Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
More praise for Guns, Germs, and Steel
“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
“[Diamond’s] 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 doesn’t 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
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES
Jared Diamond
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. Civilization—History. 3. Ethnology. 4. Human beings—Effect of environment on. 5. Culture diffusion. I. Title.
HM206.D48 1997
303.4—dc21
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
CONTENTS
Preface to the Paperback Edition
PROLOGUE YALI’S QUESTION
The regionally differing courses of history
PART ONE FROM EDEN TO CAJAMARCA
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
PART TWO THE RISE AND SPREAD OF FOOD PRODUCTION
CHAPTER 4 FARMER POWER
The roots of guns, germs, and steel
CHAPTER 5 HISTORY’S 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?
PART THREE FROM FOOD TO GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
CHAPTER 11 LETHAL GIFT OF LIVESTOCK
The evolution of germs
CHAPTER 12 BLUEPRINTS AND BORROWED LETTERS
The evolution of writing
CHAPTER 13 NECESSITY’S MOTHER
The evolution of technology
CHAPTER 14 FROM EGALITARIANISM TO KLEPTOCRACY
The evolution of government and religion
PART FOUR AROUND THE WORLD IN FIVE CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 15 YALI’S 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 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN
HISTORY AS A SCIENCE
2003 Afterword: Guns, Germs, and Steel Today
Acknowledgments
Further Readings
Credits
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
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 Eurasian 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.
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 linguistic 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 millennia; 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 all 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, 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 factors—e.g., scientific inquiry supposedly stifled in China by Confucianism but stimulated in western Eurasia by Greek or 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 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.
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 diverse 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.
J. D.
PROLOGUE
YALI’S QUESTION
WE ALL KNOW THAT HISTORY HAS PROCEEDED VERY DIFFERENTLY for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial. This puzzling question of their origins was posed to me 25 years ago in a simple, personal form.
In July 1972 I was walking along a beach on the tropical island of New Guinea, where as a biologist I study bird evolution. I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali, who was touring the district then. By chance, Yali and I were walking in the same direction on that day, and he overtook me. We walked together for an hour, talking during the whole time.
Yali radiated charisma and energy. His eyes flashed in a mesmerizing way. He talked confidently about himself, but he also asked lots of probing questions and listened intently. Our conversation began with a subject then on every New Guinean’s mind—the rapid pace of political developments. Papua New Guinea, as Yali’s nation is now called, was at that time still administered by Australia as a mandate of the United Nations, but independence was in the air. Yali explained to me his role in getting local people to prepare for self-government.
After a while, Yali turned the conversation and began to quiz me. He had never been outside New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable. First, he wanted to know about my work on New Guinea birds (including how much I got paid for it). I explained to him how different groups of birds had colonized New Guinea over the course of millions of years. He then asked how the ancestors of his own people had reached New Guinea over the last tens of thousands of years, and how white Europeans had colonized New Guinea within the last 200 years.
The conversation remained friendly, even though the tension between the two societies that Yali and I represented was familiar to both of us. Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still “living in the Stone Age.” That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousands of years ago, and they dwelt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority. Whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as “cargo.”
Many of the white colonialists openly despised New Guineans as “primitive.” Even the least able of New Guinea’s white “masters,” as they were still called in 1972, enjoyed a far higher stand
ard of living than New Guineans, higher even than charismatic politicians like Yali. Yet Yali had quizzed lots of whites as he was then quizzing me, and I had quizzed lots of New Guineans. He and I both knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans. All those things must have been on Yali’s mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
It was a simple question that went to the heart of life as Yali experienced it. Yes, there still is a huge difference between the lifestyle of the average New Guinean and that of the average European or American. Comparable differences separate the lifestyles of other peoples of the world as well. Those huge disparities must have potent causes that one might think would be obvious.
Yet Yali’s apparently simple question is a difficult one to answer. I didn’t have an answer then. Professional historians still disagree about the solution; most are no longer even asking the question. In the years since Yali and I had that conversation, I have studied and written about other aspects of human evolution, history, and language. This book, written twenty-five years later, attempts to answer Yali.
ALTHOUGH YALI’S QUESTION concerned only the contrasting lifestyles of New Guineans and of European whites, it can be extended to a larger set of contrasts within the modern world. Peoples of Eurasian origin, especially those still living in Europe and eastern Asia, plus those transplanted to North America, dominate the modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, have thrown off European colonial domination but remain far behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples, such as the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and southernmost Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists.
