Diamond - Guns, germs and steel the fates of human societies
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A global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
Until around 11,000 b.c., all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.
The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why werent native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.
He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers.
Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA Medical School, is the author of **The Third Chimpanzee**, awarded the 1992 *Los Angeles Times* Science Book Award. He is a regular contributor to **Natural History** and **Discover** magazines and lives in Los Angeles.
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No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel . In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition.
Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University
Serious, groundbreaking biological studies of human history only seem to come along once every generation or so. Now Jared Diamond must be added to their select number. Diamond meshes technological mastery with historical sweep, anecdotal delight with broad conceptual vision, and command of sources with creative leaps. No finer work of its kind has been published this year, or for many past.
Martin Sieff, Washington Times
[Diamonds] masterful synthesis is a refreshingly unconventional history informed by anthropology, behavioral ecology, linguistics, epidemiology, archeology, and technological development.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
[Jared Diamond] is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English, and deals almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned about how humanity has developed. [He] has done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid alternative to the racist answer. A wonderfully interesting book.
Alfred W. Crosby, Los Angeles Times
Fascinating and extremely important. [A] synopsis doesnt do credit to the immense subtlety of this book.
David Brown, Washington Post Book World
Deserves the attention of anyone concerned with the history of mankind at its most fundamental level. It is an epochal work. Diamond has written a summary of human history that can be accounted, for the time being, as Darwinian in its authority.
Thomas M. Disch, New Leader
A wonderfully engrossing book. Jared Diamond takes us on an exhilarating world tour of history that makes us rethink all our ideas about ourselves and other peoples and our places in the overall scheme of things.
Christopher Ehret, Professor of African History, UCLA
Jared Diamond masterfully draws together recent discoveries in fields of inquiry as diverse as archaeology and epidemiology, as he illuminates how and why the human societies of different continents followed widely divergent pathways of development over the past 13,000 years.
Bruce D. Smith, Director, Archaeobiology Program,
Smithsonian Institution
The question, Why did human societies have such diverse fates? has usually received racist answers. Mastering information from many different fields, Jared Diamond convincingly demonstrates that head starts and local conditions can explain much of the course of human history. His impressive account will appeal to a vast readership.
Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Professor of Genetics, Stanford University
THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
To Esa, Kariniga, Omwai, Paran, Sauakari, Wiwor,
and all my other New Guinea friends and teachers
masters of a difficult environment
Copyright 1999, 1997 by Jared Diamond
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.
The text of this book is composed in Sabon with the display set in Trajan Bold Composition and manufacturing by the Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Book design by Chris Welch
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diamond, Jared M.
Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies / Jared Diamond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06922-8
1. Social evolution. 2. CivilizationHistory. 3. Ethnology. 4. Human beingsEffect of environment on. 5. Culture diffusion. I. Title.
HM206.D48 1997
303.4dc21
96-37068
CIP
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street,
London W1T 3QT
PROLOGUE Y ALIS Q UESTION
The regionally differing courses of history
CHAPTER 1 UP TO THE STARTING LINE
What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.?
CHAPTER 2 A NATURAL EXPERIMENT OF HISTORY
How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands
CHAPTER 3 COLLISION AT CAJAMARCA
Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain
CHAPTER 4 FARMER POWER
The roots of guns, germs, and steel
CHAPTER 5 HISTORYS HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS
Geographic differences in the onset of food production
CHAPTER 6 TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM
Causes of the spread of food production
CHAPTER 7 HOW TO MAKE AN ALMOND
The unconscious development of ancient crops
CHAPTER 8 APPLES OR INDIANS
Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?
CHAPTER 9 ZEBRAS, UNHAPPY MARRIAGES, AND THE ANNA KARENINA PRINCIPLE
Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?
CHAPTER 10 SPACIOUS SKIES AND TILTED AXES
Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents?
CHAPTER 11 LETHAL GIFT OF LIVESTOCK
The evolution of germs
CHAPTER 12 BLUEPRINTS AND BORROWED LETTERS
The evolution of writing
CHAPTER 13 NECESSITYS MOTHER
The evolution of technology
CHAPTER 14 FROM EGALITARIANISM TO KLEPTOCRACY
The evolution of government and religion
CHAPTER 15 YALIS PEOPLE
The histories of Australia and New Guinea
CHAPTER 16 HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE
The history of East Asia
CHAPTER 17 SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA
The history of the Austronesian expansion
CHAPTER 18 HEMISPHERES COLLIDING
The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared
CHAPTER 19 HOW AFRICA BECAME BLACK
The history of Africa
EPILOGUE T HE F UTURE OF H UMAN
H ISTORY AS A S CIENCE
W HY IS W ORLD H ISTORY L IKE AN O NION ?
T HIS BOOK ATTEMPTS TO PROVIDE A SHORT HISTORY OF everybody for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you arent: as you will see, the answers to the question dont involve human racial differences at all. The books emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations, and on pushing back the chain of historical causation as far as possible.
Most books that set out to recount world history concentrate on histories of literate Eurasian and North African societies. Native societies of other parts of the worldsub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Island Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islandsreceive only brief treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them very late in their history, after they were discovered and subjugated by western Europeans. Even within Eurasia, much more space gets devoted to the history of western Eurasia than of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia, and other eastern Eurasian societies. History before the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. also receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the human species.
Such narrowly focused accounts of world history suffer from three disadvantages. First, increasing numbers of people today are, quite understandably, interested in other societies besides those of western Eurasia. After all, those other societies encompass most of the worlds population and the vast majority of the worlds ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups. Some of them already are, and others are becoming, among the worlds most powerful economies and political forces.
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