Guns, Germs, and Steel

[Sarge+ 3,436]

I'm taking a History class at Penn State right now. I had to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond. Some of you may have read this book before, but for others, I wanted to share the paper I wrote for it with you. Before I read this book, I wasn't interested in history very much at all. Now that I read it, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the class and learning more about the stuff in this paper. I know it's going to be a tl;dr for most of you, but those who do choose to read it should find it interesting.

 

Matt Christine

History 10

March 1, 2013

 

Yali’s Question: Jared Diamond based the prologue of his book on the work he did in New Guinea. Yali is one of his political friends there. Yali wondered why Caucasian people had experienced so much fortune and success. He noticed that they arrived with a lot more of what he called "cargo" than the local peoples of New Guinea. Diamond chooses to put a different spin on the question. He wonders why white Eurasians ruled other cultures by using heavier guns, germs that destroyed populations, steel, and the ability to mass produce food. Diamond’s main point of debate in this book is that these situations happened not due to racial categories, but because of the environments these peoples lived in. Diamond attempts to downplay racist ideas since they are close-minded and incorrect. Diamond argues that today’s version of Stone Age peoples are usually more intelligent than those in well-developed countries. Diamond expressed that people from New Guinea are smarter, more artistic, more emotionally expressive, and care more about ideas and culture around them than the average American or European.

 

Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Line –Diamond begins by pointing out that upright humans are as old as four million years. He says that the history of humans significantly improved about 50,000 years ago when early hominids figured out how to utilize stone tools and cave paintings, among other advances. At the same time, humans figured out how to use what we could call boats to expand into New Guinea and Australia. Also at this same time, large animals began to become extinct. At the end of the Pleistocene Era, the Clovis culture inhabited the Americas around 11,000 BCE. There were even more extinctions of animals during this time period as well.

 

Chapter 2: A Natural Experiment of History. The Maoris, using advanced weaponry and war tactics, took over the culture of the Morioris in the Chatham islands in 1835. It’s interesting to note that both came from Polynesian heritage. Polynesia featured a variety of different climates, resources, geographies, and social and political complexities that lead to massive amounts of cultural diversity among similar human populations.

 

Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca. Diamond now discusses the conflict and capture by Francisco Pizarro and his men over Atahuallpa, the Incan emperor, at Cajamarca, Peru in 1532. Pizarro and his men decimated the Incan peoples by using quality weapons and armor made of steel, new diseases, especially smallpox, cavalry and horses, ships with advanced sea travelling technology such as compasses, early guns called harquebuses, superior forms of written communication, and centralized politics. As Diamond notes, however, these are only the tangible reasons why Pizarro overran the Incan peoples. He still searches to know how Pizarro and his men became so powerful.

 

Chapter 4: Farmer Power. One of the most important points of contention in the book is Diamond’s discussion of the importance of farming. Not only did early humans figure out how to domesticate animals, but arguably the most important invention in the history of man was the ability to plant food and subsist from it. Diamond talks about the benefits of raising animals for food consumption and herding over the previous hunter-gatherer tribes of the early hominids. These advances in thought and ability increased the amount of calories available to people. Milk and meat are more filling than grains and berries. More yields from crops enabled populations to grow in density. The frequency of birthing children also quickly increased due to better nutrition. Once humans were able to store excess food for later consumption, more people could focus on tasks other than gathering food. This is how artisans, toolmakers, politicians, and other professions first began. Animals also helped early humans stay warm with hides, move goods from place to place, and conquer other lands with the germs derived from them. Smallpox and the flu were especially useful.

 

Chapter 5: History's Haves and Have-Nots. Diamond here discusses carbon dating as it relates to tree rings. He talked about how we can tell which societies had the most food that they were able to produce. Many cultures relied on imported food or they were overrun by the better producers that they tried to trade with. The cultures that could harvest and store surpluses of their own food are the ones that survived the longest in the days of early human civilizations.

 

Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm. Human societies did not decide to settle down overnight. The transition from the hunting and gathering style happened for several reasons. As human populations grew, animal populations scattered away from them. It became harder to find more animals to domesticate and raise for food. Early farmers likely did not have nutrition on par with the hunters and gatherers, but this changed quickly. Despite most of the world’s change to farming, some hunting and gathering bands still exist today.

 

Chapter 7: How to Make an Almond. Many people don’t know that wild almonds contain poisons. Early humans had to figure out by trial and error which strains were fit for food consumption. In this section, Diamond describes the ways in which plants are chosen for food and made better. Diamond states that several factors influenced which plants became normal for inclusion in the diets of early humans, including the availability of preferred seeds, bigger sizes of seeds, more flesh, richer taste, plants that could reproduce with minimal effort, and seeds with softer coats on the outside. Some plants, such as acorns, have never been used for formal diets although they are able to be ingested safely. Because seed crops were easy to grow and store, they became the first foods to be stored by early humans. It wouldn’t be long, however, until foods such as fruits, nuts, and cherries were introduced to human diets. By the time of the Roman Empire, most of these foods were available in the entire domesticated world. Some of the more modern plants include strawberries, cranberries, and kiwi fruit.

 

Chapter 8: Apples or Indians. The climate in the Mediterranean area allowed food production to increase drastically. The mild, rainy winters and hot summers gave advantages to a large number of big-seeded annual plants, plants capable of self-pollination, a high percentage of plants that were perfect for human consumption, large grass seeds such as barley, animals that could be tamed and raised for food, and the early domestication of eight founder crops. In contrast, Mesoamerica, New Guinea, and the Eastern US were limited in the available large seed grasses, suitable animals, edible pulses, and domestic plants high in protein. Because local cultures mastered their own crops, it’s easy to see why very few modern plants were discovered.

 

Chapter 9: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle. The family of animals in the Anna Karenina family share one common trait with all other domesticated animals: everything must happen in perfect order for their complete domestication to be possible. By roughly 2500 BCE, most large animals that could be domesticated were indeed domesticated. Attempts in the 19th and 20th centuries to domesticate the eland, musk ox, elk, moose, zebra, and bison have not been the greatest successes. Only 14 large animals have been domesticated: sheep, cow, goat, horse, pig, Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama and alpaca, reindeer, donkey, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, and Mithan. The requirements for domestication include that the animal must be an omnivore or herbivore, with the modern dog being an exception, they must grow rapidly, they have to be able to breed while held captive, they have to have a suitable disposition, they must accept penning and they must have a developed social structure and hierarchy so they can accept subordinate roles and herding. Certain species, like zebras, have never been domesticated. Animals that become domesticated change more due to their environments than anything else. Most large animals have become smaller for milk purposes, while others were specialized for more wool, or greater meat supplies. Only one large animal, the llama/alpaca, is a New World domesticate. The Eurasian cultures had a lot more animal candidates for domestication than the New World, which gave its inhabitants a competitive advantage.

 

Chapter 10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes. The difference in food production between Eurasia and other cultures occurred in large part because people outside this area didn’t know how to keep their crops safe from cross-contamination with other people (and thus, germs). Comparatively, the difference in the food production of the Americans, Africa, and New Guinea and Australia was slowed by the greater variation in jungles, climates, and diseases. Eurasia had the distinct advantages of amber fields of grain and spacious skies, which the New World did not have.

 

Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock. The large-scale infectious diseases in recent history were derived from animals: smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, flu, bubonic plague, measles, AIDS, and cholera. Pigs and dogs gave humans pertussis. Farmers had more exposure to the germs of their livestock. In addition, keeping pets, human intimacy with animals, and animal fecal contamination in crowded urban conditions contributed to the increased exposure of humans to deadly illnesses. Some endemic diseases are shared by humans and animal reservoirs, and these include yellow fever, yaws, bubonic plague, hookworm, and more. The exclusively human epidemic diseases all require large numbers of closely packed people in order to be sustained by shifting from one area to another, and are called crowd diseases. These diseases were unable to arise in small hunter-gatherer cultures. Successful recurring epidemic diseases had these traits in common: they spread quickly and easily, they cause acute illness, they leave immune survivors, and they are restricted to humans. Examples include mumps pertussis, and smallpox. Many disease manifestations serve the needs of the infecting organisms in providing a means of increasing transmission. Newly introduced infections decimated up to 95% or more of the Mississippi Indians, Peruvians, and the Mexico Indians. Khoisan, Pacific Islanders, and Aboriginal Australians were also decimated by imported diseases. Syphilis may have been the only disease to have traveled from the New to the Old World. Although native epidemic tropical diseases did not deter the invading Europeans in the New World, certain endemic diseases like cholera, yellow fever, and malaria did impede colonization in tropical Asia, Indonesia, and New Guinea.

 

Chapter 12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters. The use of writing originated in southwest Asia with Sumerian cuneiform, Mesoamerica, and China. Other cultures adopted writing by blueprint copying or, less directly, by idea diffusion. Writing systems may incorporate various combinations of logograms, syllabaries, and letters contained in alphabets. Other possible independent sites of writing were Egypt and Easter Island. The Mycenaean Linear alphabet developed around 1400 BCE from the Linear A syllabary of Minoan Crete. The alphabet arose from Egyptian hieroglyphs for consonant sounds, which Semites initially adapted. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, adding vowel sounds. The Etruscans modified the Greek alphabet and later the Romans, leading to the Latin alphabet we use today. The Cherokee Indian Sequoyah developed a writing system for writing Cherokee using 85 symbols, including some from our own alphabet. Other writing systems include Han'gul of Korea, ogham and the Rongorongo script of Island. Writing was initially used in complex stratified societies by an elite few to maintain palace records and manage bureaucratic accounts, collect taxes, facilitate enslavement, push propaganda and myths, promote religious practice and more. Writing was not used by hunter-gatherer societies. Some complex food-producing societies never developed writing such as Incas, Tonga, Hawaii, and the Mississippi Valley Indians. This likely occurred because of isolation and failure of idea diffusion.

 

Chapter 13: Necessity's Mother. The first printed document on record is the Cretan Minoan Phaistos disk of 1700 BCE, but it did not lead to a n increase of printing because it was ahead of its time, lacked receptive circumstances and supporting technology. Though necessity is sometimes the mother to invention, invention often precedes the creation of necessity. Early models of inventions often perform poorly and appear unconvincing. In order for an invention to flourish in a culture, several criteria must be met: it must show an economic advantage, it has to have social value and prestige, and the advantages of the invention must be readily apparent. Receptivity to innovation varies widely on each continent. Most new developments arrive by diffusion, which for places with geographic or ecologic barriers is limited. Food production, large population and land mass favor more rapid technological development. In New Guinea and other areas of the world, conservative and more receptive societies lived side by side. The Navajo more than other Indian tribes adapted European use of dyes for weaving and they also took up ranching. The receptivity to innovation in Islam and China has varied over time. No continent has been unusually innovative over history. Important inventions such as guns can allow a culture to overrun another. Yet in Japan, the samurai restricted the adoption of guns until 1853. Other examples of cultures rejecting new innovations include the Tasmanians, China and Polynesians. Technology begets more technology, and the rate of development can accelerate dramatically.

 

Chapter 14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy. Diamond reviews the levels of societal organization. A band of peoples usually has 5 to 80 people. They were typically related by blood and nomadic. They had one language and ethnicity, had egalitarian government with informal leadership, no bureaucracy, no formal structures for conflict resolution, and no economic specialization. The tribe has hundreds of people, often fixed settlements, consist of kin-based clans, still one ethnicity and language, have egalitarian government, they are informal and often have difficult conflict resolution problems. 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, have intensive food production, early division of labor, and luxury goods. 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, and more. Kleptocrats maintain power by disarming the population and arming the elite, making the masses happy by redistributing the tribute, keeping order and curbing violence, promoting religion and ideology that justifies kleptocracy, and building public works. States are especially good at developing weapons of war, providing troops, and promoting religion. States arise not just from the natural tendencies, but by social contract, in response to needs for irrigation and regional population size. The large populations require intensive food production. Increased opportunities in states for conflicts force the development of laws.

 

Chapter 15: Yali's People. The Australian climate and terrain is mostly inhospitable and it supports a low population of primitive peoples. It and New Guinea were formerly united land masses and were last separated by water roughly 10,000 years ago. New Guinea is wetter, but grows very little protein. Australians did not absorb as many complex technologies from New Guinea as they might have. Penetration of Europeans in New Guinea was slow due to diseases as well as to the poor thriving of their cattle and crops. Australia was easier to settle, allowing the decimation of aborigines by Europeans who imported their technologies, guns, and epidemics.

 

Chapter 16: How China Became Chinese. China has a 500,000 year human prehistory and its human populations were once more diverse, but have become very uniform due to forced unification under the Qin dynasty around 221 BCE. The Northern Chinese overran the Southern Chinese. As a result, the Sino-Tibetan family of languages dominates except for southeastern Asia, Thailand and Laos. Pockets of Miao-Yao languages are also scattered about. The conquests were aided by food production, animal domestication, diseases, technologies, and suppression of the indigenous cultures. The Austronesian migration may have been of peoples displaced from China.

 

Chapter 17: Speedboat to Polynesia. The islands of the Pacific were colonized by waves of colonists from Asia, arriving in New Guinea around 40,000 BCE. The Austronesian migrations began from the Chinese mainland, reaching Taiwan first at roughly 3500 BCE, the Philippines by 3000 BCE, Sumatra and Java by 2000 BCE, Northern New Guinea by 1600 BCE, Samoa by 1200 BCE, and Hawaii, Easter Island, and Madagascar by 500 CE. These Austronesian migrants became the Polynesians. The Austronesian languages include the Western Malayo-Polynesian subfamily and Central-Eastern family including Oceanic. The sailing canoe made the Austronesian migration possible. Evidence of this spread comes from the characteristic artifacts as well as the Proto-Austronesian language. They displaced less capable peoples but not the central or southern New Guineans, over whom they had no competitive advantage, and they had difficulty establishing themselves in Australia.

 

Chapter 18: Hemisphere's Colliding. Diamond again reviews factors leading to the European conquest of the Americas. These include better food production, better domesticated plants and animals, better metallurgy, better weapons and cavalry, better transport and communication via writing, and better political organization. Development in the New World was more primitive because of several factors, which include the later arrival of humans there, later domestication, geographic and ecological barriers, and migration through the Siberian Arctic, which had stripped away technologies for warmer climates. The wheel had not been invented except as a toy in the New World and writing was limited to a few locations. The New World shows much less major language diffusion. Spain was stronger, more capable of conquest, and had better germs and weapons. Many natives were killed by casual murders by private citizens. The first European visitors to the New World were the Norse around 1000 CE.

 

Chapter 19: How Africa Became Black. Africa has a high diversity of peoples and languages due to diverse geography and a long prehistory. North African white peoples resemble whites in the Middle East and Europe and mostly speak Afro-Asiatic languages. Pygmies, now confined mostly to Central Africa, were once more widespread but were engulfed by Bantu farmers, and their languages were lost even where they continue to live. Similarly, Khoisan peoples were once widespread as were their click-laden languages, but now they have been marginalized to desert areas the Bantu could not farm. Madagascar has blacks blended with Indonesians speaking Austronesian languages. Blacks occupy most of sub-Saharan Africa. They mostly speak non-Bantu and Bantu versions of the Niger-Congo languages with some pockets remaining of Nilo-Saharan languages. The Bantu farmers dominated as they spread at around 3000 BCE to 500 CE due to superior plant and animal domestication. They also had iron and bronze. They extended their range to Natal on the East coast and, as the Xhosa people, extended their range to the Fish River 500 miles east of Cape Town. Dutch white colonists at South Africa around 1652 CE faced only the poorly defended Khoisan, since the Bantus were far away, and brought crops well adapted to the climate. On expanding, they encountered and fought the Xhosas in 1702. Further white colonization succeeded via better food production, and better weapons, such as cannons.

 

Final thoughts: I found reading this book to be an incredibly eye-opening experience. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the history of ancient civilizations and their connections to our modern civilizations. If I learned one thing and one thing only from this book, it’s that the history of our civilized world is shaped by so many factors, but the main one just may be, as Diamond asserts, the environments that early civilizations thrived in. These environmental factors allowed early cultures to grow by keeping them healthy, allowing them to plant foods, raise animals, and live longer, healthier lives which enabled them to learn more about writing, communication, war tactics, and more. Some people, mainly Eurasians, had biology on their side, especially in the form of deadly diseases that other cultures could not protect themselves against. It is a combination of these factors, and not made up racial differences, that allowed these civilizations to conquer others and shape our modern world.

[CARDINAL 205]

 

I'm taking a History class at Penn State right now. I had to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond. Some of you may have read this book before, but for others, I wanted to share the paper I wrote for it with you. Before I read this book, I wasn't interested in history very much at all. Now that I read it, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the class and learning more about the stuff in this paper. I know it's going to be a tl;dr for most of you, but those who do choose to read it should find it interesting.

 

Matt Christine

History 10

March 1, 2013

 

Yali’s Question: Jared Diamond based the prologue of his book on the work he did in New Guinea. Yali is one of his political friends there. Yali wondered why Caucasian people had experienced so much fortune and success. He noticed that they arrived with a lot more of what he called "cargo" than the local peoples of New Guinea. Diamond chooses to put a different spin on the question. He wonders why white Eurasians ruled other cultures by using heavier guns, germs that destroyed populations, steel, and the ability to mass produce food. Diamond’s main point of debate in this book is that these situations happened not due to racial categories, but because of the environments these peoples lived in. Diamond attempts to downplay racist ideas since they are close-minded and incorrect. Diamond argues that today’s version of Stone Age peoples are usually more intelligent than those in well-developed countries. Diamond expressed that people from New Guinea are smarter, more artistic, more emotionally expressive, and care more about ideas and culture around them than the average American or European.

 

Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Line –Diamond begins by pointing out that upright humans are as old as four million years. He says that the history of humans significantly improved about 50,000 years ago when early hominids figured out how to utilize stone tools and cave paintings, among other advances. At the same time, humans figured out how to use what we could call boats to expand into New Guinea and Australia. Also at this same time, large animals began to become extinct. At the end of the Pleistocene Era, the Clovis culture inhabited the Americas around 11,000 BCE. There were even more extinctions of animals during this time period as well.

 

Chapter 2: A Natural Experiment of History. The Maoris, using advanced weaponry and war tactics, took over the culture of the Morioris in the Chatham islands in 1835. It’s interesting to note that both came from Polynesian heritage. Polynesia featured a variety of different climates, resources, geographies, and social and political complexities that lead to massive amounts of cultural diversity among similar human populations.

 

Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca. Diamond now discusses the conflict and capture by Francisco Pizarro and his men over Atahuallpa, the Incan emperor, at Cajamarca, Peru in 1532. Pizarro and his men decimated the Incan peoples by using quality weapons and armor made of steel, new diseases, especially smallpox, cavalry and horses, ships with advanced sea travelling technology such as compasses, early guns called harquebuses, superior forms of written communication, and centralized politics. As Diamond notes, however, these are only the tangible reasons why Pizarro overran the Incan peoples. He still searches to know how Pizarro and his men became so powerful.

 

Chapter 4: Farmer Power. One of the most important points of contention in the book is Diamond’s discussion of the importance of farming. Not only did early humans figure out how to domesticate animals, but arguably the most important invention in the history of man was the ability to plant food and subsist from it. Diamond talks about the benefits of raising animals for food consumption and herding over the previous hunter-gatherer tribes of the early hominids. These advances in thought and ability increased the amount of calories available to people. Milk and meat are more filling than grains and berries. More yields from crops enabled populations to grow in density. The frequency of birthing children also quickly increased due to better nutrition. Once humans were able to store excess food for later consumption, more people could focus on tasks other than gathering food. This is how artisans, toolmakers, politicians, and other professions first began. Animals also helped early humans stay warm with hides, move goods from place to place, and conquer other lands with the germs derived from them. Smallpox and the flu were especially useful.

 

Chapter 5: History's Haves and Have-Nots. Diamond here discusses carbon dating as it relates to tree rings. He talked about how we can tell which societies had the most food that they were able to produce. Many cultures relied on imported food or they were overrun by the better producers that they tried to trade with. The cultures that could harvest and store surpluses of their own food are the ones that survived the longest in the days of early human civilizations.

 

Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm. Human societies did not decide to settle down overnight. The transition from the hunting and gathering style happened for several reasons. As human populations grew, animal populations scattered away from them. It became harder to find more animals to domesticate and raise for food. Early farmers likely did not have nutrition on par with the hunters and gatherers, but this changed quickly. Despite most of the world’s change to farming, some hunting and gathering bands still exist today.

 

Chapter 7: How to Make an Almond. Many people don’t know that wild almonds contain poisons. Early humans had to figure out by trial and error which strains were fit for food consumption. In this section, Diamond describes the ways in which plants are chosen for food and made better. Diamond states that several factors influenced which plants became normal for inclusion in the diets of early humans, including the availability of preferred seeds, bigger sizes of seeds, more flesh, richer taste, plants that could reproduce with minimal effort, and seeds with softer coats on the outside. Some plants, such as acorns, have never been used for formal diets although they are able to be ingested safely. Because seed crops were easy to grow and store, they became the first foods to be stored by early humans. It wouldn’t be long, however, until foods such as fruits, nuts, and cherries were introduced to human diets. By the time of the Roman Empire, most of these foods were available in the entire domesticated world. Some of the more modern plants include strawberries, cranberries, and kiwi fruit.

 

Chapter 8: Apples or Indians. The climate in the Mediterranean area allowed food production to increase drastically. The mild, rainy winters and hot summers gave advantages to a large number of big-seeded annual plants, plants capable of self-pollination, a high percentage of plants that were perfect for human consumption, large grass seeds such as barley, animals that could be tamed and raised for food, and the early domestication of eight founder crops. In contrast, Mesoamerica, New Guinea, and the Eastern US were limited in the available large seed grasses, suitable animals, edible pulses, and domestic plants high in protein. Because local cultures mastered their own crops, it’s easy to see why very few modern plants were discovered.

 

Chapter 9: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle. The family of animals in the Anna Karenina family share one common trait with all other domesticated animals: everything must happen in perfect order for their complete domestication to be possible. By roughly 2500 BCE, most large animals that could be domesticated were indeed domesticated. Attempts in the 19th and 20th centuries to domesticate the eland, musk ox, elk, moose, zebra, and bison have not been the greatest successes. Only 14 large animals have been domesticated: sheep, cow, goat, horse, pig, Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama and alpaca, reindeer, donkey, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, and Mithan. The requirements for domestication include that the animal must be an omnivore or herbivore, with the modern dog being an exception, they must grow rapidly, they have to be able to breed while held captive, they have to have a suitable disposition, they must accept penning and they must have a developed social structure and hierarchy so they can accept subordinate roles and herding. Certain species, like zebras, have never been domesticated. Animals that become domesticated change more due to their environments than anything else. Most large animals have become smaller for milk purposes, while others were specialized for more wool, or greater meat supplies. Only one large animal, the llama/alpaca, is a New World domesticate. The Eurasian cultures had a lot more animal candidates for domestication than the New World, which gave its inhabitants a competitive advantage.

 

Chapter 10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes. The difference in food production between Eurasia and other cultures occurred in large part because people outside this area didn’t know how to keep their crops safe from cross-contamination with other people (and thus, germs). Comparatively, the difference in the food production of the Americans, Africa, and New Guinea and Australia was slowed by the greater variation in jungles, climates, and diseases. Eurasia had the distinct advantages of amber fields of grain and spacious skies, which the New World did not have.

 

Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock. The large-scale infectious diseases in recent history were derived from animals: smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, flu, bubonic plague, measles, AIDS, and cholera. Pigs and dogs gave humans pertussis. Farmers had more exposure to the germs of their livestock. In addition, keeping pets, human intimacy with animals, and animal fecal contamination in crowded urban conditions contributed to the increased exposure of humans to deadly illnesses. Some endemic diseases are shared by humans and animal reservoirs, and these include yellow fever, yaws, bubonic plague, hookworm, and more. The exclusively human epidemic diseases all require large numbers of closely packed people in order to be sustained by shifting from one area to another, and are called crowd diseases. These diseases were unable to arise in small hunter-gatherer cultures. Successful recurring epidemic diseases had these traits in common: they spread quickly and easily, they cause acute illness, they leave immune survivors, and they are restricted to humans. Examples include mumps pertussis, and smallpox. Many disease manifestations serve the needs of the infecting organisms in providing a means of increasing transmission. Newly introduced infections decimated up to 95% or more of the Mississippi Indians, Peruvians, and the Mexico Indians. Khoisan, Pacific Islanders, and Aboriginal Australians were also decimated by imported diseases. Syphilis may have been the only disease to have traveled from the New to the Old World. Although native epidemic tropical diseases did not deter the invading Europeans in the New World, certain endemic diseases like cholera, yellow fever, and malaria did impede colonization in tropical Asia, Indonesia, and New Guinea.

 

Chapter 12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters. The use of writing originated in southwest Asia with Sumerian cuneiform, Mesoamerica, and China. Other cultures adopted writing by blueprint copying or, less directly, by idea diffusion. Writing systems may incorporate various combinations of logograms, syllabaries, and letters contained in alphabets. Other possible independent sites of writing were Egypt and Easter Island. The Mycenaean Linear alphabet developed around 1400 BCE from the Linear A syllabary of Minoan Crete. The alphabet arose from Egyptian hieroglyphs for consonant sounds, which Semites initially adapted. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, adding vowel sounds. The Etruscans modified the Greek alphabet and later the Romans, leading to the Latin alphabet we use today. The Cherokee Indian Sequoyah developed a writing system for writing Cherokee using 85 symbols, including some from our own alphabet. Other writing systems include Han'gul of Korea, ogham and the Rongorongo script of Island. Writing was initially used in complex stratified societies by an elite few to maintain palace records and manage bureaucratic accounts, collect taxes, facilitate enslavement, push propaganda and myths, promote religious practice and more. Writing was not used by hunter-gatherer societies. Some complex food-producing societies never developed writing such as Incas, Tonga, Hawaii, and the Mississippi Valley Indians. This likely occurred because of isolation and failure of idea diffusion.

 

Chapter 13: Necessity's Mother. The first printed document on record is the Cretan Minoan Phaistos disk of 1700 BCE, but it did not lead to a n increase of printing because it was ahead of its time, lacked receptive circumstances and supporting technology. Though necessity is sometimes the mother to invention, invention often precedes the creation of necessity. Early models of inventions often perform poorly and appear unconvincing. In order for an invention to flourish in a culture, several criteria must be met: it must show an economic advantage, it has to have social value and prestige, and the advantages of the invention must be readily apparent. Receptivity to innovation varies widely on each continent. Most new developments arrive by diffusion, which for places with geographic or ecologic barriers is limited. Food production, large population and land mass favor more rapid technological development. In New Guinea and other areas of the world, conservative and more receptive societies lived side by side. The Navajo more than other Indian tribes adapted European use of dyes for weaving and they also took up ranching. The receptivity to innovation in Islam and China has varied over time. No continent has been unusually innovative over history. Important inventions such as guns can allow a culture to overrun another. Yet in Japan, the samurai restricted the adoption of guns until 1853. Other examples of cultures rejecting new innovations include the Tasmanians, China and Polynesians. Technology begets more technology, and the rate of development can accelerate dramatically.

 

Chapter 14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy. Diamond reviews the levels of societal organization. A band of peoples usually has 5 to 80 people. They were typically related by blood and nomadic. They had one language and ethnicity, had egalitarian government with informal leadership, no bureaucracy, no formal structures for conflict resolution, and no economic specialization. The tribe has hundreds of people, often fixed settlements, consist of kin-based clans, still one ethnicity and language, have egalitarian government, they are informal and often have difficult conflict resolution problems. 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, have intensive food production, early division of labor, and luxury goods. 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, and more. Kleptocrats maintain power by disarming the population and arming the elite, making the masses happy by redistributing the tribute, keeping order and curbing violence, promoting religion and ideology that justifies kleptocracy, and building public works. States are especially good at developing weapons of war, providing troops, and promoting religion. States arise not just from the natural tendencies, but by social contract, in response to needs for irrigation and regional population size. The large populations require intensive food production. Increased opportunities in states for conflicts force the development of laws.

 

Chapter 15: Yali's People. The Australian climate and terrain is mostly inhospitable and it supports a low population of primitive peoples. It and New Guinea were formerly united land masses and were last separated by water roughly 10,000 years ago. New Guinea is wetter, but grows very little protein. Australians did not absorb as many complex technologies from New Guinea as they might have. Penetration of Europeans in New Guinea was slow due to diseases as well as to the poor thriving of their cattle and crops. Australia was easier to settle, allowing the decimation of aborigines by Europeans who imported their technologies, guns, and epidemics.

 

Chapter 16: How China Became Chinese. China has a 500,000 year human prehistory and its human populations were once more diverse, but have become very uniform due to forced unification under the Qin dynasty around 221 BCE. The Northern Chinese overran the Southern Chinese. As a result, the Sino-Tibetan family of languages dominates except for southeastern Asia, Thailand and Laos. Pockets of Miao-Yao languages are also scattered about. The conquests were aided by food production, animal domestication, diseases, technologies, and suppression of the indigenous cultures. The Austronesian migration may have been of peoples displaced from China.

 

Chapter 17: Speedboat to Polynesia. The islands of the Pacific were colonized by waves of colonists from Asia, arriving in New Guinea around 40,000 BCE. The Austronesian migrations began from the Chinese mainland, reaching Taiwan first at roughly 3500 BCE, the Philippines by 3000 BCE, Sumatra and Java by 2000 BCE, Northern New Guinea by 1600 BCE, Samoa by 1200 BCE, and Hawaii, Easter Island, and Madagascar by 500 CE. These Austronesian migrants became the Polynesians. The Austronesian languages include the Western Malayo-Polynesian subfamily and Central-Eastern family including Oceanic. The sailing canoe made the Austronesian migration possible. Evidence of this spread comes from the characteristic artifacts as well as the Proto-Austronesian language. They displaced less capable peoples but not the central or southern New Guineans, over whom they had no competitive advantage, and they had difficulty establishing themselves in Australia.

 

Chapter 18: Hemisphere's Colliding. Diamond again reviews factors leading to the European conquest of the Americas. These include better food production, better domesticated plants and animals, better metallurgy, better weapons and cavalry, better transport and communication via writing, and better political organization. Development in the New World was more primitive because of several factors, which include the later arrival of humans there, later domestication, geographic and ecological barriers, and migration through the Siberian Arctic, which had stripped away technologies for warmer climates. The wheel had not been invented except as a toy in the New World and writing was limited to a few locations. The New World shows much less major language diffusion. Spain was stronger, more capable of conquest, and had better germs and weapons. Many natives were killed by casual murders by private citizens. The first European visitors to the New World were the Norse around 1000 CE.

 

Chapter 19: How Africa Became Black. Africa has a high diversity of peoples and languages due to diverse geography and a long prehistory. North African white peoples resemble whites in the Middle East and Europe and mostly speak Afro-Asiatic languages. Pygmies, now confined mostly to Central Africa, were once more widespread but were engulfed by Bantu farmers, and their languages were lost even where they continue to live. Similarly, Khoisan peoples were once widespread as were their click-laden languages, but now they have been marginalized to desert areas the Bantu could not farm. Madagascar has blacks blended with Indonesians speaking Austronesian languages. Blacks occupy most of sub-Saharan Africa. They mostly speak non-Bantu and Bantu versions of the Niger-Congo languages with some pockets remaining of Nilo-Saharan languages. The Bantu farmers dominated as they spread at around 3000 BCE to 500 CE due to superior plant and animal domestication. They also had iron and bronze. They extended their range to Natal on the East coast and, as the Xhosa people, extended their range to the Fish River 500 miles east of Cape Town. Dutch white colonists at South Africa around 1652 CE faced only the poorly defended Khoisan, since the Bantus were far away, and brought crops well adapted to the climate. On expanding, they encountered and fought the Xhosas in 1702. Further white colonization succeeded via better food production, and better weapons, such as cannons.

 

Final thoughts: I found reading this book to be an incredibly eye-opening experience. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the history of ancient civilizations and their connections to our modern civilizations. If I learned one thing and one thing only from this book, it’s that the history of our civilized world is shaped by so many factors, but the main one just may be, as Diamond asserts, the environments that early civilizations thrived in. These environmental factors allowed early cultures to grow by keeping them healthy, allowing them to plant foods, raise animals, and live longer, healthier lives which enabled them to learn more about writing, communication, war tactics, and more. Some people, mainly Eurasians, had biology on their side, especially in the form of deadly diseases that other cultures could not protect themselves against. It is a combination of these factors, and not made up racial differences, that allowed these civilizations to conquer others and shape our modern world.

 

 

I've honestly never heard of this book before, but if I have I can't recall at the moment. I plan on reading this in further detail, but you made a mistake though Sarge. It's supposed to be BC instead of BCE, and AD instead of CE.

Edited March 2, 2013 by Barracuda

[Sarge+ 3,436]

The official terms today are B.C.E (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).

Edited March 1, 2013 by Sarge

[Vin+ 3,121]

Good stuff. I would add that bad luck/bad decisions play a huge part in things to. I mean, the Incas basically said to Pizarro, "Hey, you look like a god we cast out of our city a while back who was supposed to return at some point. Why don't you come with us back to our city?" Then you've got diseases and the fact that the Incas were disliked by other tribes, and you've then got your recipe for the downfall of a civilization.

 

And while not necessarily tied in to how things got their start, I've always wondered how things would've been had, say, Charles Martel not stopped the Muslim expansion into Europe?Or if Philip hadn't been stupid about attacking England with the Spanish Armada? Or if the Chinese decided to continue on with their naval explorations instead of pretty much scrapping their navy in favor of isolationism?

 

Anyway, I don't know if this is a specialized history class, or if it's more of a general history of civilization type; but I would say that if you liked this, chances are there will be a lot of other stuff in the class that you will like as well.

[OSUViking 505]

Cardinal... why would you quote the entirety of such a large post and come up with such a short response?

 

Tagging this for future read, though.

[CARDINAL 205]

Cardinal... why would you quote the entirety of such a large post and come up with such a short response?

 

Tagging this for future read, though.

 

lol I was still drinking my morning coffee, so I wasn't in the mood to read the entire post yet! lol

 

I will respond to this in further detail later on today though, like you!

[Sarge+ 3,436]

Good stuff. I would add that bad luck/bad decisions play a huge part in things to. I mean, the Incas basically said to Pizarro, "Hey, you look like a god we cast out of our city a while back who was supposed to return at some point. Why don't you come with us back to our city?" Then you've got diseases and the fact that the Incas were disliked by other tribes, and you've then got your recipe for the downfall of a civilization.

 

And while not necessarily tied in to how things got their start, I've always wondered how things would've been had, say, Charles Martel not stopped the Muslim expansion into Europe?Or if Philip hadn't been stupid about attacking England with the Spanish Armada? Or if the Chinese decided to continue on with their naval explorations instead of pretty much scrapping their navy in favor of isolationism?

 

Anyway, I don't know if this is a specialized history class, or if it's more of a general history of civilization type; but I would say that if you liked this, chances are there will be a lot of other stuff in the class that you will like as well.

 

It's basically just an overall view of civilizations mainly thriving before 1500 CE.