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Summary and Analysis of Guns, Germs, and Steel
The Fates of Human Societies
By Jared Diamond OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4310-6
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Prologue: Yali's Question
Jared Diamond first confronted what would become the central inquiry of Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1972, while studying the evolution of birds in New Guinea. There, Diamond met Yali, a local politician who asked him why New Guinea's European colonizers developed technology and political structures that native New Guineans never developed. Expanding Yali's question beyond New Guinea, Diamond asks: Why did human development progress so differently on different continents?
In response to his own query, Diamond argues that environmental variations, not biological differences, are responsible for the varying rates of human development on different continents.
Part One: From Eden to Cajamarca
A broad overview of human history, including two specific object lessons in geography and ecology's important roles in shaping the development of human societies.
Chapter One: Up to the Starting Line
Seven million years ago, human history began: A population of African apes diverged into three groups, one of which evolved into Homo sapiens.
Fifty thousand years ago, modern humans began to migrate out of Africa. They spread first to Eurasia, then to Australia and New Guinea, and finally to the Americas in 12,000 BCE. The arrival of humans to all continents except Eurasia coincided with the extinction of large native mammals. This left native Australians, New Guineans, and Americans without any large mammals — which would have serious consequences for their ancestors thousands of years in the future.
Chapter Two: A Natural Experiment of History
The Maori and the Moriori tribes descended from the same Polynesian ancestors sometime around 1200 CE. But in 1835, the Maori invaded the Moriori and slaughtered them with superior weapons, effective military organization, and advanced watercraft.
How did two branches of the same ancestral group become so different in so little time? The Maori were warrior-farmers who lived in fierce competition with other tribes in Northern New Zealand, while the Moriori were hunter-gatherers who lived and worked in communal harmony on the isolated Chatham Islands.
Chapter Three: Collision at Cajamarca
On November 16, 1532, General Francisco Pizarro met the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in the Inca city of Cajamarca. Though Pizarro's forces were vastly outnumbered, they were able to capture Atahuallpa and kill thousands of Inca without the loss of a single conquistador. Their unlikely triumph arose from a few advantages they had over the Inca: steel weapons, horses for transport, immunity to animal-borne diseases that had already killed many Inca, and a literate tradition that allowed them to make informed military decisions based on past precedent.
Part Two: The Rise and Spread of Food Production
In six chapters, Diamond identifies the ultimate causes of Eurasians' dominance over other continents. The most fundamental of these is agriculture. Food production is a prerequisite to complex, technologically advanced, and militarily dominant societies.
Chapter Four: Farmer Power
From the very start of human history, there were more plants and animals that humans could use in Eurasia than anywhere else. Because plants and animals were readily available there, but scarce on other continents, food production arose in Eurasia first. Agriculture supported larger societies, and larger societies became politically complex and technologically innovative. Plus, the domesticated animals of Eurasian societies transmitted the diseases they carried to their human handlers, which meant over time that Eurasians developed immunity to those diseases.
Chapter Five: History's Haves and Have-nots
Different societies developed food production at different times — and some societies never organized their food production at all. Agriculture was most likely developed independently in only a few places and at various times, from 8000 BCE in Southwest Asia to 3500 BCE in Mesoamerica. Elsewhere, societies did not develop agriculture even in ecologically suitable regions.
Most societies adopted crops, animals, and agricultural techniques from their neighbors. Egypt, for example, was probably introduced to new plants and farming methods from the Fertile Crescent in Southwest Asia.
Chapter Six: To Farm or Not to Farm
No society simply decided to become farmers instead of hunter-gatherers. The evolution to agriculture was gradual, often due to geographic factors, such as the availability of food per square mile and the access to wild game.
Farming and hunting-gathering represent two alternative and competing strategies for sustaining a population of people. In most cases throughout history, hunter-gatherers became farmers because they were forced to: they had to farm, or else be forced out of their land by farmers. Hunter-gatherer societies that avoided farming into modern times did so because they were confined to areas not suitable for food production.
Chapter Seven: How to Make an Almond
Plant domestication is the process of gradually making a wild plant more useful to humans. Wild almonds, for example, are bitter and contain lethal levels of cyanide. But sometimes, wild almond trees have a genetic mutation that makes their almonds tasty and safe for humans. Ancient people didn't gather non-bitter almonds intending to plant them — they chose the almonds that tasted best. When they discarded or accidentally dropped a few of the almonds they'd picked, they unconsciously promoted the growth of new almond trees bearing non-bitter almonds.
Domestication was a piecemeal, accidental, and self-catalytic process: the more people selected plants with certain desirable traits, the more plants with those traits grew, which meant more desirable food for those people, who could then grow in numbers and population density because of the availability of food.
Chapter Eight: Apples or Indians
Some plants are easier to domesticate than others, and those easily domesticable plants are concentrated in Southwest Asia and Europe. Many species of domesticable animals, including pigs, sheep, and cows, are also native to Eurasia.
In contrast, most of the plants native to the United States, New Guinea, and Australia weren't easy to domesticate — apple trees, for example, are genetically complex and slow-growing, making them hard to domesticate. As a result, food production arose later or not at all in those regions.
Chapter Nine: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle
"Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way," writes Diamond at the start of this chapter. According to his "Anna Karenina principle," domesticable animals all share key characteristics: they aren't picky eaters, they grow to maturity quickly, they reproduce in captivity, and they are submissive to humans. If an animal species lacks any single one of those characteristics, it cannot be domesticated.
Many domesticable animals were native to Southwest Asia and Europe. In Australia and the Americas, there were very few suitable native species, because most of the potentially domesticable animals native to those continents were hunted to extinction by early hunter-gatherers (as we learned in Chapter One).
Chapter Ten: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes
The major axis of Eurasia runs east–west, which means that many societies in Eurasia exist along the same latitude, and so enjoy similar growing seasons and climates. Plants, domestic animals, and technologies (such as agriculture) readily diffused both eastward and westward across the Eurasian continent.
The major axes of Africa and the Americas run north–south. On those continents, there is a wild diversity of climate, hours of sunlight in a day, and seasons along the same longitudinal line. The north–south axis resulted in far slower diffusion of ideas and technology across the Americas and Africa.
Part Three: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel
Now that he has detailed the ultimate causes of Eurasians' advantage over other peoples, Diamond traces the connections between ultimate and proximate causes, which include disease immunity, written language, technology, and political centralization.
Chapter Eleven: Lethal Gift of Livestock
Many of the most devastating human diseases in history started out infecting animals before making the jump to humans. Those who lived in close proximity to animals gradually developed immunity to the diseases they caught from them. But people without many domesticated animals, like Native Americans and Australians, did not develop immunity to animal-borne diseases. As a result, Old World pathogens proved devastating to New World societies, but not vice versa.
Chapter Twelve: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters
Why did some societies develop writing, while others did not? Writing only developed independently in a few places: Sumer, Mexico, and possibly China and Egypt. In every case, writing seems to have arisen first as a way to keep track of stored food, goods, and trade. Writing was another corollary of food production.
Most societies that developed writing got the idea from one of those original sites of written language instead of coming up with an alphabet de novo. Societies that interacted with other groups often — such as those on the Eurasian continent — adopted written language long before more isolated societies.
Chapter Thirteen: Necessity's Mother
"Invention is the mother of necessity," writes Diamond. Great innovations, such as the wheel and iron tools, came about only in food producing societies with the resources and population densities to support many inventors. Large, prosperous societies led to innovations, not the other way around.
In Eurasia, where societies lived in close competition with each other, and ideas easily passed from one group to the next, people built on each other's innovations and drove development forward in a self-catalyzing process.
Chapter Fourteen: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
We can organize human societies in order of ascending complexity: tribes, bands, chiefdoms, states. Complex societies are food-producing societies — agriculture leads to dense populations, and dense populations lead to stratified social structures and strong leadership.
Political centralization can solve some of the problems that arise in denser societies, which include conflicts, resource allocation problems, space constrictions, and disputes with other tribes. These states can also effectively invade and conquer other tribes, chiefdoms, or states, and thereby expand.
Part Four: Around the World in Five Chapters
These five chapters apply the ideas developed in the preceding chapters to each of the continents and a few islands.
Chapter Fifteen: Yali's People
When Europeans arrived in Australia and New Guinea, they found what seemed like Stone Age tribes. Native Australians and New Guineans had no written language, little agriculture, and they still used stone tools.
Why? The extreme environments of New Guinea and Australia made organized agriculture very difficult, and their geographic isolation prevented new ideas from easily being exchanged with their people. Neither region had sufficient native domesticable plants or animals to make farming competitive with hunting and gathering, except in the New Guinean highlands.
Chapter Sixteen: How China Became Chinese
China became unified in 221 BC. Diamond uses glottochronology to track the movement of agriculture, written language, and technological innovations through ancient China. The rise of food production in North China spawned a prehistoric movement of human population, language, and agriculture from North China into South China. This caused the entirety of China to become unified, as it has remained almost without exception ever since.
Chapter Seventeen: Speedboat to Polynesia
Diamond jumps back more than one thousand years, to what he believes was the start of an Austronesian expansion from South China through Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and all the way to the Polynesian Islands. However, the Austronesians were unable to colonize New Guinea and Australia.
Chapter Eighteen: Hemispheres Colliding
We return to the collision at Cajamarca between Pizarro and the Inca emperor Atahuallpa. We can see now that Pizarro's victory over Atahuallpa — and, by extension, Europe's conquest of the Americas — was the culmination of two separate historical trajectories that determined thousands of years previously by environmental differences between Eurasia and the Americas.
Chapter Nineteen: How Africa Became Black
Though Europeans colonized Africa as they did the Americas, the history of the African continent contrasts with that of the Americas. Africa has a different climate, and within its bounds are a hugely varied number of languages and peoples. With the exception of South Africa, European conquest did not lead to widespread or long-lasting European colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.
Diamond provides a sweeping overview of African human history, focusing especially on the prehistoric expansion of the Bantu people throughout the continent. The Bantu were an agricultural society that had the advantage over the hunter-gatherers they displaced throughout the sub-Saharan region.
Despite Africa's long pre-history, its scarcity of domesticable plants and animals and its north–south primary axis prevented most African societies from developing the guns, germs, and steel that Eurasian invaders possessed.
Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science
In the final pages of his book, Diamond summarizes his argument: Differences in continental geography and ecology led to differences in native peoples' historical outcomes.
By happenstance, Eurasians inherited an environment replete with domesticable plants and animals. They also happened to find themselves on a continent with an east–west axis, which allowed for relative ease of communication between peoples, and the knowledge of new technologies and agricultural methods to be shared from one society to the next.
Though much of prehistory is still unknown and potentially unknowable, Diamond champions human history as a science. Its methodologies may be different from chemistry or physics, but history's "natural experiments" are valuable subjects of study. Broad historical patterns are discernible, and they can teach us much about ourselves — our past, our present, and our future.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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