrigation ("hydraulic theory"), and regional population size. The large populations require intensive food production, which contributes (1) seasonal workers for other purposes, (2) stored food surpluses which feed specialists and other elite, (3) sedentary living. Increased opportunities in states for conflicts forces the development of laws. The processes by which states form virtually never include voluntary merger, but rather (1) merger under threat of force (e.g., the Cherokee Indian federation), or (2) merger by conquest (e.g., the Zulus)--when population density is high, the defeated men are often killed and the women taken in marriage.

p. 273: With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part of the solution was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force. States began to arise around 3700 B.C. in Mesopotamia and around 300 B.C. in Mesoamerica, over 2,000 years ago in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia, and over 1,000 years ago in West Africa.

p. 313: Archaeological evidence establishes that human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture.

p. 413: Europe’s fragmentation vis-a-vis China led to Columbus’s success in getting sponsorship for his voyages: he went to 5 separate monarchs before getting approval. Those potentially harmful effects of unity have flared up again in modern China, notably during the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when a decision by one or a few leaders closed the whole country’s school systems for five years.