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.
Chapter 3
1. Diamond focuses on the conflict between the Incas and the Spanish in 1532. In that confrontation, Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers captured King Atahuallpa, with the aid of an 80,000 men army. Before his encounter with Atahuallpa, Pizarro stationed groups of men with guns and trumpets in strategic positions around a square. Rattles were even put on his men’s horses so they would make more noise. When Atahuallpa and his entourage arrived, Pizarro presented the king with a Bible and a message about its contents. Atahuallpa couldn’t read Spanish and was also offended by Pizarro’s manners so he threw the Bible to the ground. The Spaniards then captured the king and slaughtered many Incas which resulted in Pizarro gaining control of the entire kingdom. Some historians have argued that the Spanish conquistadors ruled in the New World because they were seen as intimidating and a higher figure; Diamond states that they won because they had better weapons than the Native Americans, not because of how they were seen. Their horses also played a huge part for the conquistadors by outrunning their opponents. Diamond then talks about how guns didn’t play a huge role in the Spaniard's’ victory and that their steel was their biggest advantage. Their steel swords and lances slaughtered the Incas and their steel armor protected them from the Incas’ clubs. Diamond then asks why Pizarro came to the Americas and why didn’t Atahuallpa sail to Europe? Diamond explains that Pizarro’s voyage was the result of European maritime technology, as well as the political organizations that financed his travels. Pizarro’s voyage was also possible because of the existence of writing, which was used to spread information about travel and navigation. The Incas lacked all three essential precursors for maritime exploration (writing, centralization, and naval technology). Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire because of his superior technology, his horses, Europe’s diseases, and, less overtly, his knowledge of writing.
2. Why was Pizarro’s victory over the Incas so successful when the Incas outnumbered him?
How come the Inca’s weren’t able to conquer other tribes?
If the Incas had more advanced weapons, would they have beaten Pizarro?
3. Pizarro’s victory was a clear demonstration of the European society’s “dominance” over the New World. Pizarro was terribly outnumbered, and yet succeeded anyway. He was victorious because he had the advantage of horses and weapons but the reason for his victory is more because of weaponry than psychological reasons. The chapter mentions nothing on Pizarro’s brilliance as a general or his commitment but instead it focuses on material, environmental conditions, and not on individual human beings’ abilities. A large component of Pizarro’s victory over the Inca Empire were diseases. The diseases wiped out a large portion of the population. The importance of the diseases emphasizes that history often has little to do with individual human beings’ abilities or decisions. Moreover, Pizarro’s maritime technology, weaponry, and Atahuallpa’s lack of technology and written language all played a part in his victory. Also, the significance of written language played a huge role in his triumph. Atahuallpa fell for Pizarro’s trap because he didn’t know what to expect; his education in human nature was limited to the people he interacted with directly, people who treated him with great respect and honesty. Atahuallpa’s willingness to fall for Pizarro’s trick doesn’t prove that Atahaullpa was foolish, it only shows the importance of literacy. Even if it’s clear that some societies prevail militarily because of their superior technology, language, and transportation, it’s not yet clear what factors lead to the emergence of such advantages.
Chapter 4
1. Diamond used to work on a farm in Montana and he worked with many white people, but also a Blackfoot Indian named Levi. Levi once shouted to a white farmer, “Damn the ship that brought you from Switzerland!” Ever since, Diamond wondered how Europeans conquered the New World and stole it from Native Americans such as Levi’s ancestors. Diamond argues that superior food production was the cause of Eurasia’s people developing the guns, germs, and steel that conquered the rest of the world. A population that produces more food will produce more people. Out of the plant and animal matter our planet produces naturally, the vast majority is inedible, poisonous, or too inefficient for people to eat. When people control what the land produces, they can choose to raise the plants and animals that are the best. Some farm animals produce fertilizer, do farm work, and provide fuel for fires in addition to providing meat and milk. As a result, herding and farming societies can usually feed 10 to 100 times the number of people hunter-gatherer societies can feed. Also, farming replaces a nomadic lifestyle with a sedentary one. This allows farming cultures to have more children and store and use food surpluses. Farming societies are in a better position to have full-time leaders, shamans, artisans, and scribes. After large mammals were domesticated, the ability to transport people and trade goods over longer distances was developed. In these farming societies, domesticated mammals lived close to humans and gave infectious diseases that devastated the populations. Smallpox, measles, and flu all evolved from similar diseases in farm animals. The people who domesticated the animals quickly evolved at least partial resistance to these diseases. However, the same diseases brought devastation every time they were introduced to populations that had not previously been exposed to them. Diamond admits that, over the course of history, a few hunter-gatherer societies have developed sedentary lifestyles and specialist workers. However, he says that only agricultural societies have ever achieved the population density and number of specialists necessary to develop widespread, politically centralized cultures. Moreover, only food-producing societies have achieved significant technological advancement. In conclusion, a culture’s ability to advance is ultimately dependant on food production and on the availability of domesticable plants and animals.
2. I wonder how agriculture first began
I wonder who first thought of the idea of agriculture
Were there successful hunter-gatherer societies?
3. Diamond describes European colonization from an angry, critical point of view which is similar to Levi’s point of view. What separates certain kinds of societies from others is agriculture and many military advantages arise from a society that is descended from an agricultural society. An advantage of agriculture is its efficiency. Agriculture can feed more people than hunter-gatherer societies can. Agriculture also doesn’t require large amounts of energy such as running after or climbing to pick fruits and berries. In an agricultural society, a leader decides who gets the extra food. In a hunter-gatherer society, there is almost never a surplus since meat and fruit couldn’t really be stored thousands of years ago. While agricultural societies still require their people to work hard, the efficiency of agriculture results free time during which people can learn other skills. Here, Diamond offers a general outline of his argument for the importance of agriculture in human history. Agriculture allows for organization and specialization in society. It also encourages people to domesticate wild animals and survive more germ epidemics. Considering how Pizarro defeated the Incas, it would seem that an early history of agriculture plays a major role in creating the kind of society that’s powerful enough to defeat other societies.
Chapter 6
1. Diamond compares the five different areas, southwest Asia’s Fertile Crescent, southwestern Europe, California, southwestern Australia, and South Africa’s Cape, with fertile climates. Agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent in 8500 B.C. and made its way down to southwestern Europe at around 5500 B.C. For the rest of the areas, agriculture wasn’t present until after 1500 A.D., when colonists from Europe began spreading their crops and food-production techniques. Food production techniques evolved over time through a slow process of trial and error. There were societies with both hunter-gatherer and agricultural qualities. At times, hunter-gatherers adopted agriculture for a period of time and then resumed to their old practices. In the last 10,000 years, it’s become progressively challenging to be a hunter-gatherer, for various reasons. Wild foods have become less available, and most of the world’s large mammal species became extinct. Another theory about why humans turned toward agriculture is that agriculture can support larger populations. People experimented with agriculture because it would benefit their survival. Agriculture also depended on technology (like the hoe and the awl) which didn't exist before 10,000 years ago. Because of environmental changes and the rise of human technology and population density, agriculture arose.
2. I wonder if at first people frowned upon agriculture
I wonder what the first success was when it came to agriculture
I wonder what societies that had both hunter-gatherer and agricultural aspects prefered more
3. This chapter attempts to discover why agriculture first emerged around 8500 B.C. Agriculture did not emerge fully formed and instead, societies experimented with bits and pieces of agriculture.The decision to pursue agriculture instead of hunter-gatherer practices was motivated by practicality more than anything else—humans came to recognize that their best chance of feeding themselves involved growing crops, not killing large mammals.
Chapter 11
1. Diamond has talked about how differences in environments results in differences in food production and how agricultural differences between civilizations also resulted in differences in literacy, health, technology, and government. Diamond begins this chapter by recalling a farmer who attempted to have sex with a sheep and later contracted a horrible disease from the animal. Germs and viruses have been one of the leading causes of death in human history. A large portion of the key plagues and epidemics of history were from animals that later spread to people. Microbes have evolved over millions of years and the “successful” ones are those that are able to pass from host to host quickly and efficiently. Microbes travel through saliva and other fluids, and to provoke reactions like bleeding, vomiting, open sores, etc. Humans have developed different defenses against germs, such as coughing, sneezing, running a fever, etc. Evolution has also been a vital defense. Those with weak immune systems were more likely to die off without conceiving children, taking themselves out of the gene pool. Gradually, people have evolved immunity to diseases, which results in diseases evolving and becoming more infectious. A small community could endure any number of fatal diseases. Even though the size of the community is small, the people would either die off rapidly or thrive. Only certain diseases can only survive in large populations such as measles. In such “crowd diseases,” the microbe needs many human hosts to survive. It needs people to infect and children to infect after it’s killed off everyone else in the community. The rise of agriculture corresponded with the rise of crowd diseases. Farming communities were larger and more stationary, and everyone shared resources. The development of cities was also important for crowd diseases, because sufficient numbers of people were living close to one another so the diseases were able to spread. Another vital reason why crowd diseases appeared first among agriculturalists were domesticated animals. Animals contain a large amount of microbes, and most lethal human diseases originated as diseases of animals such as AIDS. The AIDS virus was once a disease of monkeys, so agriculturalists would’ve been more likely to suffer from infectious diseases, but because of their large populations, their communities would also have been more likely to overcome the diseases. European explorers brought diseases to the New World which a substantial amount of Native Americans, whose immune systems were weak. Native Americans had no natural defenses against diseases because they hadn’t interacted with domesticated animals. On the other hand, Europeans hadn’t interacted with certain diseases of the New World and many European explorers died. Nevertheless, infectious diseases acted as a net benefit to the Europeans when they colonized the New World, because, by and large, the Europeans had stronger immune systems.
2. I wonder what the Native Americans first thought of the diseases that were brought to them.
Why did some diseases only survive in large groups?
Why would someone have the desire to perform sexual intercourse with a sheep?
3. The differences between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies are simple and straightforward but Diamond explains how these differences expand into even greater differences. The reason for this disturbing incident is that if people are in close contact with animals for a decent amount of time, they catch diseases from them. Diseases thrive within hosts and the most successful diseases reproduce themselves quickly inside of their hosts, so that they don’t die out. The symptoms of a disease, such as coughing or sneezing, end up spreading the disease because the most successful viruses and germs have been those that provoke such responses in their hosts so that the viruses and germs can reproduce. Populations either die out or else develop an immunity to the disease and this means that the diseases themselves either die out or evolve into new, more threatening diseases. The diseases and their hosts constantly evolve to exceed one another. In order to determine if a community will die of an epidemic is to know the size of the population. A small population can be wiped out effortlessly by a disease. On the contrary, larger populations will have at least some people with immunities to the disease, which ensures that the community will survive as a whole and those who do survive will pass on their immunity to their children. However, there are some diseases that only exist in large populations. Large populations are the only groups that develop immunities to the diseases so that both the disease and the host survive. This means that when a large community interacts with a smaller community, a greater amount of people from the smaller community will die than in the large community. Agriculture results in the widespread of deadly diseases because people are closer together, and also are closer to animals. Since animals spread diseases, agricultural societies tend to have more diseases but they also develop more immunities. When a large, agricultural society like early modern Spain encounters a small, hunter-gatherer society like the 16th century Native Americans, the small society will die of the larger society’s diseases.
Chapter 18
1. Native American societies didn’t have many domesticated large mammals and as a result, Columbus and Pizarro’s expeditions weren’t affected by Native American diseases. On the other hand,the diseases that the Europeans brought wiped out the Native Americans. Furthermore, agriculture wasn’t as favored in the New World as in Western Europe. Native Americans were mostly hunter-gatherers because of the lack of resources that agriculturalists used and because of this, Europeans were in a major favorable position when it came to specialization of society, centralization of government, improvement of writing, and technology, which were all led to European pioneers voyaging to the New World. In Eurasia, plant and animal domestication, metallurgy, the establishment of an unified state, and writing before New World civilizations were mastered.In the New World, the dispersion of agriculture, innovation, and writing was postponed by various geographic variables, including mountains, deserts, and oceans. Moreover, Norse peoples traveled to Newfoundland and Greenland, but also wasn’t successful in journeying more west and south. Moreover, these Norse established colonies carry on being inexplicable; they died off before the 15th century, most likely because agriculture couldn’t have been supported due to the cold climate.
2. I wonder why Native Americans lacked domesticated mammals
I wonder how big of an effect geographical barriers left to societies
How come the Europeans always had an advantage over the Native Americans?
3. In this chapter, Diamond explains how the New World didn't grow more advanced technology or societal centralization in the pre-Columbian time.The lack of large domesticable mammals held back Native American societies from developing an immune system against diseases. In other chapters, Diamond talked about how agriculture helps civilizations emerge different professions, technologies, and centralized states. Although, agriculture can never develop in a society without proper geographic essentials which were rare in the New World. Moreover, the east-west introduction of Eurasia guaranteed that once technology was found some place in the mainland, it diffused to different parts of the landmass moderately rapidly. This also proved that when similar technology developed, it would most likely stay secluded. For example, domesticated mammals were brought to Europe from Mesopotamia, but not from Peru to Mexico. The chapter hypothesizes that the Europeans didn't colonize the New World much sooner in light of the fact that the ranges of the New World they colonized were too geologically deserted to have agriculture. When European societies expanded to the New World after 1492 A.D., they were able to use their advantages to overcome the Native Americans. Their triumph is the aftereffect of geographic components that drove European societies to develop agriculture sooner than New World societies.