Top Quotes: “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” — Jared Diamond

Introduction

“The peoples of N. Europe contributed nothing of fundamental importance to Eurasian civilization until the last thousand years; they simply had the good luck to live at a geographic location where they were likely to receive advances (such as agriculture, wheels, writing, and metallurgy) developed in warmer parts of Eurasia.”

“Of the modern world’s 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.”

“During the Ice Ages, so much of the oceans’ water was locked up in glaciers that worldwide sea levels dropped hundreds of feet below their present stand. As a result, what are now the shallow seas between Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali became dry land. (So did other shallow straits, such as the Bering Straight and the English Channel.) The edge of the SE Asian mainland then lay 700 miles E. of its present location. Nevertheless, central Indonesian islands between Bali and Australia remained surrounded and separated by deepwater channels. To reach Australia / New Guinea from the Asian mainland at that time still required crossing a minimum of 8 channels, the broadest of which was at least 50 miles wide. Most of those channels divided islands visible from each other, but Australia itself was always invisible from even the nearest Indonesian islands, Timor and Tanimbar. Thus, the occupation of Australia / New Guinea is momentous in that it demanded watercraft and provides by far the earliest evidence of their use in history. Not until about 30k years later (13k years ago) is there strong evidence of watercraft anywhere else in the world, from the Mediterranean.”

“The disappearance of all of the big animals of Australia / New Guinea had heavy consequences for subsequent human history. Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might’ve otherwise been candidates for domestication, and left native Australians and New Guineans without a single native domestic animal.”

“One might at first be surprised that Clovis descendants could reach Patagonia, lying 8k miles S of the US-Canada border, in less than a thousand years. However, that translates into an average expansion of only 8 miles per year, a trivial feat for a hunter-gatherer likely to cover that distance even within a single day’s normal foraging.

One might also at first be surprised that the Americas evidently filled up with humans so quickly that people were motivated to keep spreading S. toward Patagonia. That population growth also proves unsurprising when one stops to consider the actual numbers. If the Americas eventually came to hold hunter-gatherers at an average population density of somewhat under 1 person per sq. mile (a high value for modern hunter-gatherers), then the whole area of the Americas would eventually have held about 10 million hunter-gatherers. But even if the initial colonists had consisted of only 100 people and their numbers had increased at a rate of only 1% per year, the colonists’ descendants would’ve reached that population ceiling of 10 million people within a thousand years. A population growth rate of 1% per year is again trivial: rates as high as 3% per year have been observed in modern times when people colonized virgin lands, such as when the HMS Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives colonized Pitcairn Island.”

“Most large wild mammal species that might otherwise have later been domesticated by Native Americans were removed.”

The Chathams

“On the Chatham Islands, 500 miles E. of New Zealand, centuries of independence came to a brutal end for the Moriori people in Dec. 1835. On Nov. 19 of that year, a ship carrying 500 Maori armed with guns, clubs, and axes arrived, followed on Dec. 5 by a shipload of 400 more Maori. Groups of Maori began to walk through Moriori settlements, announcing that the Moriori were now their slaves, and killing those who objected. An organized resistance by the Moriori could still then have defeated the Maori, who were outnumbered 2:1. However, the Moriori had a tradition of resolving disputes peacefully. They decided in a council meeting not to fight back, but to offer peace, friendship, and a division of resources.

Before the Moriori could deliver that offer, the Maori attacked en masse. Over the course of the next few days, they killed hundreds of Moriori, cooked and ate many of the bodies, and enslaved all the others, killing most of them too over the next few years as it suited their whim. A Moriori survivor recalled, ‘[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep…[We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed–men, women, and children indiscriminately.’ A Maori conquerer explained, ‘We took possession…in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed, and others we killed–but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.’

The brutal outcome of this collision between the Moriori and the Maori could’ve been easily predicted. The Moriori were a small, isolated population of hunter-gatherers, equipped with only the simplest tech and weapons, entirely inexperienced at war, and lacking strong leadership or organization. The Maori invaders (from NZ’s N. Island) came from a dense population of farmers chronically engaged in ferocious wars, equipped with more-advanced tech and weapons, and operating under strong leadership. Of course, when the 2 groups finally came into contact, it was the Maori who slaughtered the Moriori, not vice versa.”

“It’s easy to trace how the differing environments of the Chatman Island and New Zealand molded the Moriori and the Maori differently. While those ancestral Maori who first colonized the Chatmans may’ve been farmers, Maori tropical crops couldn’t grow in the Chatmans’ cold climate, and the colonists had no alternative except to revert to being hunter-gatherers. Since as hunter-gatherers they didn’t produce crop surpluses available for redistribution or storage, they couldn’t support and feed nonhunting craft specialists, armies, bureaucrats and chiefs. Their prey were seals, shellfish, nesting seabirds, and fish that could be captured by hand or with clubs and required no more elaborate tech. In addition, the Chathams are relatively small and remote islands, capable of supporting a total population of only about 2k hunter-gatherers. With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori had to remain in the Chathams, and to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple tech and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization.”

Polynesia

“Polynesian islands are volcanoes that rose from the sea, have never formed part of a continent, and may or may not include areas of raised limestone.”

“Ancestral Polynesians brought with them 3 domesticated animals (the pig, chicken and dog) and domesticated no other animals within Polynesia. Many islands retained all 3 of those species, but the more isolated Polynesian islands lacked one or more of them, either because livestock brought in canoes failed to survive the colonists’ long overwater journey or because livestock that died out couldn't be readily obtained again from the outside. For instance, isolated New Zealand ended up with only dogs; Easter and Tikopia, with only chickens. Without access to coral reefs or productive shallow waters, and with their territorial birds quickly exterminated, Easter Islanders turned to constructing chicken houses for intensive poultry farming.”

“At the time of Europeans’ arrival in the 18th century, the Tongan chiefdom or state had already become an inter-archipelagal empire. Because the Tongan Archipelago itself was geographically close-knit and included several large islands with unfragmented terrain, each island became unified under a single chief; then the hereditary chiefs of the largest Tongan island (Tongatapu) united the whole archipelago, and eventually they conquered islands outside the archipelago up to 500 miles distant. They engaged in regular long-distance trade with Fiji and Samoa, established Tongan settlements in Fiji, and began to raid and conquer parts of Fiji. The conquest and administration of this maritime proto-empire were achieved by navies of large canoes, each holding up to 150 men.

Like Tonga, Hawaii became a political entity encompassing several populous islands, but one confined to a single archipelago because of its extreme isolation. At the time of Hawaii’s ‘discovery’ by Europeans in 1778, political unification had already taken place within each Hawaiian island, and some political fusion between the islands had begun. The 4 largest islands–the Big Island, Maui, Oahu, and Kauai–remained independent, controlling (or jockeying with each other for control of) the smaller islands (Lanai, Molokai, Kahoolawe, and Niihau). After the arrival of Europeans, the Big Island’s King Kamehameaha I rapidly proceed with the consolidation of the largest islands by purchasing European guns and ships to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu. Kamehameha prepped invasions of the last independent island, Kauai, whose chief finally reached a negotiated settlement with him, completing the unification.”

How Did Europe Conquer The Americas?

“The most dramatic moment in subsequent European-Native American relations was the first encounter between the Inca emperor Atahualipa and the Spanish consquistador Francisco Pizarro at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca on Nov, 16, 1532. Atahualipa was absolute monarch of the largest and most advanced state in the New World, while Pizarro represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (also known as King Charles I of Spain), monarch of the most powerful state in Europe. Pizarro, leading a ragtag group of 168 Spanish soldiers, was in unfamiliar terrain, ignorant of the local inhabitants, completely out of touch with the nearest Spaniards (1k miles to the N. in Panama) and far beyond the reach of timely reinforcements. Atahualipa was in the middle of his own empire of millions of subjects and immediately surrounded by his army of 80k soldiers, recently victorious in a war with other Indians. Nevertheless, Pizzaro captured Atahualipa within a few minutes after the 2 leaders first set eyes on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for 8 months, while extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom — enough gold to fill a room 22 ft long by 17 ft wide to a height of over 8 ft–was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahualipa.

Atahualipa’s capture was decisive for the European conquest of the Inca Empire. Although the Spaniards’ superior weapons would’ve assured an ultimate Spanish victory in any case, the capture made the conquest quicker and infinitely easier. Atahualipa was revered by the Incas as a sun-god and exercised absolute authority over his subjects, who obeyed even the orders he issued from captivity. The months until his death gave Pizarro time to dispatch exploring parties unmolested to other parts of the Inca Empire, and to send for reinforcements from Panama. When fighting between Spaniards and Incas finally did commence after Atahualipa’s execution, the Spanish forces were more formidable.”

“Today, it’s hard for us to grasp the enormous numerical odds against which the Spaniards’ military equipment prevailed. At the battle of Cajamarca recounted above, 168 Spaniards crushed a Native American army 500 times more numerous, killing thousands of natives while not losing a single Spaniard. Time and again, accounts of Pizarro’s subsequent battles with the Incas, Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs, and other early European campaigns against Native Americans describe encounters in which a few dozen European horsemen routed thousands of Indians with great slaughter. During Pizarro’s march from Cajamarca to the Inca capital of Cuzco after Atahualipa’s death, there were 4 such battles: at Jauja, Vilcashuaman, Vilcaconga, and Cuzco. Those 4 battles involved a mere 80, 30, 110, and 40 Spanish horsemen, respectively, in each case ranged against thousands or tens of thousands of Indians.”

“The tremendous advantage that the Spaniards gained from their horses leaps out of the eyewitness accounts. Horsemen could easily outride Indian sentries before the sentries had time to warn Indian troops behind them, and could ride down and kill Indians on foot. The shock of a horse’s charge, its maneuverability, the speed of attack that it permitted, and the raised and protected fighting platform that it provided left foot soldiers nearly helpless in the open.”

“How did Atahualipa come to be at Cajamarca? Atahualipa and his army came to be at Cajamarca because they’d just won decisive battles in a civil war that left the Incas divided and vulnerable. Pizarro quickly appreciated those divisions and exploited them. The reason for the civil war was that an epidemic of smallpox, spreading overland among S. American Indians after its arrival with Spanish settlers in Panama and Colombia, had killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and most of his court around 1526 and then immediately killed his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi. Those deaths precipitated a contest for the throne between Atahualipa and his half brother Huascar. If it hadn’t been for the epidemic, the Spaniards would’ve faced a united empire.”

“Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 9% of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of N. America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600s, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River. A smallpox epidemic in 1713 was the biggest single step in the destruction of S. Africa’s native San people by European settlers. Soon after the British settlement of Sydney in 1788, the first of the epidemics that decimated Aboriginals began.”

“A related factor bringing Spaniards to Peru was the existence of writing. Spain possessed it, while the Inca Empire didn’t. Info could be spread far more widely, accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth. That info, coming back to Spain from Columbus’ voyages and from Cortes’ conquest of Mexico, sent Spaniards pouring into the New World. Letters and pamphlets supplied both the motivation and the necessary detailed sailing directions. The first published report of Pizarro’s exploits, by his companion Captain Cristobal de Mena, was printed in Seville in April 1534, a mere 9 months after Atahualipa’s execution. It became a bestseller, was rapidly translated into other European languages, and sent a further stream of Spanish colonists to tighten Pizarro’s grip on Peru.”

“From books, the Spaniards knew of many contemporary civilizations remote from Europe, and about several thousand years of European history. Pizarro explicitly modeled his ambush of Atahualipa on the successful strategy of Cortes.

In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahualipa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also hadn’t even heard of (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trip and Atahualipa to walk into it.”

Animal Domestication

“Mliked mammals include the cow, sheep, goat, horse, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, and Arabian and Bactrian camels.”

“The largest domestic mammals interacted with domestic plants to increase food production by pulling plows and thereby making it possible for people to till land that had previously been uneconomical for farming. Those plow animals were the cow, horse, water buffalo, Bali cattle, and yak/cow hybrids. Here’s one example of their value: the first prehistoric farmers of C. Europe, the Linearbandkeramik culture that arose slightly before 5000 BCE were initially confined to soils light enough to be tilled by means of handheld digging sticks. Only over a thousand years later, with the intro of the ox-driven plow, were those farmers able to extend cultivation to a much wider range of heavy soils and tough sods. Similarly, Native American farmers of the N. American Great Plains grew crops in the river valleys, but farming of the tough sods on the extensive uplands had to await 19th-century Europeans and their animal-drawn plows.”

“A stored food surplus built up by taxation can support other full-time specialists besides kings and bureaucrats. Of most direct relevance to wars of conquest, it can be used to feed professional soldiers. That was the decisive factor in the British Empire’s eventual defeat of New Zealand’s well-armed indigenous Maori population. While the Maori achieved some stunning temporary victories, they couldn’t maintain an army consistently in the field and were in the end wore down by 18k full-time British troops.”

“One of the earliest cultivated plants in many parts of the Americas was grown for nonfood purposes: the bottle gourd, used as a container.

Big domestic mammals further revolutionized human society by becoming our main means of land transport until the development of railroads in the 19th century. Before animal domestication, the sole means of transporting goods and people by land was on the backs of humans. Large mammals changed that: for the first time in human history, it became possible to move heavy goods in large quantities, as well as people, rapidly overland for long distances. The domestic animals that were ridden were the horse, donkey, yak, reindeer and Arabian and Bactrian camels.”

“Even much earlier (around 4000 BCE), at a time when horses were still ridden bareback, they may have been the essential military ingredient behind the westward expansion of speakers of Indo-European languages from the Ukraine. Those languages eventually replaced all earlier W. European languages except Basque.”

“Of equal importance in wars of conquest were the germs that evolved in human societies with domestic animals. Infectious diseases like smallpox, measles, and flu arose as specialized germs of humans, derived by mutations of very similar ancestral germs that had infected animals. The humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly evolved germs, but those humans then evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases. When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99% of the previously unexposed population was killed.”

“Cattle were domesticated independently in India and W. Eurasia, within the last 10k years, starting with wild Indian and W. Eurasian cattle subspecies that had diverged hundreds of thousands of years earlier.”

The Transition to Farming

“A misconception is that there’s necessarily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently draw such a contrast, hunter-gatherers in some productive areas, including N. America’s Pacific NW and possibly SE Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, coastal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction of hunter-gatherers 15k years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gatherers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.

Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea’s Lakes Plains make clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has produced. Apache Indians of the SW US settled down to farm in the summer at higher elevations and toward the N, then withdrew to the S and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp during regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pastorage.”

“It even happened that food production systems were abandoned in favor of hunting-gathering. For instance, around 3000 BCE the hunter-gatherers of S. Sweden adopted farming based on SW Asian crops, but abandoned it around 2700 BCE and reverted to hunting-gathering for 400 years before resuming farming.”

Plant Domestication

“Not even ardent nut lovers eat wild almonds, of which a few dozen contain enough cyanide (the poison used in Nazi gas chambers) to kill us.”

“The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal’s gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well-adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow in the latrine sites of aardvarks.

As an example of how would-be plant hitchhikers attract animals, consider wild strawberries. When strawberry seeds are still young and not yet ready to be planted, the surrounding fruit is green, sour, and hard. When the seeds finally mature, the berries turn red, sweet, and tender. The change in the berries’ color serves as a signal attracting birds like thrushes to pluck the berries and fly off, eventually to spit out or defecate the seeds.

Naturally, strawberry plants didn’t set out with a conscious intent of attracting birds when, and only when, their seeds were ready to be dispersed. Neither did thrushes set out with the intent of domesticating strawberries. Instead, strawberry plants evolved through natural selection. The greener and more sour the young strawberry, the fewer the birds that destroyed the seeds by eating berries before the seeds were ready; the sweeter and redder the final strawberry, the more numerous the birds that dispersed its ripe seeds.”

“The early unconscious stages of crop evolution from wild plants consisted of plants evolving in ways that attracted humans to eat and disperse their fruit without yet intentionally growing them. Human latrines, like those of aardvarks, may’ve been a testing ground of the first unconscious crop breeders.”

“Ancestral cabbage plants, possibly grown originally for their oily seeds, underwent even greater diversification as they became variously selected for leaves (modern cabbage and kale), stems (kohirabi), buds (brussels sprouts), or flower shoots (cauliflower and broccoli).”

“The range of altitudes in the Pacific Crescent meant staggered harvest seasons: plants at higher elevations produced seeds somewhat later than plants at lower elevations. As a result, hunter-gatherers could move up a mountainside harvesting grain seeds as they matured, instead of being overwhelmed by a concentrated harvest system at a single altitude, where all grains matured simultaneously.”

Why Did Eurasia Develop Farming First?

“4 species of big mammals — the goat, sheep, pig, and cow — -were domesticated very early in the Fertile Crescent, possibly earlier than any other animal except the dog anywhere else in the world. Those species remain today 4 of the world’s 5 most important domesticated mammals. But their wild ancestors were commonest in slightly different parts of the Fertile Crescent, with the result that the 4 species were domesticated in different places: sheep possibly in the C part, goats either in the E part at higher elevations (Iran’s Zagros Mountains) or in the SW part (the Levant), pigs in the N-Central part, and cows in the W. part, including Anatolia. Nevertheless, even though the areas of abundance of these 4 wild progenitors thus differed, all 4 lived in sufficiently close proximity that they were readily transferred after domestication from one part of the Fertile Crescent to another, and the whole region ended up with all 4 species.

Agriculture was launched in the Fertile Crescent by the early domestication of 8 crops, termed ‘founder crops’ (because they founded agriculture in the region and possibly in the world). Those 8 founders were the cereals emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley; the pulses lentil, pea, chickpea, and bitter vetch; and the fiber crop flax. Of these 8, only 2, flax and barley, range in the wild at all widely outside the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. 2 of the founders had very small ranges in the wild, chickpea being confined to SE Turkey and emmer wheat to the Fertile Crescent itself. Thus, agriculture could arise in the Fertile Crescent from domestication of locally available wild plants, without having to wait for the arrival of crops derived from wild plants domesticated elsewhere. Conversely, 2 of the 8 founder crops couldn’t have been domesticated anywhere in the world except in the Fertile Crescent, since they didn’t occur wild elsewhere.

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised 3 cereals, as the main carb sources; 4 pulses, with 20–25% protein, and 4 domestic animals as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40% oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent’s first farmers came to meet humanity’s basic economic needs: carbs, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

A final advantage of early food production in the Fertile Crescent is that it may have faced less competition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than that in some other areas, including the W. Mediterranean. SW Asia has few large rivers and only a short coastline, providing relatively meager aquatic resources. One of the important mammal species hunted for meat, the gazelle, originally lived in large herds but was overexploited by the growing human population and reduced to low numbers. Thus, the food production package quickly became superior to the hunter-gatherer package. Sedentary villages based on cereals were already in existence before the rise of food production and predisposed those hunter-gatherers to agriculture and herding.”

“Foremost among these local domesticates is the modern world’s leading crop, sugarcane, of which the annual tonnage produced today nearly equals that of #2 and #3 crops combined (wheat and corn).”

“Like the hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent, those of New Guinea did evolve food production independently. However, their indigenous food production was restricted by the local absence of domesticable cereals, pulses, and animals, by the resulting protein deficiency in the highlands, and by limitations of the locally available root crops at high elevations. Yet New Guineans themselves know as much about the wild plants and animals available to them as any peoples on Earth today. They can be expected to have discovered and tested any wild plant species worth domesticating. They’re perfectly capable of recognizing useful additions to their crop larder, as is shown by their exuberant adoption of the sweet potato when it arrived.”

“The Hopewell fluorescence sprang up nearly 9k years after the rise of village living in the Fertile Crescent. Still, it wasn’t until after 900 CE that the assembly of the Mexican crop trinity triggered a larger population boom, the so-called Mississippian flourescence, which produced the largest towns and most complex societies achieved by Native Americans north of Mexico. But that boom came much too late to prepare Native Americans of the US for the impending disaster of European colonization. Food production based on eastern US crops had been insufficient to trigger the boom, for reasons that are easy to specify. The area’s available wild cereals weren’t nearly as useful as wheat and barley. Native Americans of the E. US domesticated no locally available wild pulse, no fiber crop, no fruit or nut tree. They had no domesticated animals at all except for dogs, which were probably domesticated elsewhere in the Americas.”

“Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced tech, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.”

The Major 5 Domesticated Animals

“Only 14 species weighing over 100 pounds were domesticated before the 20th century. Of those Ancient 14, 9 became important livestock for people in only limited areas of the globe: the Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama/alpaca (different breeds of the same ancestral species), donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, banteng, and gaur. Only 5 species became widespread and important around the globe. Those Major 5 of mammal domestication are the cow, sheep, goat, pig, and horse.

1. Sheep. Wild ancestor: the Asiatic mouflon sheep of W. and C. Asia. Now worldwide
2. Goat. Wild ancestor: the bezoar goat of W. Asia. Now worldwide
3. Cow, alias ox or cattle. Wild ancestor: the now extinct aurochs, fomerly distributed over Eurasia and N. Africa. Now worldwide
4. Pig. Wild ancestor: the wild boar, distributed over Eurasia and N. Africa. Now worldwide. Actually an omnivore, whereas the other 13 of the Ancient 14 are more strictly herbivores.
5. Horse. Wild ancestor: now extinct wild horses of S. Russia; a different subspecies of the same species survived in the wild to modern times as Przewalski’s horse of Mongolia. Now worldwide.”

“Elephants have been tamed, but never domesticated. Hannibal’s elephants were, and Asian work elephants are, just wild elephants that were captured and tamed; they weren’t bred in captivity. In contrast, a domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal’s breeding and food supply.”

“Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food. Comparing a dachshund with a wolf, you wouldn’t even suspect that the former had been derived from the latter if you didn’t already know it.”

“The wild ancestors of the Ancient 14 were spread unevenly over the globe. S. America had only one such ancestor, which gave rise to the llama and alpaca. N. America, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa had none at all. The lack of domestic mammals indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa is especially astonishing, since a main reason why tourists visit today is to see its abundant and diverse wild mammals. In contrast, the wild ancestors of 13 of the Ancient 14 (including all of the Major 5) were confined to Eurasia (in which I include N. Africa).

Of course, not all 13 of these wild ancestral species occurred together throughout Eurasia. No area had all 13, and some of the wild ancestors were quite local, such as the yak, confined in the wild to Tibet and adjacent highland areas. However, many parts of Eurasia did have quite a few of these 13 species living together in the same area: for example, 7 of the wild ancestors occurred in SW Asia.

This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs a, and steel. How can we explain the concentration of the Ancient 14 in Eurasia?

One reason is simple. Eurasia has the largest number of terrestrial wild mammal species, whether or not ancestral to a domesticated species. Let’s define a ‘candidate for domestication’ as any terrestrial herbivorous or omnivorous mammal species weighing on the average 100+ pounds. Eurasia has the most candidates, 72, just as it has the most species in many other plant and animal groups. That’s because Eurasia is the world’s largest landmass, and it’s also very diverse ecologically, with habitats ranging from extensive tropical rainforests, through temperate forests, deserts, and marshes, to equally extensive tundras. Sub-Saharan Africa has fewer candidates, 51, just as it has fewer species in most other plant and animal groups — because it’s smaller and ecologically less diverse than Eurasia. Africa has smaller areas of tropical rainforest than does SE Asia, and no temperate habitats at all beyond latitude 37*. The Americas may formerly have had almost as many candidates as Africa, but most of America’s big wild mammals (including its horses, most of its camels, and other species likely to have been domesticated if they’d survived) became extinct almost 13k years ago. Australia, the smallest and most isolated continent, has always had far fewer species of big wild mammals than has had Eurasia, Africa, or the Americas.”

“Sheep acquired from Spaniards transformed Navajo society and led to, among other things, the weaving of the beautiful woolen blankets for which the Navajo have become renowned.”

“The era of big mammal domestication began with the sheep, goat, and pig, and ended with camels. Since 2500 BCE there have been no significant additions.

It’s true, of course, that some small mammals were first domesticated long after 2500 BCE. For example, rabbits weren’t domesticated for food until the Middle Ages, mice and rats for lab research not until the 20th century, and hamsters for pets not until the 1930s. The continuing development of domesticated small mammals isn’t surprising, because there are literally thousands of wild species as candidates, and because they were of too little value to traditional societies to warrant the effort of raising them. But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world’s 148 candidate big species must’ve been tested numerous times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.”

“To be domesticated, a candidate wild species must possess many different characteristics.

Diet. Every time an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer’s biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100%, typically 10%. That is, it takes around 10k pounds of corn to grow a 1,000 pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1k pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10k pounds of herbivore grown on 100k pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals.”

Growth Rate. To be worth keeping, domesticates must also grow quickly. That eliminates gorillas and elephants, even though they’re vegetarians with admirably nonfinicky food preferences and represent a lot of meat. What would-be gorilla or elephant rancher would wait 15 years for his herd o reach adult size? Modern Asians who want work elephants find it much cheaper to capture them in the wild and tame them.

Problems of Captive Breeding. We humans don’t like to have sex under the watchful eyes of others; some potentially valuable animal species don’t like to, either. That’s what derailed attempts to domesticate cheetahs, the swiftest of all land animals, despite our motivation to do for thousands of years. One Mogul emperor of India kept a stable of a thousand cheetahs, used as hunting animals.

In the wild, several cheetah brothers chase a female for several days, and that rough courtship over large distances seems to be required to get the female to ovulate or to become sexually receptive. Cheetahs usually refuse to carry out that elaborate courtship ritual inside a cage.

Nasty Disposition. Naturally, almost any mammal species that is sufficiently large is capable of killing a human. People have been killed by pigs, horses, camels, and cattle. Nevertheless, some large animals have much nastier dispositions and are more incurably dangerous than others. Tendencies to kill humans have disqualified many otherwise seemingly ideal candidates for domestication.

One obvious example is the grizzly. Bear meat is an expensive delicacy, grizzlies weigh up to 1,700 pounds, they’re mainly vegetarians (though also formidable hunters), their vegetable diet is very broad, they thrive on human garbage, and they grow relatively fast. If they would behave themselves in captivity, grizzlies would be a fabulous meat production animal. The Ainu people of Japan made the experiment by routinely rearing grizzly cubs as part of a ritual. For understandable reasons, though, the Ainu found it prudent to kill and eat the cubs at the age of 1 year. Keeping grizzlies for longer would be suicidal; I’m not aware of any adult that has been tamed.

Another otherwise suitable candidate that disqualifies itself for equally obvious reasons is the African buffalo. It grows quickly up to a weight of a ton and lives in herds that have a well-developed dominance hierarchy. But the African buffalo is considered the most dangerous and unpredictable large mammal of Africa. Anyone insane enough to try to domesticate it either died in the effort or was forced to kill the buffalo before it got too big and nasty. Similarly, hippos, as 4 ton vegetarians, would be great barnyard animals if they weren’t so dangerous. They kill more people each year than do any other African mammals, including even lions.

Tendency to Panic. Big mammalian herbivore species react to danger from predators or humans in different ways. Some species are nervous, fast, and programmed for instant flight when they perceive a threat. Other species are slower, less nervous, seek protection in herds, stand their ground when threatened, and don’t run until necessary. Most species of deer and antelope (with the conspicuous exception of reindeer) are of the former type, while sheep and goats are of the latter.

Naturally, the nervous species are difficult to keep in captivity. If put into an enclosure, they’re likely to panic, and either die of shock or batter themselves to death against the fence in their attempts to escape. That’s true, for example, of gazelles.

Social Structure. Almost all species of domesticated large mammals prove to be ones whose wild ancestors share 3 social characteristics: they live in herds, they maintain a well-developed dominance hierarchy among herd members; and the herds occupy overlapping home ranges rather than mutually exclusive territories.

When the herd is on the move, its members maintain a stereotyped order: in the rear, the stallion; in the front, the top-ranking female, followed by her foals in order of age, with the youngest first; and behind her, the other mares in order of rank, each followed by her foals in order of age. In that way, many adults can coexist in the herd without constant fighting and with each knowing its rank.

That social structure is ideal for domestication, because humans in effect take over the dominance hierarchy. Domestic horses of a pack line follow the human leader as they would normally follow the top-ranking female. Herds or packs of sheep, goats, cows, and ancestral dogs (wolves) have a similar dominance hierarchy. As young animals grow up in such a herd, they imprint on the animals that they regularly see nearby. Under wild conditions those are members of their own species, but captive young herd animals also see humans nearby and imprint on humans as well.

Such social animals lend themselves to herding. Since they’re tolerant of each other, they can be bunched up. Since they instinctively follow a dominant leader and will imprint on humans as that leader, they can be readily driven by a shepherd or sheepdog. Herd animals do well when penned in crowded conditions, because they’re accustomed to living in densely packed groups in the wild.

In contrast, members of most solitary territorial animal species cannot be herded. They don’t tolerate each other, don’t imprint on humans, and aren’t instinctively submissive.

Herds of many species don’t have overlapping home ranges but instead maintain exclusive territories against other herds. It’s no more possible to pen 2 such herds together than to pen 2 males of a solitary species.

Second, many species that live in herds for part of the year are territorial in the breeding season, when they fight and don’t tolerate each other’s presence. That’s true of most deer and antelope (again with the exception of reindeer), and it’s one of the main factors that has disqualified all the social antelope species for which Africa is famous from being domesticated.”

Why Did Domesticates and Tech Spread Quickly Across Eurasia?

“Why was the spread of crops from the Fertile Crescent so rapid? The answer depends partly on the East-West axis of Eurasia. Localities distributed E and W of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats and biomes (types of vegetation).”

“The germination, growth, and disease resistance of plants are adapted to precisely those features of climates. Seasonal changes of day length, temperature, and rainfall constitute signals that eliminate seeds to germinate, seedlings to grow, and mature plants to develop flowers, seeds, and fruit. Each plant population becomes genetically programmed, through natural selection, to respond appropriately to signals of the seasonal regime under which it’s evolved.”

“The plant would lack genes for resistance to diseases of N. climates, while uselessly carrying genes for resistance to diseases of S. climates.”

“Continental differences in axis orientation affected the diffusion not only of food production but also of other technologies and inventions. For example, around 3000 BCE the invention of the wheel in or near SW Asia spread rapidly W and E across much of Eurasia within a few centuries, whereas the wheels invented independently in prehistoric Mexico never spread south to the Andes. Similarly, the principle of alphabetic writing, developed in the W part of the Fertile Crescent by 1500 BCE, spread W to Carthage and E to the Indian subcontinent within about a thousand years, but the Mesoamerican writing systems that flourished in prehistoric times for at least 2,000 years never reached the Andes.

Naturally, wheels and writing aren’t directly linked to latitude and day length in the way crops are. Instead, the links are indirect, especially via food production systems and their consequences. The earliest wheels were parts of ox-drawn carts used to transport agricultural produce. Early writing was restricted to elites supported by food-producing peasants, and it served purposes of economically and socially complex food-producing societies (such as royal propaganda, goods inventories, and bureaucratic record keeping). In general, societies that engaged in intense exchange of crops, livestock, and tech related to food production were more likely to become involved in other exchanges as well.”

Germs

“The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history — smallpox, flu, TB, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera — are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans. Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they ‘ve also been decisive shapers of history. Until WWII, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds. All those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth: the winners of past wars weren’t always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.”

“A few microbes are more sensitive to heat than our own bodies are. By raising our body temperature, we in effect try to bake the germs to death before we get baked ourselves.

Another common response of ours is to mobilize our immune system. White blood cells and other cells of ours actively seek out and kill foreign microbes. The specific antibodies that we gradually build up against a particular microbe infecting us make us less likely to get reinfected once we become cured.”

“The principle of vaccination is to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.

Alas, some clever microbes don’t just cave in to our immune defenses. Some have learned to trick us by changing those molecular pieces of the microbe (its antigens)that our antibodies recognize. The constant evolution or recycling of new strains of flu, with differing antigens, explains why your having gotten flu 2 years ago didn’t protect you against the different strain that arrived this year. Malaria and sleeping sickness are even more slippery customers in their ability rapidly to change their antigens. Among the slipperiest of all is AIDS, which evolves new antigens even as it sits within an individual patient, thereby eventually overwhelming their immune system.

Our slowest defensive response is through natural selection, which changes our gene frequencies from generation to generation. For almost any disease, some people prove to be genetically more resistant than are others. In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance — just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

Fat consolation, you may be thinking again. This evolutionary response isn’t one that does the genetically susceptible dying individual any good. It does mean, though, that a human population as a whole becomes better protected against the pathogen. Examples of those genetic defenses include the protections (at a price) that the sickle-cell gene, Tay-Sachs gene, and cystic fibrosis gene may confer on African blacks, Ashkenazi Jews, and N. Europeans against malaria, TB, and bacterial diarrheas, respectively.”

“To sustain themselves, acute infectious diseases need a human population that’s sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning. Hence measles and similar diseases are also known as crowd diseases.”

“Having killed most of its tribelet, the epidemic then disappears. The small population size of tribelets explains not only why they can’t sustain epidemics introduced from the outside, but also why they never could evolve epidemic diseases of their own to give back to visitors.

That’s not to say, though, that small human populations are free from all infectious diseases. They do have infections, but only of certain types. Some are caused by microbes capable of maintaining themselves in animals or in the soil, with the result that the disease doesn’t die out but remains constantly available to infect people. For example, the yellow fever virus is carried by African wild monkeys, whence it can always infect rural human populations of Africa, whence it was carried by the transatlantic slave trade to infect New World monkeys and people.”

“Small human populations are also susceptible to nonfatal infections against which we don’t develop immunity, with the result that the same person can become reinfected after recovering. That happens with hookworm and many other parasites.

All these types of diseases, characteristic of small isolated populations, must be the oldest diseases of humanity. They were the ones we could evolve and sustain through the early millions of years of our evolutionary history, when the total human population was tiny and fragmented. These diseases are also shared with, or similar to the diseases of, our closest wild relatives, the African great apes. In contrast, the crowd diseases could’ve arisen only with the buildup of large, dense human populations. That buildup began with the rise of agriculture starting about 10k years ago and then accelerated with the rise of cities starting several thousand years ago. In fact, the first familiar infectious diseases are surprisingly recent, around 1600 BCE, for smallpox (as deduced from pockmarks on an Egyptian mummy), 400 BCE for mumps, 200 BCE for leprosy, 1800 CE for epidemic polio, and 1959 for AIDS.

“Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe’s urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. Another bonanza was the development of world trade routes, which by Roman times effectively joined the populations of Europe, Asia, and N. Africa into one giant breeding ground for microbes.”

“Among animals, too, epidemic diseases require large, dense populations and don’t affect just any animal: they’re confined mainly to social animals providing the necessary large populations Hence when we domesticated social animals, such as cows and pigs, they were already afflicted by epidemic diseases just waiting to be transferred to us.

For example, measles virus is most closely related to the virus causing rinderpest. That nasty epidemic disease affects cattle and many wild cut-chewing mammals, but not humans. Measles in turn doesn’t affect cattle. The close similarity of the measles virus to the rinderpest virus suggest that the latter transferred from cattle to humans and then evolved into the measles virus by changing its properties to adapt to us. That transfer isn’t at all surprising, considering that many peasant farmers live and sleep close to cows and their feces, urine, breath, sores, and blood. Our intimacy with cattle has been going on for 9,000 years since we domesticated them — ample time for the rinderpest virus to notice us nearby. Others of our familiar infectious diseases can similarly be traced back to diseases of our animal friends.”

“When syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today. Apparently, those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spircohete offspring into more victims.”

“By 1618, Mexico’s initial population of about 20 million had plummeted to about 1.6 million.”

“North America supported populous Indian societies in the most logical place, the Mississippi Valley, which contains some of our best farmland today. In that case, however, conquistadores contributed nothing directly to the societies’ destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything. When Hernando de Soto became the first European conquistador to reach through the SE US, in 1540, he came across Indian townsites abandoned 2 years earlier because the inhabitants had died in epidemics. These epidemics had been transmitted from coastal Indians infected by Spaniards visiting the coast. The Spaniards’ microbes spread to the interior in advance of the Spaniards themselves.”

“When I was young, American schoolchildren were taught that North America had originally been occupied by only about 1 million Indians. That low number was useful in justifying the white conquest of what could be viewed as an almost empty continent. However, archaeological excavations, and scrutiny of descriptions left by the very first European explorers on our coasts, now suggest an initial number of around 20 million Indians. For the New World as a whole, the Indian population decline in the century or 2 following Columbus’ arrival is estimated to have been as large as 95%.

The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus competed for top risk among the killers. As if these hadn’t been enough, diphtheria, malaria, mumps, pertussis, plague, TB, and yellow fever came up close behind.”

“The few domesticates that remaiend to Native Americans weren’t likely sources of crowd diseases, compared to cows and pigs.”

“Syphilis, gonorrhea, TB, and influenza arriving with Captain Cook in 1779, followed by a big typhoid epidemic in 1804 and numerous ‘minor’ epidemics, reduced HI’s population from around half a million in 1779 to 84,000 in 1853, the year when smallpox finally reaching HI and killed around 10,000 of the survivors. These examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely.

However, germs didn’t act solely to Europeans’ advantage. While the New World and Australia didn’t harbor native epidemic diseases awaiting Europeans, tropical Asia, Africa, Indonesia, and New Guinea certainly did. Malaria throughout the tropical Old World, cholera in tropical SE Asia, and yellow fever in tropical Africa were (and still are) the most notorious of the tropical killers. They posed the most serious obstacle to European colonization of the tropics, and they explain why the European colonial partitioning of New Guinea and most of Africa wasn’t accomplished until nearly 400 years after European partitioning of the New World began. Furthermore, once malaria and yellow fever did become transmitted to the Americas by European ship traffic, they emerged as the major impediment to colonization of the New World tropics as well. A familiar example is the role of those diseases in aborting the French effort, and nearly aborting the ultimately successful American effort, to construct the Panama Canal.”

Writing

“Somehow, the first scribes solved all these problems, without having in front of them any example of the final result to guide their efforts. That task was evidently so difficult that there have been only a few occasions in history when people invented writing entirely on their own. The 2 indisputably independent inventions of writing were achieved by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia somewhat before 3000 BCE and by Mexican Indians before 600 BCE; Egyptian writing of 3000 BCE and Chinese writing (by 1300 BCE) may also have arisen independently. Probably all other peoples who’ve developed writing since then have borrowed, adapted, or at least been inspired by existing systems.”

“Finnish lacks the sounds that many other European languages express by the letters b, c, f, g, w, x, and z so the Finns dropped these letters from their version of the Roman alphabet.”

“Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.”

Invention

“When Edison built his first phonograph in 1877, he published an article proposing 10 uses to which his invention might be put. They included preserving the last words of dying people, recording books for blind people to hear, announcing clock time, and teaching spelling. A few years later Edison told his assistant that his invention had no commercial value. Within another few years he changed his mind and did enter business to sell phonographs — but for use as office dictating machines. When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to his debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention. Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

The motor vehicle is another invention whose uses seem obvious today. However, it wasn’t invented in response to any demand. When Nikolaus Otto built his first gas engine, in 1866, horses had been supplying people’s land transportation needs for nearly 6,000 years, supplemented increasingly by steam-powered railroads for several decades. There was no crisis in the availability of horses, no dissatisfaction with railroads.

Because Otto’s engine was weak, heavy, and 7 ft. tall, it didn’t recommend itself over horses. Not until 1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle; he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

In 1905, motor vehicles were still expensive, unreliable toys for the rich. Public contentment with horses and railroads remained high until WWI, when the military concluded that it really did need trucks. Intensive postwar lobbying by truck manufacturers and armies finally convinced the public of its own needs and enabled trucks to begin to supplant horse-drawn wagons in industrialized countries. Even in the largest Amer. cities, the changeover took 50 years.”

“19th-century chemists found the middle distillate fraction useful as fuel for oil lamps. The chemists discarded the most volatile fraction (gasoline) as an unfortunate waste product — until it was found to be an ideal fuel for internal-combustion engines. Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

“This book, like probably every other typed document you’ve ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most 6 letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, the keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters all over keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95%. But QWERTY’s keyboards were solidly entrenched by then.”

“Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the US is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings.”

“The societies most accessible to receiving inventions by diffusion were those embedded in the major continents. In these societies tech developed most rapidly, because they accumulated not only their own inventions but also those of other societies.”

“Contemporary European rulers included some who despised guns and tried to restrict their availability. But such measures never got far in Europe, where any country that temporarily swore off firearms would be promptly overrun by gun-toting neighboring countries. Only because Japan was a populous, isolated island could it get away with its rejection of the powerful new military tech. Its safety in isolation came to an end in 1853, when the visit of Commodore Perry’s US fleet bristling with cannons convinced Japan of its need do resume gun manufacture.

That rejection and China’s abandonment of oceangoing ships (as well as of mechanical clocks and water-driven spinning machines) are well-known historical instances of technological reversals in isolated or semi-isolated societies. Other such reversals occurred in prehistoric times. The extreme case is that of Aboriginal Tasmanians, who abandoned even bone tools and fishing to become the society with the simplest tech in the modern world. Aboriginal Australians may have adopted and then abandoned bows and arrows. Torres Islanders abandoned canoes, while Gaua Islanders abandoned and then readopted them. Pottery was abandoned throughout Polynesia. Most Polynesians and many Melanesians abandoned the use of bows and arrows in war. Polar Eskimos lost the bow and arrow and the kayak, while Dorset Eskimos lost the bow and arrow, bow drill, and dogs.

These examples, at first so bizarre to us, illustrate well the role of geography and of diffusion in the history of tech. Without diffusion, fewer techs are acquired, and more existing techs are lost.”

“Each society on a continent represents one more opportunity to invent and adopt a tech, because societies vary greatly in their innovativeness for many separate reasons. Hence, all other things being equal, tech develops fastest in large productive regions with large human populations, many potential inventors, and many competing societies.”

“The continents’ populations 10,000 years ago, just before the rise of food production, aren’t known but surely stood in the same sequence, since many of the areas producing the most food would also have been productive areas for hunter-gatherers 10k years ago. The differences in population are glaring: Eurasia’s (including North Africa’s) is nearly 6x that of the Americas, nearly 8x that of Africa’s, and 230x that of Australia’s. Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.”

“Societies with effective conflict resolution, sound decision making, and harmonious economic redistribution can develop better tech, concentrate their military power, seize larger and more productive territories, and crush autonomous smaller societies one by one.

Thus, competition between societies at one level of complexity tends to lead to societies on the next level of complexity if conditions persist.”

Oceania

“As a consequence of being food producers instead of hunter-gatherers, New Guineans lived at much higher average population densities than Australians: New Guinea has only 1/10 of Australia’s area but supported a native population several times that of Australia’s.

Why did the human societies of the larger landmass remain so ‘backward’ in their development, while the societies of the smaller landmass ‘advanced’ much more rapidly? Why didn’t all those New Guinea innovations spread to Australia, which is separated from New Guinea by only 90 miles of sea at Torres Strait?

Australia has by far the oldest, most infertile, most nutrient-leached soils of any continent, because of Australia’s little volcanic activity and its lack of high mountains and glaciers. Despite having only 1/10 of Australia’s area, New Guinea is home to approximately as many mammal and bird species as is Australia — a result of New Guinea’s equatorial location, much higher rainfall, much greater range of elevations, and greater fertility.”

“Steep terrain, persistent cloud cover, malaria, and risk of drought at lower elevations confine New Guinea highland agriculture to elevations above about 4,000 ft. In effect, the New Guinea highlands are an island of dense farming populations thrust up into the sky and surrounded below by a sea of clouds. Lowland New Guineans on the seacoast and rivers are villagers depending heavily on fish, while those on dry ground away from the coast and rivers at low densities subsist by slash-and-burn agriculture based on bananas and yams, supplemented by hunting and gathering. In contrast, lowland New Guinea swamp dwellers live as nomadic hunter-gatherers dependent on the starchy pith of wild sago palms, which are very productive and yield 3x more calories per hour of work than does gardening.”

“New Guinea had several biological and geographical strikes against it.

First, although indigenous food production did arise in the New Guinea highlands, it yielded little protein. The dietary staples were low-protein root crops, and production of the sole domesticated animal species (pigs and chickens) was too low to contribute much to people’s protein budgets. Since neither pigs nor chickens can be harnessed to pull carts, highlanders remained without sources of power other than human muscle power, and also failed to evolve epidemic diseases to repel the eventual European invaders.

A second restriction on the size of highland populations was the limited available area: the New Guinea highlands have only a few broad valleys, notably the Wahgi and Baliem, capable of supporting dense populations. Still a third limitation was the reality that the mid-montane zone between 4k-9k ft. was the sole altitudinal zone in New Guinea suitable for intensive food production. Thus, large-scale economic exchanges of food, between communities at different altitudes specializing in different types of food production, never developed in New Guinea. Such exchanges in the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas not only increased population densities in those areas, by providing people at all altitudes with a more balanced diet, but also promoted regional economic and political integration.

For all these reasons, the population of traditional New Guinea never exceeded 1 million until European colonial governments brought W. medicine and the end of intertribal warfare. Of the approximately 9 world centers of agricultural origins, New Guinea remained the one with by far the smallest population. With a mere 1 million people, New Guinea could never develop the tech, writing, and political systems that arose among populations of tens of millions in China, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes, and Mesoamerica.”

“New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese: nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language grousp (still with a mere 100k speakers) were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages. Each of those microsocieties alone was far too small to support chiefs and craft specialists, or to develop metallurgy and writing.”

“The sole foreign domesticated animal adopted in Australia was the dog, which arrived from Asia (presumably in Austronesian canoes) around 1500 BCE and established itself in the wild in Australia to become the dingo. Native Australians kept captive dingos as companions, watchdogs, and even as living blankets, giving rise to the expression ‘five-dog-night’ to mean a very cold night. But they did not use dingos/dogs for food.”

“Australia is unique in that the overwhelming influence on climate over most of the continent is an irregular nonannual cycle, the El Nino S. Oscillation, rather than the regular annual cycle of the seasons so familiar in most other parts of the world. Unpredictable severe droughts last for years, punctuated by equally unpredictable torrential rains and floods.”

“Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia’s ENSO-driven resource unpredictability. When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better. Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in good years and a sufficiency in bad years.

The Aboriginal Australian substitute for food production has been termed ‘firestick farming.’ The Aborigines modified and managed the surrounding landscape in ways that increased its production of edible plants and animals, without resorting to cultivation. In particular, they intentionally burned much of the landscape periodically. That served several purposes: the fires drove out animals that could be killed and eaten immediately; fires converted dense thickets into open parkland in which people could travel more easily; the parkland was also an ideal habitat for kangaroos, Australia’s prime game animal; and the fires stimulated the growth both of new grass on which kangaroos fed and of fern roots on which Aborigines themselves fed.”

“The number of European settlers was always very small, and today New Guinea is still populated largely by New Guineans. That contrasts sharply with the situation in Australia, the Americas, and South Africa, where European settlement was numerous and lasting and replaced the original native population over large areas. Why was New Guinea different?

A major factor was the one that defeated all European attempts to settle the New Guinea lowlands until the 1880s: malaria and other tropical diseases, none of them an acute epidemic crowd infection. The most ambitious of those failed lowland settlement plans, organized by French marquis de Rays around 1880 on the nearby island of New Ireland, ended with 930 of the 1,000 colonists dead within 3 years. Even with modern medical treatments available today, many of my Western friends in New Guinea have been forced to leave because of [diseases].”

“As Europeans were being felled by New Guinea lowland germs, why were Eurasian germs not simultaneously felling New Guineans? Some New Guineans did become infected, but not on the massive scale that killed off most of the native peoples of Australia and the Americas. One lucky break for New Guineans was that there were no permanent European settlements in New Guinea until the 1880s, by which time public health discoveries had made progress in bringing smallpox and other infectious diseases of European populations under control. In addition, the Austronesian expansion had already been bringing a stream of Indonesian settlers and traders to New Guinea for 3,500 years. Since Asian mainland infectious diseases were well established in Indonesia, New Guineans thereby gained long exposure and built up much more resistance to European germs than did Aborigines.

The sole part of New guinea where Europeans don’t suffer from severe health problems is the highlands, above the altitudinal ceiling for malaria. But the highlands, already occupied by dense populations of New Guineans, weren’t reached by Europeans until the 1930s. By then, the Australian and Dutch colonial governments weren’t longer willing to open up lands for white settlement by killing native people in large numbers or driving them off their lands.

The remaining obstacle to European would-be settlers was that European crops, livestock, and subsistence methods do poorly everywhere in the New Guinea environment and climate. While introduced tropical American crops such as squash, corn, and tomatoes are now grown in small quantities, and tea and coffee plantations have been established in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, staple European crops, like wheat, barley, and peas, have never taken hold. Introduced cattle and goats, kept in small numbers, suffer from tropical diseases, just as do European people themselves. Food production in New Guinea is still dominated by the crops and agricultural methods that New Guineans perfected over the course of thousands of years.”

Asia

“India, Indonesia, and Brazil are recent political creations (or re-creations in the case of India), home to about 850, 670, and 210 languages, respectively.)”

“China’s long E-W rivers (the Yellow and Yangtze) facilitated diffusion of crops and tech between the coast and inland, while its broad E-W expanse and relatively gentle terrain, which eventually permitted those 2 river systems to be joined by canals, facilitated N-S exchanges. All these geographic factors contributed to the early cultural and political unification of China, whereas W. Europe, with a similar area but a more rugged terrain and no such unifying rivers, has resisted cultural and political unification to this day.”

“The historical southward expansions of Burmese, Laotians, and Thais from S. China completed the Sinification of tropical SE Asia. All those modern peoples are recent offshoots of their S. Chinese cousins.

So overwhelming was this Chinese streamroller that the former peoples of tropical SEA Asia have left behind few traces in the region’s modern populations. Just 3 relict groups of hunter-gatherers — the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islanders, and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka — remain to suggest that tropical SE Asia’s former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like modern New Guineans and unlike the light-skinned, straight-haired S. Chinese and the modern tropical SE Asians who are their offshoots.”

“But China’s role was nonetheless disproportionate. For example, the prestige value of Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han’gu~1 alphabet. That persistence of Chinese writing in Japan and Korea is a vivid 20th-century legacy of plant and animal domestication in China nearly 10k years ago. Thanks to the achievement’s of E. Asia’s first farmers, China became Chinese, and peoples from Thailand to Easter Island became their cousins.”

“Importation of Chinese writing is nominally illegal in Indonesian New Guinea. In much of Indonesia the merchants are Chinese immigrants. Latent mutual fear between the economically dominant Chinese and politically dominant Javans erupted in 1966 in a bloody revolution, when Javans slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese.”

“Taiwan’s aborigines had the island largely to themselves until mainland Chinese began settling in large numbers within the last thousand years. Still more mainlanders arrived after 1945, especially after the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists in 1949, so that aborigines now constitute only 2% of Taiwan’s population. The concentration of 3 out of the 4 Austronesian subfamilies on Taiwan suggests that, within the present Austronesian realm, Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.”

“Once Pacific peoples spread beyond the range of wool-yielding domestic animals and fiber plant crops and hence of woven clothing, they became dependent on pounded bark ‘cloth’ for their clothing. Inhabitants of Rennell Island, a traditional Polynesian island that didn’t become Westernized until the 1930s, told me that Westernization yielded the wonderful side benefit that the island became quiet. No more sounds of bark beaters everywhere, pounding out bark cloth from dawn until after dusk every day!”

“The last phases of the expansion, during the millennium after 1 CE, resulted in the colonization of every Polynesian and Micronesian island capable of supporting humans.”

“One might initially wonder how a linguist, studying only modern languages whose unwritten ancestral forms remain unknown, could ever figure out whether Austronesians living on Taiwan 6k years ago had pigs. The solution is to reconstruct the vocabularies of vanished ancient languages by comparing vocabularies of modern languages derived from them.”

“Evidently, Proto-Indo-Europeans 6k years ago had sheep, in agreement with archaeological evidence. Nearly 2k other words of their vocab can similarly be reconstructed, including words for ‘goat,’ ‘horse,’ ‘wheel,’ ‘brother,’ and ‘eye.’ But no Proto-Indo-European word can be reconstructed for ‘gun,’ which uses different roots in different modern Indo-European languages: ‘gun’ in English, ‘fusil’ in French, ‘rushyo’ in Russian, and so on. That shouldn’t surprise us: people 6k years ago couldn’t possibly have had a word for guns, which were invented only within the past 1k years. Since there was thus no inherited shared root meaning ‘gun,’ each Indo-European language had to invent or borrow its own word when guns were finally invented.”

“Genetically, the Bismarck and Solomon Islanders and north coastal New Guineans are about 15% Austronesian and 85% like New Guinea highlanders. Hence Austronesians evidently reached the New Guinea region but failed completely to penetrate the island’s interior and were genetically diluted by New Guinea’s previous residents on the north coast and islands.”

“Before Austronesians arrived, most of Indonesia was thinly occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking even polished stone tools. In contrast, food production had already been established for thousands of years in the New Guinea highlands, and probably in the New Guinea lowlands and in the Bismarcks and Solomons as well. The New Guinea highlands supported some of the densest populations of Stone Age people anywhere in the modern world.”

“Japan’s high rainfall ensures that its forest regenerates quickly after logging. Despite thousands of years of dense human occupation, everyone’s first impression of Japan is of its greenness, because 70%+ of its land area is still covered by forest (compared with only 10% for Britain). Conversely, all that forest means that there’s no native grassland or natural pasture. Traditionally, the sole animal raised on a large scale for food in Japan has been the pig; sheep and goats have never been significant, and cattle were raised for pulling plows and carts but not food. Japanese-raised beef remains a luxury food for the wealthy few, selling for up to $100/pound.”

“After the Japanese established trading posts on Hokkaido in 1615, they proceeded to treat the Hokkaido Ainu such as white Americans treated Native Americans. The Ainu were conquered, rounded up into reserves, forced to work for trading posts, driven off land desired by Japanese farmers, and killed when they revolted. When Japan annexed Hokkaido in 1869, Japanese schoolteachers made determined efforts to expunge the Ainu culture and language. Today, the language is virtually extinct, and probably no pure-bred Ainu survives.”

“The world’s oldest-known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago.”

“The Japanese environment is so productive that it was one of the few locations where people could settle down and make pottery while still living as hunter-gatherers. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers to exploit their environment’s rich food resources more than 10k years before intensive agriculture reached Japan. In contrast, pottery wasn’t adopted in the Fertile Crescent until about a thousand years after the adoption of agriculture.”

“Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese. On the assumption that modern Japanese people arose as a mixture of Korean-like Yayoi population with an Ainu-like Jomon population, geneticists have attempted to calculate the relative contributions of the 2 gene pools. The resulting conclusion is that the Korean/Yaoi contribution was generally dominant. The Ainu/Jomon contribution was lowest in SW Japan, where most Korean immigrants would’ve arrived and Jomon populations were sparse, and relatively greater in N. Japan, where forests were richer in nuts, Jomon population densities were highest, and Yoyoi rice agriculture was least successful.”

“I suspect that the Korean language that was carried to Japan in 400 BCE and that evolved into modern Japanese, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we shouldn’t be surprised that modern Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.”

The Americas

“In parts of C America and the Andes, the Native Americans were originally so numerous that, even after epidemics and wars, much of the population today remains Native American or mixed. This is especially true at high altitudes in the Andes, where genetically European women have physiological difficulties even in reproducing, and where native Andean crops still offer the most suitable basis for food production.”

Europe

“All those English dialects form only one low-order subgroup of the Germanic language family. All the other subgroups — the various Scandinavian, German, and Dutch languages — are crammed into NW Europe. In particular, Frisian, the other Germanic language most closely related to English, is confined to a tiny coastal area of Holland and W Germany. Hence a linguist would deduce correctly that the English language arose in coastal NW Europe and spread around the world from there. In fact, we know from recorded history that English really was carried from there to England by invading Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries.”

“Today, the expressions ‘Fertile Crescent’ and ‘world leader in food production’ are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. Today’s ephemeral wealth of some of the region’s nations, based on the single nonrenewable resource of oil, conceals the region’s long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty in feeding itself.

In ancient times, however, much of the Fertile Crescent and E. Mediterranean region, including Greece, was covered with forest. The region’s transformation from fertile woodland to eroded scrub or desert had been elucidated by paleobotanists and archaeologists. Its woodlands were cleared for agriculture, or cut to obtain construction timber, or burned as firewood or for manufacturing plaster. Because of low rainfall and hence low primary productivity (proportional to rainfall), regrowth of vegetation couldn’t keep pace with its destruction, especially in the presence of overgrazing by abundant goats. With the tree and grass cover removed, erosion proceeded and valleys silted up, while irrigation agriculture in the low-rainfall environment led to salt accumulation. These processes, which began in the Neolithic era, continued into modern times. For instance, the last forests near the ancient Nabataean capital of Petra, in modern Jordan, were felled by the Ottoman Turks during construction of the Hejaz railroad just before WWI.

Thus, Fertile Crescent and E. Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base. Power shifted westward as each E. Mediterranean society in turn undermined itself, beginning with the oldest societies, those in the east. N and W Europe has been spared this fate, not because its inhabitants have been wiser but because they have had the good luck to live in a more robust environment with higher rainfall, in which vegetation regrows quickly. Much of N and W Europe is still able to support productive intensive agriculture today, 7k years after the arrival of food production.”

“In the early 15th century it sent treasure fleets, each consisting of hundreds of ships up to 400 ft long and with total crews of up to 28k, across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa, decades before Columbus’ 3 puny ships crossed the narrow Atlantic. Why didn’t Chinese ships proceed around Africa’s southern cape westward and colonize Europe, before Vasco de Gama’s own 3 puny ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope eastward and launched Europe’s colonization of E. Asia? Why didn’t Chinese ships cross the Pacific to colonize the America’s west coast. Why, in brief, did China lose its technological lead to the formerly so backward Europe?

The end of China’s treasure fleets gives us a clue. 7 of those fleets sailed from China between 1405–1493. They were then suspended as a result of a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between 2 factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents). The former faction had been identified with sending and captaining the fleets. Hence when the latter faction gained the upper hand in a power struggle, it stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards, and forbade oceangoing shipping. The episode is reminiscent of the legislation that strangled development of public electric lighting in London in the 1880s, the isolationism of the US between WWI and WWII, and any number of backward steps in any number of countries, all motivated by lcoal political issues. But in China there was a difference, because the entire region was politically unified. One decision stopped fleets over the whole of China. That one temporary decision became irreversible, because no shipyards remained to turn out ships that would prove the folly of that temporary decision, and to serve as a focus for rebuilding other shipyards.

Now contrast those events in China with what happened when fleets of exploration began to sail from politically fragmented Europe. Columbus, an Italian by birth, switched his allegiance to the duke of Anjou in France, then to the king of Portugal. When the latter refused his request for ships in which to explore westward, Columbus turned to the duke of Medina-Sedonia, who also refused, then to the count of Medina-Celi, who did likewise, and finally to the king and queen of Spain, who denied Columbus’ first request but eventually granted his renewed appeal. Had Europe been united under any one of the first three rulers, its colonization might’ve been stillborn.

In fact, precisely because Europe was fragmented, Columbus succeeded on his 5th try in persuading one of Europe’s hundreds of princes to sponsor him. Once Spain had thus launhced the European colonization of America, other European states saw the wealth flowing into Spain, and six more joined in colonizing America. The story was the same with Europe’s common, electric lighting, printing, small firearms, and innumerable other innovations: each was at first neglected or opposed in some parts of Europe for idiosyncratic reaosns, but once adopted in one area, it eventually spread to the rest of Europe.

These consequences of Europe’s disunity stand in sharp contrast to those of China’s unity. From time to time the Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas navigation: it abandoned development of an elaborate water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and tech in general after the late 15th century. Those potentially harmful effects of unity have flared up again in modern China, notably during the madness of the 60s and 70s Cultural Revolution, when a decision by one or a few leaders closed the whole country’s school systems for 5 years.

China’s frequent unity and Europe’s frequent disunity both have a long history. The most productive areas of modern China were politically joined for the first time in 221 BCE and have remained so for most of the time since then. China has had only a single writing system from the beginnings of literacy, a single dominant language for a long time, and substantial cultural unity for 2,000 years. In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification.”

“Geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on the evolution of tech. As a result, in the very long run, tech may have developed most rapidly in the regions with moderate connectedness, neither too high nor too low. Tech’s course over the last 1k years in China, Europe, and possibly the Indian subcontinent exemplifies those net effects of high, moderate, and low connectedness, respectively.

Naturally, additional factors contributed to history’s diverse courses in different parts of Eurasia. For instance, the Fertile Crescent, China, and Europe differed in their exposure to the perennial threat of barbarian invasions by horse-mounted nomads of C. Asia. One of those nomad groups (the Mongols) eventually destroyed the ancient irrigation systems of Iran and Iraq, but none of the Asian nomads ever succeeded in establishing themselves in the forests of W. Europe beyond the Hungarian plains. Environmental factors also include the Fertile Crescent’s geographically intermediate location, controlling the trade routes linking China and India to Europe, and China’s more remote location from Eurasia’s other advanced civilizations, making China a gigantic virtual island within a continent. China’s relative isolation is especially relevant to its adoption and then rejection of technologies, so reminiscent of the rejections on Tasmania and other islands.”

“Specific reasons, now lost in the remote past, may have lain behind the Sumerian adoption of a counting system based on 12 instead of 10 (leading to our modern 60-minute hours, 24-hour day, 12-month year, and 360-degree circle), in contrast to the widespread Mesoamerican counting system based on 20 (leading to its calendar using 2 concurrent cycles of 260 named days and a 365-day year).”

“What about the effects of idiosyncratic individual people? A familiar modern example is the narrow failure, on July 20, 1944, of the assassination attempt against Hitler and of a simultaneous uprising in Berlin. Both had been planned by Germans who were convinced that the war couldn’t be won and who wanted to seek peace then, at a time when the eastern front between German and Russian armies still lay mostly within Russia’s borders. Hitler was wounded by a time bomb in a briefcase placed under a conference table; he might’ve been killed if the case had been placed slightly closer to the chair where he was sitting. It’s likely that the modern map of E. Europe and the Cold War’s course would’ve been significantly different if Hitler had indeed been killed and if WWII had ended then.

Even more fateful was a traffic accident in summer 1930, over 2 years before Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, when a car in which he was riding in the ‘death seat’ (right front passenger seat) collided with a heavy trailer truck. The truck braked just in time to avoid running over Hitler’s car and crushing him. Because of the degree to which Hitler’s psychopathology determined Nazi policy and success, the form of an eventual WWII would probably have been quite different if the truck driver had braked one second later.”

Sub-Saharan Africa

“As one travels S in Africa across the Saharan desert and reencounters rain in the Sahel zone just south of the desert, one notices that Sahel rains fall in the summer rather than in the winter. Even if Fertile Crescent crops adapted to winter rain could somehow have crossed the Sahara, they would’ve been difficult to grow in the summer-rain Sahel zone. Instead, we find 2 sets of African crops whose wild ancestors occur just S. of the Sahara, and which are adapted to summer rains and less seasonal variation in day length.”

“Plants whose wild ancestors occur in Ethiopia and were probably domesticated there in the highlands are still grown mainly in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Americans — including Ethiopia’s narcotic chat, it’s banana-like ensete, its oily noog, its finger millet used to brew its national beer, and its tiny-seeded cereal called teff, used to make its national bread. But ancient Ethiopians [also domesticated] the coffee plant. It remained confined to Ethiopia until it caught on in Arabia and then around the world.”

“W. Africans were chewing the caffeine-containing nuts of [coca] as a narcotic, long before the Coca-Cola Company enticed first Americans and then the world to drink a beverage originally laced with its extracts.”

“All of Africa’s indigenous crops — those of the Sahel, Ethiopia, and W. Africa — originated N. of the equator. Not a single African crop originated S. of it. This already gives us a hint why speakers of Niger-Congo languages, stemming from N. of the equator, were able to displace Africa’s equatorial Pygmies and subequatorial Khoisan people.”

“The Bantu didn’t overrun all the Khoisan, who did survive in southern African areas unsuitable for Bantu agriculture. The southernmost Bantu people, the Xhosa, stopped at the Fish River on S. Africa’s S. coast, 500 miles east of Cape Town. It’s not that the Cape of Good Hope itself is too dry for agriculture: it is, after all, the breadbasket of modern S. Africa. Instead, the Cape has a Mediterranean climate of winter rains, in which the Bantu summer-rain crops don’t grow. By 1652, the year the Dutch arrived at Cape Town with their winter-rain crops of Near Eastern origin, the Xhosa still hadn’t spread beyond the Fish River.

That seeming detail of plant geography had enormous implications for politics today. One consequence was that, once S. African whites had quickly killed or infected or driven off the Cape’s Khoisan population, whites could claim correctly that they’d occupied the Cape before the Bantu and thus had prior rights to it. That claim needn’t be taken seriously, since the prior rights of the Cape Khoisan didn’t inhibit whites from dispossessing them. The much heavier consequence was that the Dutch settlers in 1652 had to contend only with a sparse population of Khoisan herders, not with a dense population of steel-equipped Bantu farmers. When whites finally spread E. to encounter the Xhosa at the Fish River in 1702, a period of desperate fighting began. Even though Europeans by then could supply troops from their secure base at the Cape, it took 9 wars and 175 years for their armies, advancing at an average rate of less than 1 mile per year, to subdue the Xhosa. How could whites have succeeded in establishing themselves at the Cape at all, if those first few arriving Dutch ships had faced such fierce resistance?”

“Unlike the Netherlands, Zambia doesn’t have to buy any oil or coal to generate energy. Instead, all of Zambia’s energy is hydroelectric, generated by huge dams across the Zambezi River. Those dams generate so much electricity that Zambia even has a surplus to sell to neighboring countries. Unlike the Netherlands, Zambia is very rich in minerals, especially copper. The climate in Zambia is warm, so Zambian farmers can grow several crops per year, instead of just 1 crop as in the Netherlands. Unlike most other African countries, Zambia is peaceful, stable, and democratic. Its tribes don’t fight with each other. It has never had a civil war, nor any war with its neighbors. Unlike the Netherlands, Zambia has never been invaded by a neighbor. It holds free elections. Zambians work hard and value education.”