Guns Germs And Steel

I’ve never been a big history fan. Too many names and dates to memorize. But now, free from the pressure of having to learn for the sake of getting good grades and free to pursue the topics that interested me, I thought it would be a good idea to learn a little history. Having grown up in different countries (first Malaysia, then Australia, and now England) with very different backgrounds, I’ve always known about the differences between countries but never given it much thought. Growing up, we were told in school that the Brits got ahead because they had superior technology and that was that. But with that question answered, then the next one is: well why did they have those weapons? The more I thought about this, the more curious I become about why certain countries got ahead.

When I heard about ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ (GG&S) by Jared Diamond and saw some of the quotes, like the one below:

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

I thought that I had finally found the book. The one that would explain why societies saw such different rates of progress, especially in terms of technology. Diamond’s book was not that. It was something better.

Guns, germs, steel, and other factors like them are just proximate causes. They might help explain the outcome of a particular encounter but one is still left with the question as to why the parties of the encounter had different resources at hand. You’re still left with a ‘why?’. If we keep asking ‘why?’, then eventually we can arrive at the ultimate causes. In the past, one explanation I’ve heard is cultural. For example, a particular society was peaceful so they didn’t develop advanced weaponry and lost conflicts against more violent societies. Or another society had a frugal mindset and was less willing to invest in technology and thus fell behind (this is one reason that has been put forth for why China abandoned ship-faring in the 15th century but it’s not the real reason, more on this later). On the face of it, these explanations seem fine but if you think hard about it, it’s still not sufficient. We’re still left wondering why certain societies had these attributes. And in this uncertainty and wondering, racist explanations can sometimes sneak in. Nothing so forward as “race X was better than Y and that’s why this country got ahead”, but maybe ‘culture X was better than Y and that’s why this country got ahead”. If you looked back far enough to when cultures were made up of more homogenized races, it can be tempting to wonder if a particular race did have something special going for them. I think even this sliver of a question is a big enough motivation to search for the true ultimate cause. As Diamond says:

Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.

So what is the ultimate cause that Diamond posits? Geography!

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.

This is quite a bold answer but one that Diamond backs up with a lot of compelling evidence. GG&S is a great book and I highly recommend reading it. I’m surprised by how many times the contents of the book have come in handy in casual conversation. If you’re still on the fence about committing the time to read GG&S, you can get a little taster of the book by reading my summary.

What can you expect out of this summary?

I’m trying to summarize some of Diamond’s key arguments. He covers a swathe of information and goes into great detail by presenting plenty of case studies and seeing how well the data fits competing historical hypotheses. He does this when explaining how certain societies got ahead (what I was primarily interested in) and other tangential topics such as estimating when humans arrived at certain locations and the specific routes through which certain crops spread (which I was less interested in). For this summary, I’m focusing on the chain of causation between geography and how societies got ahead which can be built with the following links:

1. Some plants and animals lent themselves better to domestication.
2. Some geographical regions had more of these easier plants and animals.
3. Domesticating plants and animals led to more calories per acre.
4. More calories per acre allowed for denser populations.
5. Denser populations allowed more complex societies to develop.
6. These more complex societies gained an edge over other societies.

So without further ado, let’s get into it!

Being easier to domesticate

Different areas of the globe began with different wild plants and animals as candidates for domestication. Before we can explore how important domestication was for the progression of a society, it’s important we define domestication. Diamond defines plant domestication as:

… growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.

I interpret the phrase ‘growing’ here to also include the process of picking and nurturing certain plants over others. Why would an early human pick a certain plant over another to grow? Well, there were certain characteristics that made these chosen plants more alluring than others, such as:

• Fruit size: The bigger the better! If you had to expend energy wading through bushes and fending off insects, you’re better off doing it for a bigger yield. This is one of the reasons why some of our domesticated plants (e.g. berries) are so much bigger than their wild counterparts. We kept choosing bigger and bigger plants and in doing so selected for genes with large fruits.
• Fleshiness: It’s all well and good to grab a large fruit but what’s the point if it’s mostly seeds? A lot of wild plants had very little fruit around their seeds but early farmers focused on the plants with a higher flesh to seed ratio and thus we now have lots of plants with really small seeds. Modern agricultural scientists have even taken this idea to the extreme: seedless plants! This is quite a curious turn of events as early plants had flesh to draw in animals and these animals would in turn ‘help’ the plants spread by moving the seed. So fruit flesh which started of as just a means to an end has become the end in itself!
• Fiber length: While fruit size and fleshiness are what we look out for in food crops, humans have used crops for lots of other purposes. One such example is textiles (e.g. making clothes from cotton) and in these cases, early humans would have chosen crops with longer fibers.

In addition to the characteristics that humans would have explicitly searched for, there were also some implicit characteristics that resulted in certain plants being chosen:

• Ease of planting: If a crop could be planted by just sowing the seed or planting a sapling, early farmers could easily get behind this and develop that crop. Other techniques, such as grafting which was required for apples, required a more developed understanding of agriculture and as such plants requiring these more advanced techniques were not domesticated early on.
• Speed of growth: Plants that grew quickly would obviously be useful to farmers sooner and hence be favoured over slower growing crops. Additionally, with a shorter growth cycle, farmers could go through generations more quickly and amplify the favourable traits they wanted in a shorter period of time.
• Self pollinating: Self-pollinating plants pass their genes directly to their offspring. They did not run the risk of cross-pollinating with other plants and losing whatever favourable genes they had (e.g. fruit size, fleshiness, etc) so farmers could confidently grow these crops and know what to expect.
• Little change required to be converted to crops: For some plants to become crops, all they had to do was become bigger or fleshier. Other plants however needed a drastic change before they could be considered a viable staple. Let me elaborate with an example: wheat. With wild wheat, the seeds grow at the top of the stalk. This stalk shatters when the plant is ripe which drops seeds on the ground where they proceed to germinate. However, there was a mutant gene that prevented the stalk from shattering. Normally, this would be lethal to the plant as without shattering, the seeds are unable to reach the ground and germinate. But when humans entered the mix, these mutant wheat plants were the ones early farmers honed in on as the seeds were still there for the taking. This mutant gene made wheat suitable for domestication. While this was quite a big change in behaviour from wild wheat, it didn’t require a large genetic change. Plants that could mutate easily (i.e. only a few genes needed to change) to become more suitable for domestication would generally stand a better chance of becoming a domesticated crop.

Now that we’ve had a look at some of the factors influencing the ease of domestication of plants, let’s consider animals. Before diving into animal domestication, I think it’s important to highlight the distinction between domestication and taming. For example, consider elephants. They are used as work animals in many parts of Southeast Asia and have even been used for war in the past. But elephants have only ever been tamed, not domesticated. As Diamond explains:

… just wild elephants that were captured and tamed; they were not 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. That is, domestication involves wild animals’ being transformed into something more useful to humans. Truly domesticated animals differ in various ways from their wild ancestors. These differences result from two processes; human selection of those individual animals more useful to humans than other individuals of the same species, and automatic evolutionary responses of animals to the altered forces of natural selection operating in human environments as compared with wild environments.

With that clarification out of the way, let’s proceed!

Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticateble animal is undomesticable in its own way…

Diamond proposes the Anna Karenina principle, after the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Diamond extends the generalization beyond just families:

For most important things … success … requires avoiding many separate possible cases of failure.

So what were the different factors that could cause animal domestication to fail?

• Diet: All animals need food to survive. Some however are less fussy than others. Specifically, herbivores are much easier to deal with than carnivores. To raise a herbivore, you need to ensure that you have a supply of whatever plant it’s inclined to eat. To raise a carnivore however, you need to ensure you have access to whatever meat it subsists on and you might also need access to the crop required to raise this meat. Additionally, because energy conversion from food to fuel for bodies isn’t very efficient, the higher up the food chain an animal is, the more you need to collect of everything below it to raise the animal. Domesticating a carnivore simply requires too much food. This is why the animals we’ve successfully domesticated have been herbivores with a few omnivores in the mix (e.g. dogs).
• Growth rate: If an animal takes too long to grow, this makes it a lot harder to domesticate them. Domestication isn’t about training a wild animal to behave better. It’s about selecting animals with particular traits (often linked to genes) that make them easier to be used by humans. The faster you can go through successive generations, the faster you can select for and amplify these desirable traits. This is one of the reasons herbivores like gorillas (average lifespan of 40 years) and elephants (average lifespan differs for different types but the lower end of the spectrum is around 40 years) haven’t been successfully domesticated. Animals that we have domesticated were ones with shorter lifespans, like sheep which average around 10 years and cows which average around 20 years.
• Problems of captive breeding: Certain animals don’t like to breed in captivity. One interesting example that Diamond covers is cheetahs. In the wild, part of the mating ritual involves a chase across large distances for many days. This seems to be required for the cheetahs to become sexually receptive. Obviously, such a chase cannot happen in a cage. If you can’t breed the animal in captivity, you lose control over the domestication process.
• Nasty disposition: Some animals are just downright mean! While a lot of animals have the potential to hurt and even kill humans, some are more inclined to do so than others. A few examples of animals in this category are the grizzly bear, African water buffalo, and zebra. It would be incredibly difficult to rear a single generation of this animal in an attempt to tame it and this difficulty only compounds when you consider that domestication involves rearing many successive generations of the animal. I’ll explain later why some animals tend to be nastier than others.
• Tendency to panic: When faced with a threat, a lot of herbivores resort to two types of actions. Some will stand their ground and seek protection in a herd (think sheep and goats). Others, will immediately bolt, like deers. This flight reaction doesn’t just cause difficulties in catching the animal. In an enclosure, some of the animals can die of shock or will continue to try and escape, even if it means ramming themselves on the enclosure till they die. If you can’t keep the animal alive, you definitely aren’t going to be able to domesticate it.
• Social structure: The large mammals we’ve domesticated share 3 characteristics in their social structure: they live in herds, the maintain a well-developed dominance hierarchy, and the herds occupy overlapping territory. All these three characteristics make domestication efforts a lot easier. Living in herds makes these animals amenable to being penned up: they’re used to being close together. The hierarchy allows humans to find their spot in the herd (at the top) and they can more easily imprint on the animals. These animals that are used to a hierarchy also more readily submit to having a human in the mix. Lastly, the ability to occupy overlapping territory means that human domesticators don’t have to worry when they mix and match different herds in the same space.

So for an animal to be a suitable candidate for domestication, a lot of factors had to line up just right. As you can imagine, the pool of candidates who met all these criteria was quite small and some areas of the globe had more easy-to-domesticate plants and animals than others.

Domestication is clearly a difficult process. So difficult in fact that some plants and animals resist domestication even till this day. Let’s look at some of these present day failures.

For plants, consider the oak tree and acorns. Till this day, we still haven’t managed to obtain large acorns that don’t taste very bitter. Why is that? Firstly, oak trees take 3-4 years to grown. This long growth period means that the number of years a human has to spend to go through multiple generations of oak trees so that they can select for the genes they want is huge. Secondly, acorns have evolved to be spread by squirrels. Squirrels proliferate acorns far faster than humans do so this made it difficult for humans to select for the kind of oak they wanted. Thirdly, the bitter flavour of acorns is controlled by multiple genes so there is no simple change to transform the oak into a suitable crop.

When it comes to animals, the examples are easier to think of. The safari industry is booming in Africa because many want to see wild animals that have resisted our efforts at domestication. In the next section, I’ll explain why Africa has a disproportionately large share of big wild animals.

I mention these failures because it goes to show that the failure of certain societies to domesticate the plants and animals available to them wasn’t a shortcoming on their end. Even the smartest people today with the latest technology at the their disposal and a repository of knowledge built up over generations still can’t crack the code of certain plants and animals.

Areas that had easier to domesticate plants and animals

Some areas of the globe had more plants and animals that were easier to domesticate. This was primarily due to climate. The Fertile Crescent is one such are that played a huge role in the development of farming. This is the crescent-shaped region in the Middle East. You might know the region better by considering some of the present day countries that have some land within the region: Egypt, Iraq, Cypress, Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey. The Fertile crescent was the site of many blockbuster domesticated plants and animals that are still important to this day such as wheat, barley, sheep, and cows. This area lay within a zone of Mediterranean climate: mild wet winters followed by long, warm to hot, dry summers. The limited period of rainfall meant that the plants that evolved in these regions didn’t have energy to waste on strong, thick barks or fibrous stems or large leaves. Instead they focused the limited energy available on producing large seeds. Additionally, the long summers meant that the seeds had to be tough to survive. This toughness meant that the seeds could be stored for a long period of time after being harvested. Such storage capabilities would have eased the transition from a hunter-gather lifestyle to a sedentary one and domestication was easier in a sedentary setting because there were fewer variables to deal with.

A sedentary lifestyle helped with the domestication process because it was easier to domesticate crops when you were in one location as opposed to being on the move.

While the Fertile Crescent had these advantages, in part due to its Mediterranean climate, this climate does exist elsewhere (e.g. Southwest Australia, California, Chile, South Africa). What was so special about the Fertile Crescent in comparison to the other Mediterranean zones?

• The Fertile Crescent was located in the biggest zone of Mediterranean climate. This bigger zone meant there was a higher diversity of wild plants and animals.
• Aside from the size of the zone, the Fertile Crescent also has a wide range of altitudes and topographies. The diversity in geography meant an increased diversity in availability of wild plants. Early hunter-gatherers had a wider selection to experiment with. Additionally, they could move plants from a higher altitude to a lower one (or vice versa) and potentially introduce the wild plant to a more favourable environment.
• Among the different Mediterranean zones, the Fertile Crescent goes through the biggest changes season to season which favoured annual plants. Annual plants go through their entire growth cycle in under a year. Plants with longer growth cycles such as biennial plants (2 year growth cycle) and perennial plants (more than 2 years for a growth cycle) require more stable climates. Being able to go through multiple generations of a plants over a shorter period of time meant shorter domestication periods.
• A diversity in wild plants supported a diversity of wild animals. Goats, sheep, pigs, and cows were commonly found in different areas of the Fertile Crescent.
• Another advantage of the Fertile Crescent with regards to farming was its unfavourable conditions for hunter-gatherers. A lack of big rivers or a long coastline meant that fishing wasn’t viable. Gazelles used to be plentiful but were overexploited early on. These conditions would have pushed the people in the Fertile Crescent to adopt a farming lifestyle much quicker, out of necessity.

While I’ve only focused on one particular region, I hope it’s clear to see how climate affected the availability of wild plants that were good candidates for domestication. As mentioned above, a variety in plants supports a variety in animals. However, some continents had a couple of unique issues that reduced the options for animal domestication. In Africa, humans and animals evolved alongside each other for much longer than anywhere else in the world. This meant that the native animals in Africa were better suited to defending themselves against humans. Whether this meant increased aggression or increased flight abilities, both of these are factors that break domestication efforts as discussed earlier. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Americas and Australia. Humans got to these continents far later than they did other locations. As a result, animals that evolved on these continents didn’t have much to fear from humans and didn’t evolve good defenses against them. When humans arrived on these continents, they quickly hunted many species to extinction (e.g. dodo, moas in Australia, mammoths in America) as they made for easy prey. This idea that the mass extinctions of animals in the Americas and Australia was due to the arrival of humans is known as the overkill hypothesis. The situation across the continents reminds me of Goldilocks. In the Americas and Australia, we have a mama bear situation, too easy and too soft, leaving them unprepared for the arrivals of humans. And in Africa, the animals evolved in a papa bear situation, surviving humans for a very long time but ultimately becoming too difficult to domesticate. Eurasia on the other hand had a nice middle ground, the baby bear situation, neither too soft or too hard. The animals here could resist being hunted to extinction without becoming too difficult to domesticate.

Domesticating plants and animals led to more calories per acre

Imagine you had an acre of wild land. Most of the native plants and animals on this wild land are unlikely to be useful to you. Perhaps some shrub and insects; low calories, low proteins. Then you bring over some wild plant that looks more promising and you plant it. You’ve now increased the amount of calories your acre can produce. Over a few generations of this plant, you keep replanting more productive specimens and the number of calories goes up even more. Now perhaps you have enough calories to start supporting some livestock. At first, you only have some wild animals (perhaps you capture and pen them) but this is still a lot better than whatever animals that land might have started out with. And while you could roam to hunt and potentially find some promising game, finding those calories is a big if. So you have more reliable sources of protein compared to wild game. More calories again. Again with time, you can start domesticating these animals and selecting promising traits, perhaps increasing docility and meat. Additionally, you can start getting other products from them instead of just the meat from slaughtering: milk and eggs. So aside from having a consistent protein source through their meat (which is a one-off gain upon slaughtering), you can gain even more calories over a sustained period of time. Your domesticated plants and animals have independently increased the available calories from your land. However, they can interact in two specific ways to further increase the gain. First, animal manure can be used to fertilize the soil and increase the productivity of the soil. Second, animals can be used to plow the land and open up patches that were previously not suitable for planting crops. So over time, at various stages of the domestication process and through lots of side effects, you could increase the yield of the land, again and again.

Now obviously this is a gross oversimplification of the process of domestication but it captures the gist of it. One of the important distinctions between this simplification and reality is the time scale. In reality, plants and animals would require many generations to be properly domesticated and this in turn might require many generations of humans to nurture this domestication. So it’s definitely not the case that one person could decide to make the switch from hunting and gathering to domestication and suddenly see a huge improvement in their life (I’ll talk more about the transition later on). But over generations? That’s how society slowly evolved.

More calories per acre allowed for denser populations.

With more food, you can feed more mouths. But an increase in calories per acre didn’t just increase population density through this obvious connection. As that patch of land started becoming more productive, people would then have increasing incentives to move from hunting and gathering to farming which means that they would be shifting from a lifestyle that was on the move to one that was more sedentary. Staying in the same location could further increase population density through two means. Firstly, such a lifestyle was more conducive to a shortened birth interval. With early tribes constantly on the move, they could only support so many children at any given time. Being in one spot meant it was easier to take care of children and this led to more children. Secondly, being in one location also meant that it was easier to store food and look after your stored food. A sedentary lifestyle thus led to more available food which in turn led to a denser population.

While it’s quite straightforward how an increase in farming led to an increase in population density, one surprising fact that I learned from GG&S was that an increase in population density also led to an increase in farming! How did this happen? Population densities were already on the rise due to other factors. One example is that the amount of food obtained from wild sources increased as the tools for hunting and gathering improved. As we already know, this increase in food would lead to a higher population. But as the population rose, so did the food requirements. To meet the rising food requirements, more people would have shifted to farming as it provides more calories per acre. So what we have here is an autocatalytic process, a process that catalyzes itself and thus improves at faster rates over time.

An aside on the shift from hunting and gathering to farming

Now in hindsight, it seems that farming is the way to go and much better than hunting and gathering. But to those who had never experienced farming or seen its effects first-hand, they couldn’t have known any better. Even if a neighboring society started farming, it might not have been immediately obvious, or even rewarding to follow suite. When trying to view the transition to farming from the perspective of these early societies, it’s important to realize that farming was a developing strategy and had to compete against hunting and gathering. Looking back now, we can seen which strategy eventually won out but what were the factors that shifted hunter-gatherers towards becoming farmers? I’ve briefly touched on some of these factors before but here are the 5 factors Diamond notes:

1. The decline in the availability of wild food. As humans grew more populous and better at hunting, we slowly but surely chipped away at the populations of wild animals that used to be viable food options.
2. A increase in the availability of domesticable wild plants. Aside from human intervention, climate change during certain periods led to an increase of areas with wild cereals.
3. The cumulative development of food production technology. This included technologies to collect, process, and store food. As this technology improved, food production began to look more appealing.
4. As population density increased, the pressure for more calories increased and the pressure to adopt food production increased.
5. The final factor affecting the adoption of food production came into play at boundaries between societies that had adopted food production and those that hadn’t. Societies with food production generally had higher populations (we’ll look at why later) and could displace smaller hunter-gatherer societies by sheer numbers. Later we’ll also look at the other advantages that arose from food production and further eased this displacement.

Denser populations allowed more complex societies to develop.

I think it’s worth first defining what we mean by complex. I’ve often heard the argument that smaller, older societies, say even groups as small as nomadic tribes, were no less complex or less advanced than today’s biggest states, they were just different. I disagree. I define complexity by the number of tasks a society is able to accomplish. Alfred North Whitehead, an English mathematician and philosopher once said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them”. Now while this was in the context of mathematics, I think it can be generalized to a wider context. The more advanced a society, the larger the number of important tasks it can carry out without thinking about it. Think of all the things we can do today without a second thought.

We can eat food from a diverse range of cuisines thanks to advances in agriculture and culinary science. Before we even have the chance to fall ill, medical practices can provide vaccinations thereby prolonging our lives before they could even be endangered. If we needed to find any esoteric knowledge, we are just a couple of clicks away from the largest information repository every built thanks to the internet. So if we agree with the definition proposed in the paragraph above, some societies are in fact more complex than others.

As population density arose, new roles appeared in societies for people to fill. Most members of hunter-gatherer societies spent the bulk of their time (surprise, surprise) hunting and gathering because these methods of obtaining food were not very efficient. As farming started to gain traction, a single individual (or perhaps a family) could provide enough food to sustain more than just themselves. This in turn freed others to explore different activities that would have later evolved into new roles. For example, with less time spent actively hunting, hunters would have had more time working on their tools. Generations on, a particular family might then consist of artisans who specialized in developing such tools.

As I mentioned in the previous section, the relationship between food production and population density was an autocatalytic one. Here I’d like to introduce another autocatalytic process: the relationship between food production and societal complexity.

Food production contributed to societal complexity in (at least) the following ways:

• Food production surplus can be stored to permit economic specialization and social stratification (e.g. politicians, scribes, craftpeople).
• Providing seasonally-pulsed inputs of labor. When the harvest has been stored, the farmers’ labor can be used by the centralized political authority for other work (e.g. public works or war).
• Food production enables sedentary living which is a prerequisite for accumulating lots of possessions (thus creating a demand for such possessions and artisans who could make them), developing advanced technology and elaborate crafts, and constructing public works.

And on the flip side here are some ways in which societal complexity lead to a rise in food production:

• Complex societies with centralized decision making could organize public works such as irrigation systems which would result in more productive crops.
• Merchants and governments could engage in long distance trade to directly obtain more food (perhaps even more productive crops compared to what the region natively had to offer) and better tools for food production (e.g. metals for better agricultural tools)
• Different groups of food specialists could interact with each other to increase their effectiveness. For example, herders and their animals could be fed with cereal from farmers and in exchange, farmers could use the herder’s animals for plowing.

These more complex societies gained an edge over other societies.

So having briefly looked at the relationships between food production, population density, and societal complexity, it’s time to dive deeper into some of the specific roles that developed and how this in turn led to more complex societies gaining an edge over their less advanced counterparts. Diamond uses a simple classification for societies with 4 categories: band, tribe, chiefdom and state. Now obviously such coarse classification will miss some fine detail but these categories capture the salient differences between different societies. Additionally, like a lot of classifications in the real world, a particular society may not neatly fit into one category and may instead be something in between. However, a society that’s somewhere between being a band and a tribe and a society that is clearly a band would fare just as poorly when going up against a state so this coarse categorization will work for our purposes.

Bands are the smallest of societies. They’re normally an extended family and number on the order of dozens of peoples. Bands are nomadic because they have to move where the food is and most band members participate in foraging for food. A lack of resources and technology mean that bands lack the tools to support more intensive food production (which hinders the addition of new members) and lack medical care (which hinders the care of existing members). Both these factors mean that band numbers stay quite low.

The next step up from a band is a tribe. Tribes tend to be larger (on the order of hundreds of members, many of whom are related to each other) and also often have fixed settlements. Being in a fixed settlement means that tribes can start to explore food production and the benefits that come from it. Aside from these differences, tribes are otherwise very similar to bands.

We move up from a tribe to a chiefdom. Chiefdoms order on the thousands of members and a lot of the members are not directly related to each other. So while bands and tribes avoided conflict because you’d likely be fighting with your family, this reason for avoidance does not necessarily exist in chiefdoms. Instead, to avoid strangers from harming each other, chiefdoms have a chief who holds the right to use force. Chiefs are also responsible for decision making and information spread (deciding who should know what). Unlike modern day offices, chiefs take on general responsibility and oversee a wide range of projects (e.g. extracting tribute, public works, organizing labor). In chiefdoms, food producers deliver food to the chief who then decides how to hand it out. Some of this food goes to specialists who in turn create products to help other producers or create luxury goods for the chief. This redistributive economy is one of the distinguishing factors between chiefdoms compared to bands and tribes. Where bands and tribes operate solely on a reciprocal economy (A gives B a gift with the expectation that B will return the favour some day), in chiefdoms, goods go directly to the chief who then decides how to dole them out. How goods are redistributed vary greatly between different chiefdoms. In some, chiefs might choose to give most of the goods back to the people (e.g. ensuring members are well-fed during a famine, developing better agricultural systems) whereas other chiefs might keep most of the goods for themselves (e.g. lavish tombs). In chiefdoms, we also see the beginnings of institutionalized religion. While earlier societies hold beliefs about the supernatural, the difference is that these beliefs aren’t used to justify actions by a centralized authority. In chiefdoms, the chief or priests hold the most power within the religion and and use this power to provide justifications for the chief’s actions. Aside from the obvious benefits this has for the ruling class, religion also helps chiefdoms in two ways. First, a shared religion could bond people who weren’t related and thus reduce conflict. Second, religion provides a motive for its members to sacrifice their lives on behalf of others.

Finally, we have states. This is the form of society that we are most familiar with today. Right now, the majority of people alive have only ever experienced this form of society. While it’s obvious that states would have larger sizes, it’s astonishing just how large they’ve got. Chiefdoms number in the thousands but these days we have a couple of states in the billions. Within states, control is a lot more centralized and redistribution happens much more extensively. Reliance on this centralized authority and the dependence on specialists is much heavier. Even farmers, whom we’ve all depended on for so long, are now no longer self sufficient. They depend on other specialists for enhanced seeds and effective farming equipment. Another very important difference with states is that literacy is a lot more widespread. Excluding chiefdoms on the verge of statehoods, bands, tribes, and smaller chiefdoms were mostly illiterate. Literacy has helped states in many ways. One example is that conflict resolution is a more straightforward and standardized thanks to written laws. Literacy also allows specialists to effectively codify their knowledge and share it with future generations. As a society, we can now remember more than we ever have before. Finally, there’s religion. The separation of church and state is a relatively new concept in the history of states and even today, there are some states that still tightly couple religion and governance. When we compare religion as used by states compared to their precursors, chiefdoms, the effects are similar (bonding the members internally and uniting them against a common enemy if need be), only a lot more intense.

Going back to our earlier definition of complexity, we can see how these different societies built on their predecessors, growing with regards to the number of tasks they could carry out, and thus increasing in complexity. With that in mind, let’s look at how more complex societies had better access to guns, germs, and steel.

First let’s consider germs. Unlike guns and steel, leveraging germs to dominate another society is normally not a conscious effort and neither is developing a resistance to germs. A resistance to germs is something that would have happened gradually, across many generations. A certain generation might have encountered a type of germ and those who had resistances to it would have passed their genes on. Natural selection doesn’t pick sides though so while it would have helped humans develop a resistance against germs, it would have also resulted in new germs that were better adapted to these new resistances. The battle would then play out in new generations and new resistances would have to be developed for humans to survive. What kind of scenario would have presented an opportunity for humans to be exposed to germs for the prolonged period of time required for robust resistances? A sedentary, farming lifestyle. A lot of germs jump from animals to humans so the close proximity between the two as part of a farming lifestyle would have seen humans repeatedly exposed to different germs. So people in societies with farming would have had a bigger advantage than those who didn’t. Additionally the more intense the farming (i.e the more types of animals were being farmed and the greater the number of these animals) and the denser the population, the more opportunities there would have been to encounter a wider variety of germs and develop more resistances. So societies that were further along the farming development would have likely had better resistances.

Aside from having better resistances, members of more advanced societies often acted carriers for diseases. This often had unintentional but beneficial consequences for the advanced society. One of the case studies Diamond presents is the Massacre of Cajamarca in which a small Spanish force wiped out a much larger Incan one. While the outcome of the battle itself came down to a difference in military technology (the Spanish had cavalry, cannons, and guns), Diamond posits some interesting questions as to how those particular forces arrived there and the state they were in. The Incan ruler had just won a civil war with his half brother Huascar. This civil war came about because an epidemic of smallpox, brought over by Spanish settlers, killed the previous Incan emperor, most of his court, and the designated heir. As Diamond notes:

If it had not been for the epidemic, the Spaniards would have faced a united empire.

Cases of germs doing the dirty work for an invading force are numerous:

Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population.

95%! Germs reduced the number of people who could resist an invading force and as we saw with the Massacre of Cajamarca, also caused a lot of civil unrest and disunity, further weakening the opposition facing the invading force.

Now let’s consider guns and steel. It’s straightforward to see how guns helped: better weaponry would give you a leg up over your enemy. Societies that brought a knife to a gunfight never stood a chance. But to broaden the discussion, I’d like to group both these factors, guns and steel, under the umbrella factor of technology. Societies with more advanced technology had an upper hand compared to those that didn’t. What were the prerequisites to having advanced technology? Two inputs were required: specialists who could develop the technology and mastery of earlier technology. As we covered earlier, any type of specialization of roles required that basic needs such as food, could be provided by a few members of society to allow other members to pursue different activities, such as developing technology.

So that’s the first input, specialists. What about the second, mastery of earlier technology? Mastering advanced technology often involved mastering simpler ones first and sometimes combining different simpler technologies to create something new. Every technological achievement paved the way for future developments. So to access advanced technology, a society needed to already be developing technology for some time. One great example of a technology that required mastery and combination of simpler technologies is the printing press. Specifically, Diamond lists 6 technological advances that came together in the creation of the Gutenberg’s printing press:

• Paper (developed in China made it’s way to Europe)
• Movable type (also developed in China and made it’s way to Europe)
• Metallurgy (different types of metals and alloys were required for different parts of the press)
• Presses (the press was derived from the screw press used in wine and olive oil making)
• Inks (an improved design based on existing inks)
• Scripts (the alphabet had evolving and developing for millenia. Additionally, using latin characters meant that only a few letter forms had to be cast compared to a more complex writing system like Chinese writing)

This required mastery and interplay between technologies means that technological development is yet another autocatalytic process:

Technology’s history exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process: that is, one that speeds up at a rate that increases with time, because the process catalyzes itself.

So we know how germs and technology helped societies get ahead. Diamond clearly placed a lot of weight on these factors as evidenced by the title of his book. However, he also views government and religion as equally important proximate factors:

The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history’s broadest pattern.

In the previous section, I briefly discussed how the government and religion played a role. Let’s now consider some concrete examples. I don’t think it’s too difficult to recall the ways in which religion has been used to help justify actions that would otherwise be considered reprehensible. Whether it’s something as old as the crusades or modern day religious terrorists, a brief look at history confirms this. What was new to me though was learning that this was a relatively new occurrence. As Diamond says:

…official religions and patriotic fervour of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally. … Such sentiments are unthinkable in bands and tribes. … Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years.

Diamond elaborates that in accounts he has heard of bands and tribes, they would never carry out military conduct that carried an accepted risk of being killed. While this is a sensible instinct for self-preservation, it severely limited the number and type of military operations that a society could carry out. Having professional soldiers who were willing to die for god and/or country made states and chiefdoms very dangerous.

When it comes to government, one of the most important aspects was the centralized decision making. Recall how the redistributive economy works. Resources flow towards the government and then the government decides how to allocate it. By pooling together these resources, governments were able to carry out important public works that would not have been feasible on a smaller scale. Early examples would have been better irrigation systems for farming. This enabled farmers to be more productive and as we saw earlier, more food leads to a higher population density which in turn allows more for complex societies. Another example of a project that would have benefited the public is sanitation systems. By introducing this, governments could reduce the number of people who would fall ill and die due to diseases thus maintaining high population densities and the benefits that arose from that. While these projects would have been massive undertakings, modern day states (the largest they’ve ever been) carry out extremely ambitious projects. Consider ‘moonshot’ projects, specifically the Manhattan project and the moon landing. Both these projects were gargantuan undertakings that required huge investments of time, money, and people and also needed strict organization to keep the projects on track and prevent information from leaking to those who would have sought to undermine these projects. While we often think of today’s governments as too bureaucratic and slow at progression, when they put their mind to it, modern day states can accomplish feats that no other body could.

Axis Orientation

So far, we’ve discussed the chain of causation between ultimate causes (availability of plants and animals) and proximate causes (guns, germs, steel, government, and religion) and how societies with the latter were able to overcome those without.

Another topic that Diamond talks about in his book at some length (he dedicated a whole chapter to it!) is axis orientation. For some continents, axis orientation helped accelerate the spread of crops, livestock, and ideas while on others, it acted to dampen the rate of spread.

Eurasia is primarily east-west orientated (meaning the land mass is larger along the east-west axis than the north-south one) whereas North and South America, and Africa are north-south orientated (here the land mass is larger along the north-south axis than the east-west one). Regardless of continent, climate stays relatively similar along the east-west axis, assuming no drastic changes in altitude. The length of days are also the same as is the seasonal variation. These two aspects of climate are extremely important in determining how plants developed:

But the germination, growth, and disease resistance of plants are adapted to precisely those feature of climate. Seasonal changes of day length, temperature, and rainfall constitute signals that stimulate seeds to germinate, seedlings to grow, and mature plants to develop flowers, seeds an, and fruit. Each plant population becomes genetically programmed, through natural selection, to respond appropriately to signal of the seasonal regime under which it has evolved… Woe betide the plant whose genetic program is mismatched to the latitude of the field in which it is planted!

So for North and South America, and Africa, the north-south major axis would have hampered the spread of any developed crops. But for areas like the Fertile Crescent, developed crops could easily be exported to neighbouring societies. This was crucial in enabling development in Europe as societies could bypass the large amount of time it might have taken to domesticate their native crops and instead import productive crops from the Fertile Crescent. However, the benefits were not just one sided and the exporting society also reaped rewards. Having goods to trade (e.g. productive crops), was a prerequisite to engaging in trade. The trade engagements directly benefited both parties and there were also some beneficial side-effects as such engagements helped pushed and facilitate the development of other technology. One such example would have been early wheels, which were used for transporting agricultural goods. Aside from these developments, Diamond also notes:

In general, societies that engaged in intense exchange of crops, livestock and technologies related to food production were more likely to become involved in other exchanges as well.

Diamond’s exposition on axis orientation was enlightening. It’s a topic I had never though much about before but in hindsight, it seems so obvious. A favourable axis orientations compounded other gains, extending the lead of select societies.

Fall

So far, I’ve described how Eurasia was able to advance as quickly as they did. An interesting question though is why did countries in Europe specifically, come to dominate other societies? What happened to the nations of the Fertile Crescent and some further east, for example China, which used to have huge political influence and many advanced technologies? We’ve already seen some of the issues with the Americas, Africa, and Australia. What’s surprising however is that having a geography that was too comfortable also caused issues.

One area that had quite a good starting point was China. There are long east-west rivers which would have supported crop diffusion and along the north-south axis, there weren’t as many barriers as other areas: the north-south distance wasn’t very large, there wasn’t a huge dessert like Africa or Norther Mexico, nor was there a narrow isthmus like Central America. Indeed, archaeologists have found evidence of at least two independent centers of origins of food production (one in the north and the other in the south). Many domesticates spread from China to the West such as soybeans, citrus fruit, tea, peaches, pigs, chicken, ducks. Later on, the broad east-west expanse and relatively gentle terrain would make it easier to build canals connecting the river in the north and the one in the south, facilitating north-south exchanges. We see that these geographic features contributed to early culture and political unification. Such unification saw the development of lot of technology such as cast-iron production, paper, gunpowder, and the compass. Alongside the compass, China also led the world in ship navigation. They used to have an extremely impressive navy. Their famous treasure ships made incredible voyages across the globe: they were routinely sailing to Africa and back decades before Columbus was even born! What happened?

In the late 15th century, China abandoned sea-faring. At the time, there were conflicting factions within the court: the eunuchs were pro-expansionist (admiral Zheng He who led the famous treasure ships’ voyages came from such a background) and the civil servants thought that the voyages were frivolous and a waste of resources. While these voyages did consume many resources, it’s also the case that these voyages expanded Chinese influence and opened up a lot of trading opportunities. And therein lies the more likely motivation behind the civil servants. With an increase in trading opportunities, the merchant class was on the rise. The civil servants felt threatened by this growing power and thus pushed to abandon ship-faring. Due to the extreme political unity of China, this one bad decision could be enacted and enforced throughout the country. The government even went as far as ordering the ships and shipyards destroyed. This action would handicap China for decades to come as China wasn’t just putting a pause on ship-faring but getting rid of essential knowledge and resources that would be required to build ships in the future.

Now contrast that with what happened in Europe with Columbus:

Christopher 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.

Talk about persistence! And more importantly, opportunity. Columbus had different options to pursue in Europe due to its fragmented nature. If he was in China instead, no one could have supported him due to the decisions made at the top. As Diamond goes on to say:

Had Europe been united under any one of the first three rulers, its colonization of the Americas might have been stillborn. In fact, precisely because Europe was fragmented, Columbus succeeded on his fifth try in persuading one of Europe’s hundreds of princes to support him.

Once the other nations in Europe saw the wealth Spain was gaining due to its colonization efforts, they began to follow suit. This is just one example out of many in which a particular idea may not have worked out or got much support the first time but after one nation successfully executed it, the others followed suite.

So that’s how China fell behind. What about the Fertile Crescent? A clue to the answer lies in the disconnect between the name of the region, the ‘Fertile Crescent’, and the reality of the geography we see in modern times. While we now think of the region as mostly desert, it was once covered in forests. Humans in the region took their good fortune and ran with it. The rate of development in the Fertile Crescent outpaced the rate of renewal. The environment was too fragile to support the rapid development and the Fertile Crescent essentially committed what Diamond calls ‘ecological suicide.’ Europe was able to escape this fate simply because there was higher rainfall. Additionally, Europe was able to import productive crops and useful technologies from the Fertile Crescent so any starting point disadvantage it may have had compared to the Fertile Crescent was evened out.

In seeing how the Fertile Crescent and China fell behind, we definitely have an important lesson to learn:

“The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy.”

Conclusion

Guns, Germs, and Steel provides a lot of illumination into why different societies progressed at different rates. Personally, I found some sections in the book too-detailed and dry (there was a lot on different types of grain) while other sections could have benefited from more detail (for example, more information on the fall of the Fertile Crescent and China would have been nice and more detail on how certain countries in Europe pulled ahead of the rest). With that said, I still highly recommend reading this incredible work. I now feel a lot more confident in my understanding of the progress of different societies and how ultimately it wasn’t race that enabled or handicapped a society but geography that determined where societies ended up.