Guns, Germs, and Steel. Part 1 From Eden to Catamarca. <책정리>

I basically copied the words and sentences from the book, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel,' 'written by Jared Diamond. It was for me to understand better and more thoroughly. If there is any problem, please let me know. 

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

Prologue

Why did history unfold differently on different continents?

Yali’s question, "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?"

OB (Objections) 1. Aren’t Understanding or explaining justification of domination?

Answer: Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.

OB 2. Automatically involve a Eurocentric approach to history, a glorification of western Europeans?

Answer: Far from glorifying peoples of western European origin, we shall see that most basic elements of their civilization were developed by other peoples living elsewhere and were then imported to Western Europe.

OB 3. , don't words such as "civilization," and phrases such as "rise of civilization," convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable

My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.

 

DOES YALI'S QUESTION really need another book to answer it? Don't we already know the answer? If so, what is it? Probably the commonest explanation involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences among peoples.

1. A genetic explanation.

2. Cold climate? Fails to survive scrutiny.

3. Importance of lowland river valleys in dry climates, where highly productive agriculture

Depended on large-scale irrigation systems that in turn required centralized bureaucracies.

Detailed archaeological studies have shown that complex irrigation systems did not accompany the rise of centralized bureaucracies but followed after a considerable lag.

4. List the immediate factors that enabled Europeans to kill or conquer other peoples—especially European guns, infectious diseases, steel tools, and manufactured products.

However, this hypothesis is incomplete, because it still offers only a proximate (first-stage) explanation identifying immediate causes. It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

 

"History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves."

 

 

Part 1. From Eden to Cajamarca

Chapter 1. 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.

Human history at last took off around 50,000 years ago, at the time of what I have termed our Great Leap Forward. 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.

 

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.

 

The oldest unquestioned human remains in the Americas are at sites in the United States south of the Canadian border and in Mexico in the centuries just before 11,000 B.C. The sites are called Clovis sites, named after the type site near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where their characteristic large stone spearpoints were first recognized.

Also unresolved is the question whether Clovis hunters really were the first Americans. In either case, of the five habitable continents, North America and South America are the ones with the shortest human prehistories.

What significance, if any, do the continents' differing dates of settlement have for subsequent history? Suppose that a time machine could have transported an archaeologist back in time, for a world tour at around 11,000 B.C. Given the state of the world then, could the archaeologist have predicted the sequence in which human societies on the various continents would develop guns, germs, and steel, and thus predicted the state of the world today?

If that counted for anything, then Africa enjoyed an enormous advantage: at least 5 million more years of separate protohuman existence than on any other continent. In addition, if it is true that modern humans arose in Africa around 100,000 years ago and spread to other continents, that would have wiped out any advantages accumulated elsewhere in the meantime and given Africans a new head start. Furthermore, human genetic diversity is highest in Africa; perhaps more-diverse humans would collectively produce more-diverse inventions.

If by head start you mean the time required to populate a continent after the arrival of the first few pioneering colonists, that time is relatively brief: for example, less than 1,000 years to fill up even the whole New World. (…) Our archaeologist might therefore look at the Americas and conclude that Africans, despite their apparently enormous head start, would have been overtaken by the earliest Americans within at most a millennium. Thereafter, the Americas' greater area (50 percent greater than Africa's) and much greater environmental diversity would have given the advantage to Native Americans over Africans.

The archaeologist might then turn to Eurasia and reason as follows. Eurasia is the world's largest continent. It has been occupied for longer than any other continent except Africa. Africa's long occupation before the colonization of Eurasia a million years ago might have counted for nothing anyway, because protohumans were at such a primitive stage then. Our archaeologist might look at the Upper Paleolithic flowering of southwestern Europe between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with all those famous artworks and complex tools, and wonder whether Eurasia was already getting a head start then, at least locally.

Finally, the archaeologist would turn to Australia / New Guinea, noting first its small area (it's the smallest continent), the large fraction of it covered by desert capable of supporting few humans, the continent's isolation, and its later occupation than that of Africa and Eurasia. All that might lead the archaeologist to predict slow development in Australia / New Guinea.

But remember that Australians and New Guineans had by far the earliest watercraft in the world. They were creating cave paintings apparently at least as early as the Cro-Magnons in Europe. As the colonists crossed the straits separating each Indonesian island from the next one to the east, they adapted anew, filled up that next island, and went on to colonize the next island again. It was a hitherto unprecedented golden age of successive human population explosions. Perhaps those cycles of colonization, adaptation, and population explosion were what selected for the Great Leap Forward, which then diffused back westward to Eurasia and Africa. If this scenario is correct, then Australia / New Guinea gained a massive head start that might have continued to propel human development there long after the Great Leap Forward.

Thus, an observer transported back in time to 11,000 B.C. could not have predicted on which continent human societies would develop most quickly, but could have made a strong case for any of the continents. With hindsight, of course, we know that Eurasia was the one.

 

Chapter 2. A Natural Experiment of History

 

The brutal outcome of this collision between the Moriori and the Maori could have been easily predicted. The Moriori were a small, isolated population of hunter-gatherers, equipped with only the simplest technology and weapons, entirely inexperienced at war, and lacking strong leadership or organization. The Maori invaders (from New Zealand's North Island) came from a dense population of farmers chronically engaged in ferocious wars, equipped with more-advanced technology and weapons, and operating under strong leadership. Of course, when the two groups finally came into contact, it was the Maori who slaughtered the Moriori, not vice versa.

Moriori and Maori history constitutes a brief, small-scale natural experiment that tests how environments affect human societies.

Contributing to these differences among Polynesian societies were at least six sets of environmental variables among Polynesian islands: island climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation.  

Environment -> Subsistence

As a result of all this environmentally related variation in subsistence, human population densities (measured in people per square mile of arable land) varied greatly over Polynesia.

Hence the area of the political unit varied not only with an island's area but also with its fragmentation and isolation.

A political unit's population size interacted with its population density to influence Polynesian technology and economic, social, and political organization. In general, the larger the size and the higher the density, the more complex and specialized were the technology and organization

 

Thus, polynesian island societies differed greatly in their economic specialization, social complexity, political organization, and material products, related to differences in population size and density, related in turn to differences in island area, fragmentation, and isolation and in opportunities for subsistence and for intensifying food production.

                                             

Chapter 3. Collision at Cajamarca

 

   The biggest population shift of modern times has been the colonization of the New World by Europeans, and the resulting conquest, numerical reduction, or complete disappearance of most groups of Native Americans (American Indians).

Atahuallpa's capture was decisive for the European conquest of the Inca Empire.

When Pizarro and Atahuallpa met at Cajamarca, why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa and kill so many of his followers, instead of Atahuallpa's vastly more numerous forces capturing and killing Pizarro? After all, Pizarro had only 62 soldiers mounted on horses, along with 106 foot soldiers, while Atahuallpa commanded an army of about 80,000.

1.     By the 1700s, guns had replaced swords as the main weapon favoring European invaders over Native Americans and other native peoples.

2.     Atahuallpa's presence at Cajamarca thus highlights one of the key factors in world history: diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, by decimating many peoples on other continents.

3.     Why did Atahuallpa walk into the trap? In hindsight, we find it astonishing that Atahuallpa marched into Pizarro's obvious trap at Cajamarca. The Spaniards who captured him were equally surprised at their success. The consequences of literacy are prominent in the ultimate explanation.

In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history.

 

Immediate reasons for Pizarro's success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing. Long before anyone began manufacturing guns and steel, others of those same factors had led to the expansions of some non-European peoples, as we shall see in later chapters.

   But we are still left with the fundamental question why all those immediate advantages came to lie more with Europe than with the New World. Why weren't the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which European lacked resistance, to develop oceangoing ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history? Those are no longer the questions of proximate causation that this chapter has been discussing, but questions of ultimate causation that will take up the next two parts of this book.