Prologue:
Some civilizations, such as those in Europe and Eastern Asia, have developed great power and wealth and used it to dominate the inhabitants of Australia and the Americas. Why did the Europeans conquer the Native Americans, Diamond asks, and not the other way around? In general, “why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?”
Diamond relates a popular explanation for human inequalities across culture: climate stimulates the mind. In cold climates, it’s been argued, humans have to work harder to survive; they have to build more sophisticated houses, plan ahead for the winter, and do other things that make them more industrious. But, Europeans who lived in cold climates received many of their most important ideas and technologies (writing, the wheel, etc.) from Eurasia, where the climate was actually warmer.
Another famous answer: civilizations that arose near rivers become more successful over time. Many of the earliest civilizations did emerge near big rivers (Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.), and it’s been suggested that the development of irrigation systems led to the development of complex bureaucracies, the basis for government and society. But studies have shown that early civilizations developed irrigation systems after they’d already developed centralized bureaucracies.
Chapter 1:
Africa had a “head start” in producing human beings, since thousands of years ago, there were more Homo erectus and later Homo sapiens in Africa than anywhere else. Effectively, Africa has “5 million more years of proto-human existence than any other continent.”
Chapter 2:
In Polynesia, there are thousands of islands, each with a different climate and elevation. Flora and fauna on these islands are incredibly diverse, reflecting the environment differences between islands. Yet the islands were colonized at approximately the same time by a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers who looked alike and spoke the same language. Therefore, Polynesia is a good “case study” for why environmental factors lead societies to branch off in different directions.
At this point, Diamond deals with correlation, not causation—i.e., he notes that agricultural production and population density seem to have some positive relationship with the establishment of complex social structures, but he doesn’t yet explain what this relationship consists of—or which factor causes which.
Chapter 3:
Europeans’ conquest of the New World arose when Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer, met Atahuallpa, the king of the Incas, who lived in present-day Peru. Pizarro was leading less than 200 soldiers through Peru on an expedition, while Atahuallpa was surrounded by tens of thousands of soldiers and on his “home turf.” And yet Pizarro managed to kidnap Atahuallpa almost immediately and then ransom him for huge sums of gold. How?
Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire because of his superior technology, his horses, Europe’s diseases, and, less overtly, his knowledge of writing. But we still haven’t tackled the more fundamental question of why Europeans had such advantages while the Native Americans did not.
Chapter 4:
Agriculture, one of the most efficient forms of food production, was first discovered about 11,000 years ago, and it’s a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel
By domesticating animals and keeping them in a small area, humans don’t have to expend energy chasing after their food. And by similarly concentrating the density of plant matter in an enclosed area (i.e., a plot of farmland) humans can grow crops quickly instead of looking for berries and fruits across a wide area.
This leads to social specialization in two main ways. First, a political elite gains control over the food, and has to decide how much food different people get. Second, the increase in leisure time caused by storing food for long periods gives people more time to experiment with resources and develop specializations in jobs other than food production.
In an agricultural society, people pay a tax to the state which can support an army.
Agricultural societies domesticated horses, donkeys, etc.—all animals that allowed humans to travel long distances (and win battles). Also, domesticated animals slowly train humans to survive germ epidemics.
Chapter 5:
Q: Why didn’t humans learn to produce food in areas of the globe that are, in theory, very suitable for food production. Indigenous people in California, Argentina, and Australia never developed agriculture even though the land has been put to good agricultural use later on.
Using carbon dating, archaeologists have identified areas where agriculture and the domestication of animals arose thousands of years ago: Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Eastern United States. Of these, Mesopotamia has the earliest records of both agriculture and animal domestication, about 8500 B.C. There are also regions where agriculture arose somewhat later, perhaps between 6000 and 3500 B.C., including the Indus River Valley in present-day Pakistan and India. It is likely that these regions adopted agriculture after a single agricultural product entered the region through trade.
Only a few areas of the world really developed agriculture independently—the other regions adopted it after communicating and trading with neighboring regions. The regions that developed agriculture earliest then had a head start toward guns, germs, and steel.
Chapter 6:
In the last 10,000 years, it’s become increasingly difficult to be a hunter-gatherer, for a number of reasons. Wild foods have become considerably less available in that time, and most of the world’s large mammal species have gone extinct.
Chapter 7:
The agricultural revolution began in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.
Crops, such as bananas, oranges, and grapes, developed reproductive mutations that allowed them to self-fertilize.
The original domesticated crops were wheat and barley, probably because they were fast-growing, easy to harvest, and self-pollinating. Later, humans learned to domesticate figs and olives—crops that grew more slowly. Then, humans learned to domesticate fruit trees, which can only be domesticated with grafting. In short, humans learned to domesticate different plants at different times: by and large, and across civilizations, humans learned to domesticate fast-growing, easy-to-harvest crops first, and slow-growing crops later on (if at all). By the time of the ancient Romans, most of the world’s leading crops were being cultivated somewhere in the world.
Chapter 8:
While there are millions of plants around the world, a surprisingly small number of them are suitable for domestication: most plants produce no fruit, and their leaves or roots are inedible. In modern times, humans haven’t succeeded in domesticating a single new plant.
Due to the environmental differences on the Earth’s surface, certain regions have lots of available seeds and crops and others don’t. One of Diamond’s central arguments is that the peoples with access to certain seeds and crops have formed societies that have gone on to be more powerful than societies formed by people without such resources.
The area of Mesopotamia (which was less dry and hot thousands of years ago than it is today) had conditions that were highly favorable to the emergence of agriculture: a wide range of nutritious crops that humans could eat, enjoy, and plant easily. These conditions helped to make agriculture the most efficient and widespread form of food production in Mesopotamia, leading (Diamond suggests) to its role as the “birthplace of civilization.” Australia has a similar climate to the Fertile Crescent, but not many seeds; the same is true of Chile, California, and Southern Africa.
Chapter 9:
Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.
1) The animal cannot be carnivorous. To raise a carnivorous animal in captivity, you would have to track down smaller animals to feed it, and you’d have to feed those smaller animals, too. It’s more efficient to raise an herbivore or omnivore.
2) The animal must grow quickly.
3) The animal must be comfortable breeding in captivity.
4) The animal must not have a “nasty” disposition (as zebras do).
5) The animal must not have a tendency to panic in danger.
6) The animal must be used to herding (i.e., being controlled by a pack leader) in the wild.
Human beings domesticated a mere 14 species before the 20th century, of which the 5 most important by far are the cow, pig, goat, sheep, and horse.
Chapter 10:
The continents of Earth have some important physical differences: most of them are wider from north to south than they are from east to west, so one could say that their “major axis” is the north-south axis. The differences in the shapes of the continents result in some big differences between civilizations.
Agriculture spread east and west far quicker than it spread north and south. For example, agriculture spread from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley at a rate of almost a mile a year (but in the Americas, it spread north from Mexico at a rate of only 0.3 miles a year). In general, innovations in food production, from agriculture to the domestication of large mammals, spread more slowly through the Americas than through Eurasia.
This is because Earth rotates on a north-south axis, meaning that the sun’s heat warms places with the same latitude equally. Two areas that share the same latitude will tend to have very similar climates, even if they’re on opposite sides of the world, whereas two areas with the same longitude often have very different climates. This helps in migration of crops, people, animals, and even languages.
Exception: Crop innovations in the American southwest never reached the American southeast, even though the two regions had the same latitude—this is because most of the area in between (i.e., present-day Texas and the Great Plains) couldn’t support agriculture.
Chapter 11:
One of the most important factors in determining whether or not a community will die of an epidemic is population size. A small community (i.e., a hunter-gatherer community) can easily be wiped out altogether by disease. Larger communities, however, will contain some people with immunities to the disease, ensuring that the community as a whole survives, even if a majority of it dies—and those who do survive will usually pass on their immunity to their offspring. On the other hand, there are some diseases that only exist in large communities—meaning that those large communities are the only groups that develop immunities to the diseases (so that both the disease and its host—the community itself—survives). This in turn means that when a large community interacts with a smaller community, a greater portion of the small community than of the (partially immune) large community will die of the disease.
Many animals spread disease, meaning that agricultural societies in which people are often around animals will tend to have more diseases—but also develop more immunities.
Chapter 12:
<Talks about types and development of languages. Can be skipped>
Chapter 13:
The car engine, the phonograph, and hundreds of other important inventions were developed for purposes entirely different from the purposes with which we now associate them. So in a way, invention is the mother of necessity; technology “finds” a use after it’s invented, instead of being invented for a specific purpose.
Chapter 14:
A kleptocrat can encourage the people to obey him is to create a religion that justifies his own power. Many chiefs are also religious leaders in their chiefdoms, and spend much of the tribute on large religious structures. By popularizing religion, chiefs not only encourage their followers to respect and worship them; they also convince their followers to sacrifice their lives for their chiefdom in times of war.
Chapter 15:
<How do above points apply in case of Australia and New Guinea>
Chapter 16:
<Explanation for China>
Chapter 17:
<Explanation for Austronesian islands>
Chapter 18:
<Explanation for Americas>
Chapter 19:
<Explanation for Africa>
Epilogue:
There are four underlying environment factors that determine the course of human history:
1) availability of wild plants and animals for domestication,
2) barriers to diffusion and migration within a continent,
3) barriers to diffusion and migration between continents, and
4) population size and density.
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