Prologue
1. Around 11,000 B.C., after the last Ice Age, societies began to head towards different directions. Societies developed themselves and they became advanced and literate civilizations that used metal tools, not non-literate farming, and hunter-gatherers who used stone tools. Now that the advanced society has conquered the rest, Diamond attempts to address the question of why some societies were more successful than others and how they differed throughout the course of history. Diamond traveled to New Guinea to study bird evolution and began talking to Yali, a local politician. Yali asked Diamond, “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?” New Guinea is not the only place that has experienced this issue, while others of Eurasian origin dominate the world’s wealth and power. Diamond states that colonization is not what only caused this, as continents already differed greatly earlier to this period. He talks about the significance of colonization and the promotion of inequality, as empires with strong defences conquered tribes with less advanced tools.
2. I wonder if Yali focused on these sort of questions in his career or out of curiosity
I wonder if a society’s location has an effect on whether or not it’s colonized
I wonder how some societies had easier access to materials that allowed them to excel faster than others
3. Diamond wants to figure out why certain societies became powerful and dominant and while others did not. Diamond talks about Yali’s knowledge and ability as a politician, suggesting that no matter how advanced a civilization’s technology is or how economically superior they are, it has little to do with the intelligence or talent of individual people. This part of the book set up the mystery that Diamond will attempt to unravel in the rest of the book which makes it more important. The question for the readers is why some societies thrive while others do not? There are several points in the book in which Diamond’s own point of view about human history becomes very clear and for the most part, Diamond’s tone is scientific and dispassionate as he is describing not judging.
Chapter 1
1. About 7 million years ago, our ancestors broke off as a separate lineage from other animals in Africa. Human ancestors began walking upright around 4 million years ago, and they moved to Eurasia around 1 or 2 million years ago. Not long after human fossils started to look like present day, our race made a blast of new technological and artistic developments that far outperformed anything made before. This period is called the Great Leap Forward and shortly after the human race expanded. Although our human ancestors had remained in Africa and Eurasia for millions and millions of years, people then moved outwards towards Australia, the South Pacific, and the coldest northern regions of Eurasia. Diamond thinks it is extraordinary that without modern technology, people traveled to all habitable areas of the globe in a few tens of thousands of years. Diamond asks about if a present-day archaeologist traveled back 13,000 years could figure out which continent’s people would have the best chances for developing advanced technologies. He then lists the different advantages that these people had.
2. How come Africa isn’t the most powerful continent in the world, given that the earliest human beings emerged from there?
How come the Egyptians, one of the most advanced civilizations of the ancient world, did not expand throughout the rest of Africa?
I wonder how people figure out when these events took place
3. There is no precise way to measure when homosapiens first emerged from the evolutionary tree—as is often the case in the book, scientists have to make educated guesses. Furthermore, homosapiens are distinguished by their ability to interact with their environments and make use of available resources. Making use of resources is one of the key human traits driving history. Human history is presented as a record of how human beings have shaped their environments and used certain resources to make useful tools. Evidently, Diamond doesn’t have enough data to argue that humans began shaping tools in response to certain geographical stimuli—scientists don’t even know where the earliest tools and cave paintings emerged. As with much of this first chapter, the data available to scientists is so limited that it’s difficult to draw any final conclusions. Nevertheless, the possibility that early human beings wiped out entire animal populations arguably anticipates the way that later societies wiped out populations in the regions they colonized, suggesting that aggression is a fundamental part of human nature. Scientists know very little about the progress of human beings around the world beyond a few thousand years ago—invalidating any pseudo-scientific explanations of how certain races or groups have “always” been superior to others. Also, the Clovis may have wiped out most of the large mammals in the Americas—echoing the possible exterminations of large animals in New Guinea. The possibility that the earliest humans around the world massacred animals and other humans suggests that humans have always drastically altered their environments, often in destructive ways.
Chapter 2
1. Diamond had a theory that environmental factors can determine the fate of a continent and he uses Polynesia as an example. He also talks about how Polynesia gives many examples of societies that developed in isolation. Also, since islands are smaller than continents, the environmental factors that affect their inhabitants are simpler to explain. In 1835, 500 Maori warriors sailed to the Chatham Islands and the Maori came from an agricultural society. They were armed with both modern and traditional weapons. The Moriori were a peaceful and less organized hunter-gatherer society who occupied a more isolated, less populated group of islands. Over only a few weeks, the Maori warriors killed nearly all the Moriori and took possession of the islands. Diamond proposes that the tragic events on the Chatham Islands were predictable. The technologically advanced society won. He points out that no genetic differences could have existed between the Maori and Moriori because the two cultures had diverged from a common area only 1,000 years before. About 1,000 years before the massacre, the Maori colonized the Chatham island and the colonizers who became the Moriori were most likely farmers when they arrived. The crops they brought with them could not grow in the cold climate, so they switched to hunting and gathering. This left them unfit to create surplus food to help individuals who were employed in occupations other than discovering food. The nomads who came to Polynesia thousands of years ago had the same culture and language, but they all adapted to the environments of the islands where they settled. The environment is broken up into categories: climate, geological activity, “marina”, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation. For each category, environmental differences between islands cause societal differences. For example, moist, warm climates favor agriculture, since crops grow easily. Volcanic activity in Polynesia produces hard, shiny stones that can be used to make tools. Certain Polynesian islands have rocky coasts, meaning that people who lived there had no way of obtaining fish. Politics in Polynesia became more complex as society became denser and resources became more plentiful. On the Chatham Islands, where the population was small and there were few resources, decisions were reached by a simple group agreement. But in Hawaii or Tonga, there were hereditary chiefs who decided how land and food would be divided up and who gave messages that had to be passed down the chain of command.
2. I wonder why different societies didn’t join forces instead of conquering one another
Did people naturally have the thought of conquering other societies
I wonder how history would’ve played out if humans didn’t result to violence
3. Civilizations interact with one another in various ways, some are peaceful while others are violent, but military confrontations are a clear illustration of one civilizations’ real-world “superiority” to another. In Diamond’s ‘experiment’, the people who came to Polynesia were the dependent variable and the geography was the independent variable. This experiment allowed Diamond to study the influence of an independent variable on the dependent variable. In conclusion, this chapter illustrates a connection between society and geography. Certain climates and the presence of certain resources predispose a group of people to set up a certain kind of society. For example, the climate and size of the Maori islands predispose the Maori people to be more violent and have more agriculture.