Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

  Two conspicuous examples of somewhat isolated societies adopting and then abandoning technologies potentially useful in competition with other societies involve Japan’s abandonment of firearms, after their adoption in A.D. 1543, and China’s abandonment of its large oceangoing fleets after A.D. 1433. The former case is described by Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun (Boston: Hall, 1979), and the latter by Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). An essay entitled “The disappearance of useful arts,” pp. 190–210 in W. H. B. Rivers, Psychology and Ethnology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), gives similar examples among Pacific islanders.

  Articles on the history of technology will be found in the quarterly journal Technology and Culture, published by the Society for the History of Technology since 1959. John Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), analyzes the papers in its first twenty years.

  Specific fields providing material for those interested in the history of technology include electric power, textiles, and metallurgy. Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), discusses the social, economic, political, and technical factors in the electrification of Western society from 1880 to 1930. Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York: Walker, 1995), describes the development of John Harrison’s chronometers that solved the problem of determining longitude at sea. E. J. W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), sets out the history of cloth in Eurasia from its beginnings more than 9,000 years ago. Accounts of the history of metallurgy over wide regions or even over the world include Robert Maddin, The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), Theodore Wertime and James Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), R. D. Penhallurick, Tin in Antiquity (London: Institute of Metals, 1986), James Muhly, “Copper and Tin,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 43:155–535 (1973), and Alan Franklin, Jacqueline Olin, and Theodore Wertime, The Search for Ancient Tin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978). Accounts of metallurgy for local regions include R. F. Tylecote, The Early History of Metallurgy in Europe (London: Longman, 1987), and Donald Wagner, Iron and Steel in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1993).

  Chapter 14

  The fourfold classification of human societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states owes much to two books by Elman Service: Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962) and Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975). A related classification of societies, using different terminology, is Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967). Three important review articles on the evolution of states and societies are Kent Flannery, “The cultural evolution of civilizations,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematic 3:399–426 (1972), the same author’s “Prehistoric social evolution,” pp. 1–26 in Carol and Melvin Ember, eds., Research Frontiers in Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1995), and Henry Wright, “Recent research on the origin of the state,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6:379–97 (1977). Robert Carneiro, “A theory of the origin of the state,” Science 169:733–38 (1970), argues that states arise through warfare under conditions in which land is ecologically limiting. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), relates state origins to large-scale irrigation and hydraulic management. Three essays in On the Evolution of Complex Societies, by William Sanders, Henry Wright, and Robert Adams (Malibu: Undena, 1984), present differing views of state origins, while Robert Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), contrasts state origins in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.

  Among studies of the evolution of societies in specific parts of the world, sources for Mesopotamia include Robert Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, 1992); for Mesoamerica, Richard Blanton et al., Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, Zapotec Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); for the Andes, Richard Burger, Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization (New York, Thames and Hudson, 1992), and Jonathan Haas et al., eds., The Origins and Development of the Andean State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); for American chiefdoms, Robert Drennan and Carlos Uribe, eds., Chiefdoms in the Americas (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987); for Polynesian societies, the books cited under Chapter 2; and for the Zulu state, Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966).

  Chapter 15

  Books covering the prehistory of both Australia and New Guinea include Alan Thorne and Robert Raymond, Man on the Rim: The Peopling of the Pacific (North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1989), J. Peter White and James O’Connell, A Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea, and Sahul (Sydney: Academic Press, 1982), Jim Allen et al., eds., Sunda and Sahul (London: Academic Press, 1977), M. A. Smith et al., eds., Sahul in Review (Canberra: Australian National University, 1993), and Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters (New York: Braziller, 1995). The first and third of these books discuss the prehistory of island Southeast Asia as well. A recent account of the history of Australia itself is Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, rev. ed. (Sydney: Collins, 1989). Some additional key papers on Australian prehistory are Rhys Jones, “The fifth continent: Problems concerning the human colonization of Australia,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 8:445–66 (1979), Richard Roberts et al., “Thermoluminescence dating of a 50,000-year-old human occupation site in northern Australia,” Nature 345:153–56 (1990), and Jim Allen and Simon Holdaway, “The contamination of Pleistocene radiocarbon determinations in Australia,” Antiquity 69:101–12 (1995). Robert Attenborough and Michael Alpers, eds., Human Biology in Papua New Guinea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), summarizes New Guinea archaeology as well as languages and genetics.

  As for the prehistory of Northern Melanesia (the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes, northeast and east of New Guinea), discussion will be found in the above-cited books by Thorne and Raymond, Flannery, and Allen et al. Papers pushing back the dates for the earliest occupation of Northern Melanesia include Stephen Wickler and Matthew Spriggs, “Pleistocene human occupation of the Solomon Islands, Melanesia,” Antiquity 62:703–6 (1988), Jim Allen et al., “Pleistocene dates for the human occupation of New Ireland, Northern Melanesia,” Nature 331:707–9 (1988), Jim Allen et al., “Human Pleistocene adaptations in the tropical island Pacific: Recent evidence from New Ireland, a Greater Australian outlier,” Antiquity 63:548–61 (1989), and Christina Pavlides and Chris Gosden, “35,000-year-old sites in the rainforests of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea,” Antiquity 68:604–10 (1994). References to the Austronesian expansion around the coast of New Guinea will be found under further readings for Chapter 17.

  Two books on the history of Australia after European colonization are Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York: Knopf, 1987), and Michael Cannon, The Exploration of Australia (Sydney: Reader’s Digest, 1987). Aboriginal Australians themselves are the subject of Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1982), and Henry Reynolds, Frontier (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987). An incredibly detailed history of New Guinea, from the earliest written records until 1902, is the three-volume work by Arthur Wichmann, Entdeckungs-geschichte von Neu-Guinea (Leiden: Brill, 1909–12). A shorter and more readable account is Gavin Souter, New Guinea: The Last Unknown (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964). Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact (New York: Viking, 1987), movingly describes the first encounters of highland New Guineans with Europeans.

  For detailed accounts of New Guinea’s Papuan (i.e., non-Austronesian) languages, see Stephen Wurm, Papuan Languages of Oceania (Tübingen: Guntet Narr, 1982), and William Foley, The Papuan Languages of New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and of Australian languages, see Stephen Wurm, Languages of Australia and Tasmania (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), and R. M. W. Dixon,
The Languages of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  An entrance into the literature on plant domestication and origins of food production in New Guinea can be found in Jack Golson, “Bulmer phase II: Early agriculture in the New Guinea highlands,” pp. 484–91 in Andrew Pawley, ed., Man and a Half (Auckland: Polynesian Society, 1991), and D. E. Yen, “Polynesian cultigens and cultivars: The question of origin,” pp. 67–95 in Paul Cox and Sandra Banack, eds., Islands, Plants, and Polynesians (Portland: Dioscorides Press, 1991).

  Numerous articles and books are devoted to the fascinating problem of why trading visits of Indonesians and of Torres Strait islanders to Australia produced only limited cultural change. C. C. Macknight, “Macassans and Aborigines,” Oceania 42:283–321 (1972), discusses the Macassan visits, while D. Walker, ed., Bridge and Barrier: The Natural and Cultural History of Torres Strait (Canberra: Australian National University, 1972), discusses connections at Torres Strait. Both connections are also discussed in the above-cited books by Flood, White and O’Connell, and Allen et al.

  Early eyewitness accounts of the Tasmanians are reprinted in N. J. B. Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines 1802 (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1983), N. J. B. Plomley, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966), and Edward Duyker, The Discovery of Tasmania: Journal Extracts from the Expeditions of Abel Janszoon Tasman and Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, 1642 and 1772 (Hobart: St. David’s Park Publishing, 1992). Papers debating the effects of isolation on Tasmanian society include Rhys Jones, “The Tasmanian Paradox,” pp. 189–284 in R. V. S. Wright, ed., Stone Tools as Cultural Markers (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977); Rhys Jones, “Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish?” pp. 11–48 in R. Gould, ed., Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978); D. R. Horton, “Tasmanian adaptation,” Mankind 12:28–34 (1979); I. Walters, “Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish?: A theoretical consideration,” Artefact 6:71–77 (1981); and Rhys Jones, “Tasmanian Archaeology,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 24:423–46 (1995). Results of Robin Sim’s archaeological excavations on Flinders Island are described in her article “Prehistoric human occupation on the King and Furneaux Island regions, Bass Strait,” pp. 358–74 in Marjorie Sullivan et al., eds., Archaeology in the North (Darwin: North Australia Research Unit, 1994).

  Chapters 16 and 17

  Relevant readings cited under previous chapters include those on East Asian food production (Chapters 4–10), Chinese writing (Chapter 12), Chinese technology (Chapter 13), and New Guinea and the Bismarcks and Solomons in general (Chapter 15). James Matisoff, “Sino-Tibetan linguistics: Present state and future prospects,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 20:469–504 (1991), reviews Sino-Tibetan languages and their wider relationships. Takeru Akazawa and Emoke Szathmáry, eds., Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Dennis Etler, “Recent developments in the study of human biology in China: A review,” Human Biology 64:567–85 (1992), discuss evidence of Chinese or East Asian relationships and dispersal. Alan Thorne and Robert Raymond, Man on the Rim (North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1989), describes the archaeology, history, and culture of Pacific peoples, including East Asians and Pacific islanders. Adrian Hill and Susan Serjeantson, eds., The Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), interprets the genetics of Pacific islanders, Aboriginal Australians, and New Guineans in terms of their inferred colonization routes and histories. Evidence based on tooth structure is interpreted by Christy Turner III, “Late Pleistocene and Holocene population history of East Asia based on dental variation,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 73:305–21 (1987), and “Teeth and prehistory in Asia,” Scientific American 260 (2): 88–96 (1989).

  Among regional accounts of archaeology, China is covered by Kwangchih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), David Keightley, ed., The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and David Keightley, “Archaeology and mentality: The making of China,” Representations 18:91–128 (1987). Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), examines China’s history since its political unification. Convenient archaeological accounts of Southeast Asia include Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); for Korea, Sarah Nelson, The Archaeology of Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); for Indonesia, the Philippines, and tropical Southeast Asia, Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (Sydney: Academic Press, 1985); for peninsular Malaysia, Peter Bellwood, “Cultural and biological differentiation in Peninsular Malaysia: The last 10,000 years,” Asian Perspectives 32:37–60 (1993); for the Indian subcontinent, Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); for Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific with special emphasis on Lapita, a series of five articles in Antiquity 63:547–626 (1989) and Patrick Kirch, The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World (London: Basil Blackwell, 1996); and for the Austronesian expansion as a whole, Andrew Pawley and Malcolm Ross, “Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 22:425–59 (1993), and Peter Bellwood et al., The Austronesians: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Canberra: Australian National University, 1995).

  Geoffrey Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonization of the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), is an account of Polynesian voyaging, navigation, and colonization. The dating of the settlement of New Zealand and eastern Polynesia is debated by Atholl Anderson, “The chronology of colonization in New Zealand,” Antiquity 65:767–95 (1991), and “Current approaches in East Polynesian colonisation research,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 104:110–32 (1995), and Patrick Kirch and Joanna Ellison, “Palaeoenvironmental evidence for human colonization of remote Oceanic islands,” Antiquity 68:310–21 (1994).

  Chapter 18

  Many relevant further readings for this chapter will be found listed under those for other chapters: under Chapter 3 for the conquests of the Incas and Aztecs, Chapters 4–10 for plant and animal domestication, Chapter 11 for infectious diseases, Chapter 12 for writing, Chapter 13 for technology, Chapter 14 for political institutions, and Chapter 16 for China. Convenient worldwide comparisons of dates for the onset of food production will be found in Bruce Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995).

  Some discussions of the historical trajectories summarized in Table 18.1, other than references given under previous chapters, are as follows. For England: Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (London: Batsford, 1987). For the Andes: Jonathan Haas et al., The Origins and Development of the Andean State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Moseley, The Incas and Their Ancestors (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992); and Richard Burger, Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992). For Amazonia: Anna Roosevelt, Parmana (New York: Academic Press, 1980), and Anna Roosevelt et al., “Eighth millennium pottery from a prehistoric shell midden in the Brazilian Amazon,” Science 254:1621–24 (1991). For Mesoamerica: Michael Coe, Mexico, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), and Michael Coe, The Maya, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984). For the eastern United States: Vincas Steponaitis, “Prehistoric archaeology in the southeastern United States, 1970–1985,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 15:363–404 (1986); Bruce Smith, “The archaeology of the southeastern United States: From Dalton to de Soto, 10,500–500 B.P.,” Advances in World Archaeology 5:1–92 (1986); William Keegan, ed., Emergent Horticultural Economies of the Eastern Woodlands (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1987); Bruce Smith, “Origins of agriculture in eastern North America,” Science 246:1566–71 (1989); Bruce Smith, The Mi
ssissippian Emergence (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); and Judith Bense, Archaeology of the Southeastern United States (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994). A compact reference on Native Americans of North America is Philip Kopper, The Smithsonian Book of North American Indians before the Coming of the Europeans (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986). Bruce Smith, “The origins of agriculture in the Americas,” Evolutionary Anthropology 3:174–84 (1995), discusses the controversy over early versus late dates for the onset of New World food production.

  Anyone inclined to believe that New World food production and societies were limited by the culture or psychology of Native Americans themselves, rather than by limitations of the wild species available to them for domestication, should consult three accounts of the transformation of Great Plains Indian societies by the arrival of the horse: Frank Row, The Indian and the Horse (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), John Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), and Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986).

  Among discussions of the spread of language families in relation to the rise of food production, a classic account for Europe is Albert Ammerman and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), while Peter Bellwood, “The Austronesian dispersal and the origin of languages,” Scientific American 265(1): 88–93 (1991), does the same for the Austronesian realm. Studies citing examples from around the world are the two books by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza et al. and the book by Merritt Ruhlen cited as further readings for the Prologue. Two books with diametrically opposed interpretations of the Indo-European expansion provide entrances into that controversial literature: Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). Sources on the Russian expansion across Siberia are George Lantzeff and Richard Pierce, Eastward to Empire (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1973), and W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (New York: Random House, 1994).