Guns, Germs, and Steel: Prologue - Part I

Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still “living in the Stone Age.” That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousands of years ago, and they dwelt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority.

Still other peoples, such as the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and southernmost Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists.

Of course, those technological and political differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world’s inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood.

Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject.

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide.

Isn’t that prominence just an ephemeral phenomenon of the last few centuries, now fading behind the prominence of Japan and Southeast Asia?

In the centuries after A.D. 1500, as European explorers became aware of the wide differences among the world’s peoples in technology and political organization, they assumed that those differences arose from differences in innate ability.

Technologically primitive peoples were considered evolutionary vestiges of human descent from apelike ancestors.

Today, segments of Western society publicly repudiate racism. Yet many (perhaps most!) Westerners continue to accept racist explanations privately or subconsciously.

Aborigines who survived the era of European colonization are now finding it difficult to succeed economically in white Australian society.

The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong.

Because of those undoubted effects of childhood environment and learned knowledge on IQ test results, the psychologists’ efforts to date have not succeeded in convincingly establishing the postulated genetic deficiency in IQs of nonwhite peoples.

It is perfectly obvious to everyone, whether an overt racist or not, that different peoples have fared differently in history.

Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.

That consideration dictates single authorship, despite all the difficulties that it poses. Inevitably, that single author will have to sweat copiously in order to assimilate material from many disciplines, and will require guidance from many colleagues.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 then show how crops and livestock came in prehistoric times to be domesticated from ancestral wild plants and animals, by incipient farmers and herders who could have had no vision of the outcome.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 then show how crops and livestock came in prehistoric times to be domesticated from ancestral wild plants and animals, by incipient farmers and herders who could have had no vision of the outcome.

Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band’s own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands.

A summary of the last 13,000 years of New World and western Eurasian history makes clear how Europe’s conquest of the Americas was merely the culmination of two long and mostly separate historical trajectories.

However, as we shall see, for virtually any X, every year brings forth new discoveries and claims of a purported still earlier X, along with refutations of some or all of previous years’ claims of earlier X.

It often takes decades of searching before archaeologists reach a consensus on such questions.

It often takes decades of searching before archaeologists reach a consensus on such questions.

However, these early Homo sapiens still differed from us in skeletal details, had brains significantly smaller than ours, and were grossly different from us in their artifacts and behavior.

The oldest unquestioned human remains in the Americas are at sites in Alaska dated around 12,000 B.C., followed by a profusion of sites in the United States south of the Canadian border and in Mexico in the centuries just before 11,000 B.C.

Even more striking is the evidence from Australia/New Guinea, where there are barely one-tenth as many archaeologists as in the United States alone, but where those few archaeologists have nevertheless discovered over a hundred unequivocal pre-Clovis sites scattered over the whole continent.

In social organization, Polynesian societies ran the gamut from fairly egalitarian village societies to some of the most stratified societies in the world, with many hierarchically ranked lineages and with chief and commoner classes whose members married within their own class.

In social organization, Polynesian societies ran the gamut from fairly egalitarian village societies to some of the most stratified societies in the world, with many hierarchically ranked lineages and with chief and commoner classes whose members married within their own class.

In social organization, Polynesian societies ran the gamut from fairly egalitarian village societies to some of the most stratified societies in the world, with many hierarchically ranked lineages and with chief and commoner classes whose members married within their own class.

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.

Island geological types include coral atolls, raised limestone, volcanic islands, pieces of continents, and mixtures of those types.

Subsistence is a convenient facet of society with which to start, since it in turn affected other facets.

Inhabitants of those islands developed intensive dry land agriculture requiring a heavy input of labor to build terraces, carry out mulching, rotate crops, reduce or eliminate fallow periods, and maintain tree plantations.

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.

Using appointed bureaucrats as agents, chiefs requisitioned food from the commoners and also conscripted them to work on large construction projects, whose form varied from island to island: irrigation projects and fishponds on Hawaii, dance and feast centers on the Marquesas, chiefs’ tombs on Tonga, and temples on Hawaii, the Societies, and Easter.

After the ransom—enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet—was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.

The prudence, fortitude, military discipline, labors, perilous navigations, and battles of the Spaniards—vassals of the most invincible Emperor of the Roman Catholic Empire, our natural King and Lord—will cause joy to the faithful and terror to the infidels.

The prudence, fortitude, military discipline, labors, perilous navigations, and battles of the Spaniards—vassals of the most invincible Emperor of the Roman Catholic Empire, our natural King and Lord—will cause joy to the faithful and terror to the infidels.

For when, either in ancient or modern times, have such great exploits been achieved by so few against so many, over so many climes, across so many seas, over such distances by land, to subdue the unseen and unknown? Whose deeds can be compared with those of Spain?

The transformation of warfare by horses began with their domestication around 4000 B.C., in the steppes north of the Black Sea.

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.