Diamond - Guns, Germs And Steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13, 000 years

C ONTENTS

The regionally differing courses of history

What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B. C. ?

How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands

Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles 1 of Spain

The roots of guns, germs, and steel

Geographic differences in the onset of food production

Causes of the spread of food production

The unconscious development of ancient crops

Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?

Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?

Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents?

The evolution of germs

The evolution of writing

The evolution of technology

The evolution of government and religion

The histories of Australia and New Guinea

The history of East Asia

The history of the Austronesian expansion

The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared

The history of Africa

This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.

An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science.

Jared Diamond is one of Americas most remarkable scholars. After training in laboratory biological science he became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School in 1966. He is equally celebrated for his brilliant contributions to ecology and evolutionary biology, and for his explorations of remote parts of New Guinea. In his fifties he developed a third career in environmental history, becoming Professor of Geography and of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA.

His bestselling and prize-winning books include The Third Chimpanzee and Why is Sex Fun? His awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee

Why is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

To Esa, Kariniga, Omwai, Paran, Sauakari, Wiwor, and all my other New Guinea friends and teachers masters of a difficult environment

This 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 Eurasia 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.

Second, even for people specifically interested in the shaping of the modern world, a history limited to developments since the emergence of writing cannot provide deep understanding. It is not the case that societies on the different continents were comparable to each other until 3,000 B. C., whereupon western Eurasian societies suddenly developed writing and began for the first time to pull ahead in other respects as well. Instead, already by 3,000 B. C., there were Eurasian and North African societies not only with incipient writing but also with centralized state governments, cities, widespread use of metal tools and weapons, use of domesticated animals for transport and traction and mechanical power, and reliance on agriculture and domestic animals for food. Throughout most or all parts of other continents, none of those things existed at that time; some but not all of them emerged later in parts of the Native Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, but only over the course of the next five millenia; and none of them emerged in Aboriginal Australia. That should already warn us that the roots of western Eurasian dominance in the modern world lie in the preliterate past before 3,000 B. C. (By western Eurasian dominance, I mean the dominance of western Eurasian societies themselves and of the societies that they spawned on other continents.)

Third, a history focused on western Eurasian societies completely bypasses the obvious big question. Why were those societies the ones that became disproportionately powerful and innovative? The usual answers to that question invoke proximate forces, such as the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, scientific inquiry, technology, and nasty germs that killed peoples of other continents when they came into contact with western Eurasians. But why did those ingredients of conquest arise in western Eurasia, and arise elsewhere only to a lesser degree or not at all?

All those ingredients are just proximate factors, not ultimate explanations. Why didnt capitalism flourish in Native Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, scientific inquiry in China, advanced technology in Native North America, and nasty germs in Aboriginal Australia? If one responds by invoking idiosyncratic cultural factorse.g., scientific inquiry supposedly stifled in China by Confucianism but stimulated in western Eurasia by Greek of Judaeo-Christian traditionsthen one is continuing to ignore the need for ultimate explanations: why didnt traditions like Confucianism and the Judaeo-Christian ethic instead develop in western Eurasia and China respectively? In addition, one is ignoring the fact that Confucian China was technologically more advanced than western Eurasia until about A.D. 1400.

It is impossible to understand even just western Eurasian societies themselves, if one focuses on them. The interesting questions concern the distinctions between them and other societies. Answering those questions requires us to understand all those other societies as well, so that western Eurasian societies can be fitted into the broader context.