Diamond, Jared - Guns, Germs & Steel

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Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short
history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. 1997 my
own book scans preserved
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond argues that
both geography and the environment played major roles in
determining the shape of the modern world. This argument runs
counter to the usual theories that cite biology as the crucial factor.
Diamond claims that the cultures that were first able to domesticate
plants and animals were then able to develop writing skills, as well as
make advances in the creation of government, technology, weaponry,
and immunity to disease
Prologue: Yali's Question: The regionally
differing courses of history 13
Ch. 1 Up to the Starting Line: What happened on all
the continents before 11,000 B.C.? 35
Ch. 2 A Natural Experiment of History: How
geography molded societies on Polynesian islands 53
Ch. 3 Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor
Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain 67
Ch. 4 Farmer Power: The roots of guns, germs, and
steel 85
Ch. 5 History's Haves and Have-Nots: Geographic
differences in the onset of food production 93
Ch. 6 To Farm or Not to Farm: Causes of the spread
of food production 104
Ch. 7 How to Make an Almond: The unconscious
development of ancient crops 114
Ch. 8 Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some
regions fail to domesticate plants? 131
Ch. 9 Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna
Karenina Principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never
domesticated? 157
Ch. 10 Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes: Why did
food production spread at different rates on different continents?
176
Ch. 11 Lethal Gift of Livestock: The evolution of
germs 195
Ch. 12 Blueprints and Borrowed Letters: The
evolution of writing 215
Ch. 13 Necessity's Mother: The evolution of
technology 239
Ch. 14 From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy: The
evolution of government and religion 265
Ch. 15 Yali's People: The histories of Australia and
New Guinea 295
Ch. 16 How China became Chinese: The history of
East Asia 322
Ch. 17 Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of the
Austronesian expansion 334
Ch. 18 Hemispheres Colliding: The histories of
Eurasia and the Americas compared 354
Ch. 19 How Africa became Black: The history of
Africa 376
Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a
Science 403
Acknowledgments 427
Further Readings 429
Credits 459
Index 461
P R E F A C E
WHY Is WORLD HISTORY LIKE AN
ONION?
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 aren't; as you will see, the answers
to the question don't involve human racial differences at all. The book's
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 world—sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Island
Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands—receive
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.
10 • P R E F A C E
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
world's population and the vast majority of the world's ethnic, cultural,
and liguistic groups. Some of them already are, and others are becoming,
among the world's 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 didn't capitalism flourish in Native Mexico,
mercantil-
WHY IS W O R L D H I S T O R Y L I K E AN O N I O N ? • I I
ism 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 factors—
e.g., scientific inquiry supposedly stifled in China by Confucianism
but stimulated in western Eurasia by Greek of Judaeo-Christian
traditions—then one is continuing to ignore the need for ultimate
explanations: why didn't 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 that 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.
Some readers may feel that I am going to the opposite extreme from
conventional histories, by devoting too little space to western Eurasia at
the expense of other parts of the world. I would answer that some
other parts of the world are very instructive, because they encompass so
many societies and such diverese societies within a small geographical
area. Other readers may find themselves agreeing with one reviewer
of this book. With mildly critical tongue in cheek, the reviewer wrote
that I seem to view world history as an onion, of which the modern world
constitutes only the surface, and whose layers are to be peeled back in
the search for historical understanding. Yes, world history is indeed
such an onion! But that peeling back of the onion's layers is fascinating,
challenging—and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to
grasp our past's lessons for our future.
Chapter One: Up To The Starting
Line
A suitable starting point from which to compare historical
developments on the different continents is around 11,000 B.C.(*)
This date corresponds approximately to the beginnings of village life
in a few parts of the world, the first undisputed peopling of the
Americas, the end of the Pleistocene Era and last Ice Age, and the
start of what geologists term the Recent Era. Plant and animal
domestication began in at least one part of the world within a few
thousand years of that date. As of then, did the people of some
continents already have a head start or a clear advantage over peoples
of other continents?
If so, perhaps that head start, amplified over the last 13,000
years, provides the answer to Yali's question. Hence this chapter will
offer a whirlwind tour of human history on all the continents, for
millions of years, from our origins as a species until 13,000 years ago.
All that will now be summarized in less than 20 pages. Naturally, I
shall gloss over details and mention only what seem to me the trends
most relevant to this book.
Our closest living relatives are three surviving species of great
ape: the gorilla, the common chimpanzee, and the pygmy chimpanzee
(also known as bonobo). Their confinement to Africa, along with
abundant fossil evidence, indicates that the earliest stages of human
evolution were also played out in Africa. Human history, as
something separate from the history of animals, began there about 7
million years ago (estimates range from 5 to 9 million years ago).
Around that time, a population of African apes broke up into several
populations, of which one proceeded to evolve into modern gorillas,
asecond into the two modern chimps, and the third into humans. The
gorilla line apparently split off slightly before the split between the
chimp and the human lines.
Fossils indicate that the evolutionary line leading to us had
achieved a substantially upright posture by around 4 million years
ago, then began to increase in body size and in relative brain size
around 2.5 million years ago. Those protohumans are generally
known as Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo
erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence.
Although Homo erectus, the stage reached around 1.7 million years
ago, was close to us modern humans in body size, its brain size was
still barely half of ours. Stone tools became common around 2.5
million years ago, but they were merely the crudest of flaked or
battered stones. In zoological significance and distinctiveness, Homo
erectus was more than an ape, but still much less than a modern
human.
All of that human history, for the first 5 or 6 million years after
our origins about 7 million years ago, remained confined to Africa.
The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus,
as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of
Java and conventionally known as Java man (see Figure 1.1).
The oldest Java "man" fossils--of course, they may actually have
belonged to a Java woman--have usually been assumed to date from
about a million years ago. However, it has recently been argued that
they actually date from 1.8 million years ago. (Strictly speaking, the
name Homo erectus belongs to these Javan fossils, and the African
fossils classified as Homo erectus may warrant a different name.) At
present, the earliest unquestioned evidence for humans in Europe
stems from around half a million years ago, but there are claims of an
earlier presence. One would certainly assume that the colonization of
Asia also permitted the simultaneous colonization of Europe, since
Eurasia is a single landmass not bisected by major barriers.
That illustrates an issue that will recur throughout this book.
Whenever some scientist claims to have discovered "the earliest X"--
whether X is the earliest human fossil in Europe, the earliest evidence
of domesticated corn in Mexico, or the earliest anything anywhere--
that announcement challenges other scientists to beat the claim by
finding something still earlier. In reality, there must be some truly
"earliest X," with all claims of earlier X's being false. However, as we
shall see, for virtually any X, every year brings forth new discoveries
and claims of a purported still earlier X, along with refutations of
some or all of previous years' claims of earlier X. It often takes
decades of searching before archaeologists reach a consensus on such
questions.
By about half a million years ago, human fossils had diverged
from older Homo erectus skeletons in their enlarged, rounder, and less
angular skulls. African and European skulls of half a million years ago
were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are
classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead of in Homo erectus.
This distinction is necessarily arbitrary, since Homo erectus evolved
into Homo sapiens. However, these early Homo sapiens still differed
from us in skeletal details, had brains significantly smaller than ours,
and were grossly different from us in their artifacts and behavior.
Modern stone-tool-making peoples, such as Yali's great-grandparents,
would have scorned the stone tools of half a million years ago as very
crude. The only other significant addition to our ancestors' cultural
repertoire that can be documented with confidence around that time
was the use of fire.
No art, bone tool, or anything else has come down to us from
early Homo sapiens except for their skeletal remains, plus those crude
stone tools. There were still no humans in Australia, for the obvious
reason that it would have taken boats to get there from Southeast
Asia. There were also no humans anywhere in the Americas, because
that would have required the occupation of the nearest part of the
Eurasian continent (Siberia), and possibly boat-building skills as well.
(The present, shallow Bering Strait, separating Siberia from Alaska,
alternated between a strait and a broad intercontinental bridge of dry
land, as sea level repeatedly rose and fell during the Ice Ages.)
However, boat building and survival in cold Siberia were both still far
beyond the capabilities of early Homo sapiens.
After half a million years ago, the human populations of Africa
and western Eurasia proceeded to diverge from each other and from
East Asian populations in skeletal details. The population of Europe
and western Asia between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago is
represented by especially many skeletons, known as Neanderthals and
sometimes classified as a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis.
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes
living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own.
They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of
burying their dead and caring for their sick. Yet their stone tools were
still crude by comparison with modern New Guineans' polished stone
axes and were usually not yet made in standardized diverse shapes,
each with a clearly recognizable function.
The few preserved African skeletal fragments contemporary with
the Neanderthals are more similar to our modern skeletons than to
Neanderthal skeletons. Even fewer preserved East Asian skeletal
fragments are known, but they appear different again from both
Africans and Neanderthals. As for the lifestyle at that time, the best-
preserved evidence comes from stone artifacts and prey bones
accumulated at southern African sites. Although those Africans of
100,000 years ago had more modern skeletons than did their
Neanderthal contemporaries, they made essentially the same crude
stone tools as Neanderthals, still lacking standardized shapes. They
had no preserved art. To judge from the bone evidence of the animal
species on which they preyed, their hunting skills were unimpressive
and mainly directed at easy-to-kill, not-at-all-dangerous animals. They
were not yet in the business of slaughtering buffalo, pigs, and other
dangerous prey. They couldn't even catch fish: their sites immediately
on the seacoast lack fish bones and fishhooks. They and their
Neanderthal contemporaries still rank as less than fully human.
Human history at last took off around 50,000 years ago, at the
time of what I have termed our Great Leap Forward. The earliest
definite signs of that leap come from East African sites with
standardized stone tools and the first preserved jewelry (ostrich-shell
beads). Similar developments soon appear in the Near East and in
southeastern Europe, then (some 40,000 years ago) in southwestern
Europe, where abundant artifacts are associated with fully modern
skeletons of people termed Cro-Magnons. Thereafter, the garbage
preserved at archaeological sites rapidly becomes more and more
interesting and leaves no doubt that we are dealing with biologically
and behaviorally modern humans.
Cro-Magnon garbage heaps yield not only stone tools but also
tools of bone, whose suitability for shaping (for instance, into
fishhooks) had apparently gone unrecognized by previous humans.
Tools were produced in diverse and distinctive shapes so modern that
their functions as needles, awls, engraving tools, and so on are
obvious to us. Instead of only single-piece tools such as hand-held
scrapers, multipiece tools made their appearance. Recognizable
multipiece weapons at Cro-Magnon sites include harpoons, spear-
throwers, and eventually bows and arrows, the precursors of rifles and
other multipiece modern weapons. Those efficient means of killing at
a safe distance permitted the hunting of such dangerous prey as rhinos
and elephants, while the invention of rope for nets, lines, and snares
allowed the addition of fish and birds to our diet. Remains of houses
and sewn clothing testify to a greatly improved ability to survive in
cold climates, and remains of jewelry and carefully buried skeletons
indicate revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual developments.
Of the Cro-Magnons' products that have been preserved, the best
known are their artworks: their magnificent cave paintings, statues,
and musical instruments, which we still appreciate as art today.
Anyone who has experienced firsthand the overwhelming power of
the life-sized painted bulls and horses in the Lascaux Cave of
southwestern France will understand at once that their creators must
have been as modern in their minds as they were in their skeletons.
Obviously, some momentous change took place in our ancestors'
capabilities between about 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. That Great
Leap Forward poses two major unresolved questions, regarding its
triggering cause and its geographic location. As for its cause, I argued
in my book The Third Chimpanzee for the perfection of the voice box
and hence for the anatomical basis of modern language, on which the
exercise of human creativity is so dependent. Others have suggested
instead that a change in brain organization around that time, without a
change in brain size, made modern language possible.
As for the site of the Great Leap Forward, did it take place
primarily in one geographic area, in one group of humans, who were
thereby enabled to expand and replace the former human populations
of other parts of the world? Or did it occur in parallel in different
regions, in each of which the human populations living there today
would be descendants of the populations living there before the leap?
The rather modern-looking human skulls from Africa around 100,000
years ago have been taken to support the former view, with the leap
occurring specifically in Africa. Molecular studies (of so-called
mitochondrial DNA) were initially also interpreted in terms of an
African origin of modern humans, though the meaning of those
molecular findings is currently in doubt. On the other hand, skulls of
humans living in China and Indonesia hundreds of thousands of years
ago are considered by some physical anthropologists to exhibit
features still found in modern Chinese and in Aboriginal Australians,
respectively. If true, that finding would suggest parallel evolution and
multiregional origins of modern humans, rather than origins in a
single Garden of Eden. The issue remains unresolved.
The evidence for a localized origin of modern humans, followed
by their spread and then their replacement of other types of humans
elsewhere, seems strongest for Europe. Some 40,000 years ago, into
Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their modern skeletons, superior
weapons, and other advanced cultural traits. Within a few thousand
years there were no more Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the
sole occupants of Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. That
sequence strongly suggests that the modern Cro-Magnons somehow
used their far superior technology, and their language skills or brains,
to infect, kill, or displace the Neanderthals, leaving behind little or no
evidence of hybridization between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.
The great leap Forward coincides with the first proven major
extension of human geographic range since our ancestors'
colonization of Eurasia. That extension consisted of the occupation of
Australia and New Guinea, joined at that time into a single continent.
Many radiocarbondated sites attest to human presence in
Australia/New Guinea between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago (plus the
inevitable somewhat older claims of contested validity). Within a
short time of that initial peopling, humans had expanded over the
whole continent and adapted to its diverse habitats, from the tropical
rain forests and high mountains of New Guinea to the dry interior and
wet southeastern corner of Australia.
During the Ice Ages, so much of the oceans' water was locked up
in glaciers that worldwide sea levels dropped hundreds of feet below
their present stand. As a result, what are now the shallow seas
between Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java,
and Bali became dry land. (So did other shallow straits, such as the
Bering Strait and the English Channel.) The edge of the Southeast
Asian mainland then lay 700 miles east of its present location.
Nevertheless, central Indonesian islands between Bali and Australia
remained surrounded and separated by deepwater channels. To reach
Australia/New Guinea from the Asian mainland at that time still
required crossing a minimum of eight channels, the broadest of which
was at least 50 miles wide. Most of those channels divided islands
visible from each other, but Australia itself was always invisible from
even the nearest Indonesian islands, Timor and Tanimbar. Thus, the
occupation of Australia/New Guinea is momentous in that it
demanded watercraft and provides by far the earliest evidence of their
use in history. Not until about 30,000 years later (13,000 years ago) is
there strong evidence of watercraft anywhere else in the world, from
the Mediterranean.
Initially, archaeologists considered the possibility that the
colonization of Australia/New Guinea was achieved accidentally by
just a few people swept to sea while fishing on a raft near an
Indonesian island. In an extreme scenario the first settlers are pictured
as having consisted of a single pregnant young woman carrying a
male fetus. But believers in the fluke-colonization theory have been
surprised by recent discoveries that still other islands, lying to the east
of New Guinea, were colonized soon after New Guinea itself, by
around 35,000 years ago. Those islands were New Britain and New
Ireland, in the Bismarck Archipelago, and Buka, in the Solomon
Archipelago. Buka lies out of sight of the closest island to the west
and could have been reached only by crossing a water gap of about
100 miles. Thus, early Australians and New Guineans were probably
capable of intentionally traveling over water to visible islands, and
were using watercraft sufficiently often that the colonization of even
invisible distant islands was repeatedly achieved unintentionally.
The settlement of Australia/New Guinea was perhaps associated
with still another big first, besides humans' first use of watercraft and
first range extension since reaching Eurasia: the first mass
extermination of large animal species by humans. Today, we regard
Africa as the continent of big mammals. Modern Eurasia also has
many species of big mammals (though not in the manifest abundance
of Africa's Serengeti Plains), such as Asia's rhinos and elephants and
tigers, and Europe's moose and bears and (until classical times) lions.
Australia/New Guinea today has no equally large mammals, in fact no
mammal larger than 100-pound kangaroos. But Australia/New Guinea
formerly had its own suite of diverse big mammals, including giant
kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and reaching the
size of a cow, and a marsupial "leopard." It also formerly had a 400-
pound ostrichlike flightless bird, plus some impressively big reptiles,
including a one-ton lizard, a giant python, and land-dwelling
crocodiles.
All of those Australian/New Guinean giants (the so-called
megafauna) disappeared after the arrival of humans. While there has
been controversy about the exact timing of their demise, several
Australian archaeological sites, with dates extending over tens of
thousands of years, and with prodigiously abundant deposits of animal
bones, have been carefully excavated and found to contain not a trace
of the now extinct giants over the last 35,000 years. Hence the
megafauna probably became extinct soon after humans reached
Australia.
The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species
raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible
answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the
摘要：

Diamond,Jared,DiamonDd,mnJarne.dd19n7nmyw,.ybm.w,knwsndcd,kpwrknsw,n.ydn1Jm.nvIotttnkdJ,m.1997myownbookscanspreservedInthisPulitzerPrize-winningbook,JaredDiamondarguesthatbothgeographyandtheenvironmentplayedmajorrolesindeterminingtheshapeofthemodernworld.Thisargumentrunscountertotheusualtheoriesthat...

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