Guns, Germs, and Steel

by Jared Diamond

  There are many obvious reasons for these effects of history, such as that long experience of state societies and agriculture implies experienced administrators, experience with market economies, and so on. Statistically, part of that ultimate effect of history proves to be mediated by the familiar proximate causes of good institutions. But there is still a large effect of history remaining after one controls for the usual measures of good institutions. Hence there must be other mediating proximate mechanisms as well. Thus a key problem will be to understand the detailed chain of causation from a long history of state societies and agriculture to modern economic growth, in order to help developing countries advance up that chain more quickly.

  In short, the themes of GGS seem to me to be not only a driving force in the ancient world but also a ripe area for study in the modern world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IT IS A PLEASURE FOR ME TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE CONTRIBUTIONS of many people to this book. My teachers at Roxbury Latin School introduced me to the fascination of history. My great debt to my many New Guinea friends will be obvious from the frequency with which I cite their experiences. I owe an equally great debt (and absolution from responsibility for my errors) to my many scientist friends and professional colleagues, who patiently explained the subtleties of their subjects and read my drafts. In particular, Peter Bellwood, Kent Flannery, Patrick Kirch, and my wife, Marie Cohen, read the whole manuscript, and Charles Heiser, Jr., David Keightley, Bruce Smith, Richard Yarnell, and Daniel Zohary each read several chapters. Earlier versions of several of the chapters appeared as articles in Discover magazine and in Natural History magazine. The National Geographic Society, World Wildlife Fund, and University of California at Los Angeles supported my fieldwork on Pacific islands. I have been fortunate to have John Brockman and Katinka Matson as my agents, Lori Iversen and Lori Rosen as my research assistants and secretaries, Ellen Modecki as my illustrator, and as my editors Donald Lamm at W. W. Norton, Neil Belton and Will Sulkin at Jonathan Cape, Willi Köhler at Fischer, Marc Zabludoff and Mark Wheeler and Polly Shulman at Discover, and Ellen Goldensohn and Alan Ternes at Natural History.

  FURTHER READINGS

  THESE SUGGESTIONS ARE FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN READING further. Hence, in addition to key books and papers, I have favored references that provide comprehensive listings of the earlier literature. A journal title (in italics) is followed by the volume number, followed after a colon by the first and last page numbers, and then the year of publication in parentheses.

  Prologue

  Among references relevant to most chapters of this book is an enormous compendium of human gene frequencies entitled The History and Geography of Human Genes, by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). This remarkable book approximates a history of everything about everybody, because the authors begin their accounts of each continent with a convenient summary of the continent’s geography, ecology, and environment, followed by the prehistory, history, languages, physical anthropology, and culture of its peoples. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francisco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), covers similar material but is written for the general reader rather than for specialists.

  Another convenient source is a series of five volumes entitled The Illustrated History of Humankind, ed. Göran Burenhult (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993–94). The five individual volumes in this series are entitled, respectively, The First Humans, People of the Stone Age, Old World Civilizations, New World and Pacific Civilizations, and Traditional Peoples Today.

  Several series of volumes published by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England, various dates) provide histories of particular regions or eras. One series consists of books entitled The Cambridge History of [X], where X is variously Africa, Early Inner Asia, China, India, Iran, Islam, Japan, Latin America, Poland, and Southeast Asia. Another series is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of [X], where X is variously Africa, China, Japan, Latin America and the Caribbean, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Australia, the Middle East and North Africa, and India, Pakistan, and adjacent countries. Still other series include The Cambridge Ancient History, The Cambridge Medieval History, The Cambridge Modern History, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, and The Cambridge Economic History of India.

  Three encyclopedic accounts of the world’s languages are Barbara Grimes, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 13th ed. (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1996), Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World’s Languages, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and C. F. Voegelin and F. M. Voegelin, Classification and Index of the World’s Languages (New York: Elsevier, 1977).

  Among large-scale comparative histories, Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–54), stands out. An excellent history of Eurasian civilization, especially western Eurasian civilization, is William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The same author’s A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), despite its title, also maintains a focus on western Eurasian civilization, as does V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954). Another comparative history with a focus on western Eurasia, C. D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), is by a biologist who recognizes some of the same links between continental history and domestication that I discuss. Two books by Alfred Crosby are distinguished studies of the European overseas expansion with emphasis on its accompanying plants, animals, and germs: The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972) and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), and Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, eds., Evolution and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), are comparative histories from the perspective of cultural anthropologists. Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (New York: Holt, 1911), is an example of earlier efforts to study geographic influences on human societies. Other important historical studies are listed under further readings for the Epilogue. My book The Third Chimpanzee (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), especially its chapter 14, on the comparative histories of Eurasia and the Americas, provided the starting point for my thinking about the present book.

  The best-known or most notorious recent entrant into the debate about group differences in intelligence is Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).

  Chapter 1

  Excellent books about early human evolution include Richard Klein, The Human Career (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer, eds., The Human Revolution: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered (New York: Doubleday, 1992), D. Tab Rasmussen, ed., The Origin and Evolution of Humans and Humanness (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1993), Matthew Nitecki and Doris Nitecki, eds., Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans (New York: Plenum, 1994), and Chris Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). Three popular books dealing specifically with the Neanderthals are Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals (New York: Knopf, 1993), and Ian Tattersall, The Last Neanderthal (New York: Macmillan, 1995).

  Genetic evidence of human origins is the subject of the two books by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza et al. already cited under the Prologue, and of chapter 1 of my book The Third Chimpanzee. Two technical papers with recent advances in the genetic evidence are J. L. Mountain and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, “Inference of human evolution through cladistic analysis
of nuclear DNA restriction polymorphism,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91:6515–19 (1994), and D. B. Goldstein et al., “Genetic absolute dating based on microsatellites and the origin of modern humans,” ibid. 92:6723–27 (1995).

  References to the human colonization of Australia, New Guinea, and the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes, and to extinctions of large animals there, are listed under further readings for Chapter 15. In particular, Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters (New York: Braziller, 1995), discusses those subjects in clear, understandable terms and explains the problems with claims of very recent survival of extinct big Australian mammals.

  The standard text on Late Pleistocene and Recent extinctions of large animals is Paul Martin and Richard Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). More recent updates are Richard Klein, “The impact of early people on the environment: The case of large mammal extinctions,” pp. 13–34 in J. E. Jacobsen and J. Firor, Human Impact on the Environment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), and Anthony Stuart, “Mammalian extinctions in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Eurasia and North America,” Biological Reviews 66:453–62 (1991). David Steadman summarizes recent evidence that extinction waves accompanied human settlement of Pacific islands in his paper “Prehistoric extinctions of Pacific island birds: Biodiversity meets zooarchaeology,” Science 267:1123–31 (1995).

  Popular accounts of the settlement of the Americas, the accompanying extinctions of large mammals, and the resulting controversies are Brian Fagan, The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), and chapter 18 of my book The Third Chimpanzee, both of which provide many other references. Ronald Carlisle, ed., Americans before Columbus: Ice-Age Origins (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1988), includes a chapter by J. M. Adovasio and his colleagues on pre-Clovis evidence at the Meadowcroft site. Papers by C. Vance Haynes, Jr., an expert on the Clovis horizon and reported pre-Clovis sites, include “Contributions of radiocarbon dating to the geochronology of the peopling of the New World,” pp. 354–74 in R. E. Taylor, A. Long, and R. S. Kra, eds., Radiocarbon after Four Decades (New York: Springer, 1992), and “Clovis-Folson geochronology and climate change,” pp. 219–36 in Olga Soffer and N. D. Praslov, eds., From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Indian Adaptations (New York: Plenum, 1993). Pre-Clovis claims for the Pedra Furada site are argued by N. Guidon and G. Delibrias, “Carbon-14 dates point to man in the Americas 32,000 years ago,” Nature 321:769–71 (1986), and David Meltzer et al., “On a Pleistocene human occupation at Pedra Furada, Brazil,” Antiquity 68:695–714 (1994). Other publications relevant to the pre-Clovis debate include T. D. Dillehay et al., “Earliest hunters and gatherers of South America,” Journal of World Prehistory 6:145–204 (1992), T. D. Dillehay, Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Site in Chile (Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), T. D. Dillehay and D. J. Meltzer, eds., The First Americans: Search and Research (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991), Thomas Lynch “Glacial-age man in South America?—a critical review,” American Antiquity 55:12–36 (1990), John Hoffecker et al., “The colonization of Beringia and the peopling of the New World,” Science 259:46–53 (1993), and A. C. Roosevelt et al., “Paleoindian cave dwellers in the Amazon: The peopling of the Americas,” Science 272:373–84 (1996).

  Chapter 2

  Two outstanding books explicitly concerned with cultural differences among Polynesian islands are Patrick Kirch, The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and the same author’s The Wet and the Dry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Much of Peter Bellwood’s The Polynesians, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), also deals with this problem. Notable books dealing with specific Polynesian islands include Michael King, Moriori (Auckland: Penguin, 1989), on the Chatham Islands, Patrick Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), on Hawaii, Patrick Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), also on Hawaii, Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Easter Island (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), and Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Earth Island (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992).

  Chapter 3

  My account of Pizarro’s capture of Atahuallpa combines the eyewitness accounts by Francisco Pizarro’s brothers Hernando Pizarro and Pedro Pizarro and by Pizarro’s companions Miguel de Estete, Cristóbal de Mena, Ruiz de Arce, and Francisco de Xerez. The accounts by Hernando Pizarro, Miguel de Estete, and Francisco de Xerez have been translated by Clements Markham, Reports on the Discovery of Peru, Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., vol. 47 (New York, 1872); Pedro Pizarro’s account, by Philip Means, Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of the Kingdoms of Peru (New York: Cortés Society, 1921); and Cristóbal de Mena’s account, by Joseph Sinclair, The Conquest of Peru, as Recorded by a Member of the Pizarro Expedition (New York, 1929). The account by Ruiz de Arce was reprinted in Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia (Madrid) 102:327–84 (1933). John Hemming’s excellent The Conquest of the Incas (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) gives a full account of the capture and indeed of the whole conquest, with an extensive bibliography. A 19th-century account of the conquest, William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (New York, 1847), is still highly readable and ranks among the classics of historical writing. Corresponding modern and classic 19th-century accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs are, respectively, Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), and William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1843). Contemporary eyewitness accounts of the conquest of the Aztecs were written by Cortés himself (reprinted as Hernando Cortés, Five Letters of Cortés to the Emperor [New York: Norton, 1969]) and by many of Cortés’s companions (reprinted in Patricia de Fuentes, ed., The Conquistadors [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993]).

  Chapters 4–10

  References for these seven chapters on food production will be combined, since many of the references apply to more than one of them.

  Five important sources, all of them excellent and fact-filled, address the question how food production evolved from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: Kent Flannery, “The origins of agriculture,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 2:271–310 (1973); Jack Harlan, Crops and Man, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis.: American Society of Agronomy, 1992); Richard MacNeish, The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (San Diego: Academic Press, 1984); and Bruce Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995). Notable older references about food production in general include two multi-author volumes: Peter Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, eds., The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), and Charles Reed, ed., Origins of Agriculture (The Hague: Mouton, 1977). Carl Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952), is a classic early comparison of Old World and New World food production, while Erich Isaac, Geography of Domestication (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), addresses the questions of where, when, and how regarding plant and animal domestication.

  Among references specifically about plant domestication, Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), stands out. It provides the most detailed account of plant domestication available for any part of the world. For each significant crop grown in western Eurasia, the book summarizes archaeological and genetic evidence about its domestication and subsequent spread.

  Among important multi-author books on plant domestication are C. Wesley Cowan and Patty Jo Watson, eds., The Origins of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), David Harris and Gordon Hillman, eds., Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), and C. Barigozzi, ed., The Origin and Domestication of Cultivated Pl
ants (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1986). Two engaging popular accounts of plant domestication by Charles Heiser, Jr., are Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Of Plants and People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). J. Smartt and N. W. Simmonds, ed., Evolution of Crop Plants, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1995), is the standard reference volume summarizing information about all of the world’s major crops and many minor ones. Three excellent papers describe the changes that evolve automatically in wild plants under human cultivation: Mark Blumler and Roger Byrne, “The ecological genetics of domestication and the origins of agriculture,” Current Anthropology 32:23–54 (1991); Charles Heiser, Jr., “Aspects of unconscious selection and the evolution of domesticated plants,” Euphytica 37:77–81 (1988); and Daniel Zohary, “Modes of evolution in plants under domestication,” in W. F. Grant, ed., Plant Biosystematics (Montreal: Academic Press, 1984). Mark Blumler, “Independent inventionism and recent genetic evidence on plant domestication,” Economic Botany 46:98–111 (1992), evaluates the evidence for multiple domestications of the same wild plant species, as opposed to single origins followed by spread.