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by
W.W. Norton
& Co., 1997
Reviewed by
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel has done for the history of civilization what On the Origin of Species did for evolution. The germ of Diamond's work was a question posed to him 25 years ago by a New Guinean: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Diamond asks why certain peoples came to dominate the globe while others became asterisks in the history of civilization. Why didn't Africans or Native Americans build ships to explore and conquer Europe?
Once it was commonly supposed that a presumed racial inferiority of non-Europeans held them back. But the Neolithic forebears of modern Europeans simply and luckily had better resources, Diamond says. Eurasia was rich in domesticable plants and animals, while Australia was impoverished and other continents were only moderately equipped. The agriculturally wealthy aboriginal Eurasians had a long head start in developing the tools of civilization, such as writing and steel, that afford decisive advantages in both war and peace. The Eurasians' lead allowed Western peoples to beat others to this point, assuring European hegemony.
Diamond amply documents that the Fertile Crescent, which gave rise to European civilization, had the best agricultural resources of the five to nine cradles of agriculture. Its grasses had the greatest variety of the largest seeds. The region also had plenty of large, domesticable animals. Goats, sheep, pigs, and cows were quickly tamed; eventually, early farms might have 13 substantial mammals. Elsewhere in the world, only the llama was domesticated. Besides supplying meat and dairy, domestic beasts powered the implements of early agriculture, sending production statistics soaring among the haves of the Neolithic. Horses became the tanks and fighter planes of preindustrial Western societies.
The deeper thread running through Diamond's book is that civilization evolves predictably, largely as a function of resources and population size and density. During rich periods, small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers may coalesce by the hundreds into village-based tribes. Chiefdoms evolve, often violently, from tribes that have successfully adopted agriculture. Chiefdoms comprise thousands of people, often in many villages. At this point, civilization starts to look familiar to modern Westerners. Conflict-mediating laws are codified in chiefdoms since most people there are strangers, lacking the bonding ties of blood and marriage in bands or tribes. Similarly, class structure, division of labor, and slavery first appear in chiefdoms. The ruling class mobilizes citizens and their resources to wage war, build public works, and increase political power.
The final development is the state, populated in numbers greater than 50,000. It was the state that nurtured the technological developments and political organization enabling Spain, and then other European countries, to muster fleets of soldiers on transatlantic conquests as early as the 1500s. When Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spanish soldiers faced 80,000 Incas under the ruler Atahuallpa, they had more than steel weapons and horses to bring to bear against the latter's arsenal of stone, wood, and bronze. The Spaniards had a literate society's perspective on a few thousand years of European history, military and otherwise, and on Western explorations of the Americas. They knew how Cortez had conquered the Aztecs and they imitated his strategy. The Incas lacked writing, and "Atahuallpa remained entirely ignorant about Spain's [earlier] conquests of Central America's most powerful and populous Indian societies," Diamond writes.
Countering the old argument that lower intelligence contributed to
Africans' and Native Americans' slower development, Diamond suggests
that most peoples of the world took advantage of every available
resource. "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." Even the aboriginal Australians, their land
dry and infertile, managed in the one region where rivers reliably flow
to construct elaborate canals up to a mile and a half long, to enable
eels to extend their range between marshes. They also learned to leach
the poison out of cycad seeds to make them edible. The sub-Saharans
failed to domesticate animals not from lack of ability, but because the
native animals were poor choices. Diamond says that sub-Saharan
candidate species each lacked at least one useful domesticating trait -
efficient conversion of food to flesh, early maturity, and easy breeding
in captivity are examples. Once European livestock were introduced,
Africans quickly adopted them.
Besides their services, domesticated animals also
furnished germs, which though giving Europeans grief over the centuries did allow immunities to
develop. When Europeans explored and settled the Americas and Australia,
their diseases helped kill off the natives. Much of the germ warfare was
accidental (outside of people like Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who gave Indians
smallpox-infested blankets), but it was no less lethal. European
microbes probably wiped out a relatively advanced Native American
civilization that had thrived along the Mississippi River
mid-millennium, long before European settlers even reached that far inland.
Diamond suggests that within two centuries of Columbus's landing,
imported disease may have killed 95% of the estimated 20 million Indians
that had inhabited North America.
So-called "crowd diseases," the diseases that decimated
natives everywhere, share several important characteristics, says
Diamond. They are transmitted directly from one person to the next. "They
run through populations like wildfires through dry forests."
People die quickly or recover completely, developing protective antibodies. Small bands of
hunter-gatherers could not have sustained such diseases, Diamond says.
Such diseases would have eradicated the small tribes, as they did with
so many Native Americans, and diseases do not survive if they kill off
their hosts.
Diamond tests his theories of the evolution of civilization by examining
the differences among Polynesian societies on different islands. He
finds that there, as in the world at large, it is driven largely by
availability of agricultural resources and the population size and
density. Inhabitants of the Chatham Islands, which are tiny but rich in
animal life, remained hunter-gatherers, as did others in similar
circumstances. At the opposite end of the scale, Hawaii, the largest
archipelago, evolved into a state.
The book places certain modern-day controversies into interesting
relief, as well as inadvertently illuminating the spiritual wisdom of
the American Founding Fathers. There are elements who would like to
institutionalize Christianity in the U.S. government, and put prayer
back in schools. Within both chiefdoms and states, writes Diamond, the
purpose of religion has been to help mobilize the people for war and
other purposes of the ruling classes.
In his epilogue, Diamond calls for development of "human history as
a science, on a par with the acknowledged historical sciences such as
astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology." His account, he
acknowledges, leaves many important questions unanswered
:Did a linguistic or cultural factor account for the otherwise puzzling failures of complex Andean civilizations to develop writing? Was there anything about India's environment predisposing toward rigid socioeconomic castes, with grave consequences for the development of technology in India? Was there anything about the Chinese environment predisposing toward Confucian philosophy and cultural conservatism, which may also have profoundly affected history? Why was proselytizing religion . . . a driving force for colonization and conquest among Europeans and West Asians but not among Chinese? . . .Diamond assembles his thesis from a broad background including years of research among New Guineans, plus research and writing about the evolution of humanity, on top of a professorship in the Department of Physiology at UCLA School of Medicine. He is also winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant. Although he does not use footnotes, he carefully attributes research, facts, and ideas to their sources. He includes an extensive, chapter-by-chapter annotation of "further readings" While Guns, Germs and Steel is not as accessible as his last book, The Third Chimpanzee, it is a rich tapestry of wide-ranging information supporting Diamond's hypothesis, and is ever so satisfying to the intellectually adventurous. In answering the question that the New Guinean posed a quarter century ago, Diamond has made a very strong case that will surely stand. His new field of inquiry may unfold much as researchers have illuminated the details of evolution since publication of On the Origin of Species.
David C. Holzman is a contributor to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and the American Society for Microbiology News. His first article for Smithsonian appears in the June issue.
One day, while their return home was blocked by members of another tribe, some members of the Fore tribe and Diamond were starving in the jungle. One of the Fore returned to camp laden with mushrooms.
Dinner at last. But then I had an unsettling thought: what if the mushrooms were poisonous? I patiently explained to my Fore companions that . . . even expert American mushroom collector[s have died] because of the difficulty of distinguishing safe from dangerous mushrooms . . . my companions told me to shut up and listen. . . . After I had been quizzing them for years about the names of hundreds of trees and birds, how could I insult them by assuming they didn't have names for different mushrooms? They went on to lecture me about 29 types of edible mushroom species. . . .
Two lectures by Jared Diamond, based on Guns, Germs and Steel, may be found in Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?: A Talk by Jared Diamond on the Web site The Edge, and in a UCLA Faculty Research Lecture.
"Dominance and Submission" - review by the New York Times of Diamond's book.
Papua New Guinea page from Lonely Planet has facts, history, and travel information about the country.
Fertile Crescent Home Page - dedicated to reuniting the various peoples of the Fertile Crescent area. It contains a vast array of links and information on the region, its history, and its cultural heritage.
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 by Alfred W. Crosby., a book discussing the role the importation of plants and animals had in the success of European expansion. Published by Eco-books, which also offers A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations by Clive Ponting. The book examines the effect of environment on the last 10,000 years of human history.
Civilization II - the sequel to the immensely popular game in which you attempt to guide a civilization from its roots as a hunter-gatherer tribe to world domination. Interestingly, as per Diamond's book, the presence or absence of natural resources and the development of technology play a vast role in your chances for success.
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