You really do need to read the books before you can criticize them. He’s not talking about what we would call cultural diffusion, but about the spread of viable plant and animal species, which happened across an extremely broad swath of Eurasia, but not across America – there’s not much that got carried all the way from Atlantic to Pacific coasts. Besides which, Duiamond’s point is that geographical barriers – especially temperature differences and lengths of growing season – prevented species of plants and animals from spreading across the Americas because it would have to go north and south across those boundaries. In Eurasia yoyu could spread wheat, rye, barley, and others east and west because the conditions were similar enough.
It was mainly remarkable because it represented one of the first and most broad synthesises of a number of very different fields which had all been quietly bubbling away with bits of data that would suggest but not prove his ultimate thesis. Also, at the time, he raised a number of hypothesises that were either a) well accepted by academics but not widely known by the general public or b) still controversial between different groups of academica but supported by enough evidence to seem credible. It’s a testament to the popularity of his book that such views are rendered patently obvious by the public at large.
Some specific examples of claims he made that were reasonably controversial are:
- The arrival of Europeans in North America killed somewhere between 90 and 98% of Native Americans.
- The cause of the great megafauna extinction of Australia and North America was due to humans hunting them. This is still debated by some academics but I think the general consensus was that he was correct. Because humans moved into NA/Australia relatively late, they had developed reasonably sophisticated hunting techniques which the local wildlife were completely unfamiliar with. Animals living in europe had already evolved a fear of humans which saved them from extinction.
- The polynesian islands provides a reasonably controlled dataset to test many hypothesises on human culture and show a great deal of enviromental determinism. This was later expanded on in Collapse and still remains controversial, even then.
In the first episode, Diamond explained that the climate changed from the fertile conditions that gave the area the head start and that the longer period of time cultivating poorer land drained it of being capable of supporting large populations.
It’s just a tv show. The questions are simplified and the answers are even more simplified. I think it does a fairly good job of presenting a straightforward narrative of the type that imparts information without confusion.
But it’s a laughably light takeoff from the book. And even the book has sparked a huge scholarly debate over Diamond’s methods and conclusions. Remember that while Diamond is a real scientist, in these fields he’s no more than a popular science writer using other people’s research. He’s chosen up sides on scientific controversies he doesn’t know much about and I believe he choose the wrong side at times. You have to treat it like a John Gribbin book on cosmology - no matter how good the book is or much much you think you understand after you read it, real science is something else altogether and no popular science book is a substitute for primary research.
Like the others have said, if all you’ve seen is the tv show, you don’t have a case against Diamond.
I enjoyed the book - it told me a lot about the history of aisa and brought together different strands of other stuff I already knew. But … I found his style hard work, I know that you have to lay out your theories in a certain way for academia but his constant recapping/restating annoyed me. Of course now that I know it’s been made into a TV series & he needs a little opener for each episode it makes more sense 
Ahem. I may be a large member of the public but I like to think my education and reading puts me on a different plane in these matters than “the public at large.”
Ninety-eight percent?!?!? Where the hell did he get THAT number? Reasonable estimates are closer to 80-90%. See why I can’t read his book? I’ll just get pissed off.
Weeeeellll, that’s an orful lot of large animals. Not saying folks weren’t a contributory factor, and we must remember there were quite a few more people here in 1400 than in 1700, but I’m thinking an epidemic might have something to do with it, too. After all, the bison weren’t wiped out, too.
One word for you, my friend: Corn. Grown from Chile in the south to Illinois and Nebraska in the north and in some mighty different conditions, from desert to slashed and burned jungle. Diamond is clearly full of it there.
This would be more convincing if you had read Diamond’s comments on corn. Wheat spread throughout Eurasia very rapidly. Corn’s spread in the Americas was painstakingly slow because different variants of it were needed as it moved north and south, and those took time to be developed from the original strains.
Heck, even wheat needs different varieties for optimal production in climes as similar as those of Kansas and Saskatchewan. Why do you think it’s all spring wheat up here, and all winter wheat down there? Spring wheat would shrivel and dry up before producing a decent head in Kansas, and winter wheat would as often as not winter-kill in Saskatchewan (though fall rye for some reason does really well). Now imagine yourself as a stone age subsistence farmer, and tell me how long it will take you to selectively breed Kansas wheat into a viable crop for Saskatchewan.
You say 80-90, he says 90-98, and you get pissed off? Geez, start drinking decaf. Your estimated range and his actually overlap.
Sure, now it’s widespread. In pre-Columbian times, though, the native Americans didn’t engage in nearly enough trade and travel to spread useful crops (and diseases) across the continents. Or so Diamond contends.
No, I read the book, and have only seen one episode of the TV show. I was underwhelmed by the book.
Haven’t read the book. My only comment is if you had a drinking game where you took a drink every time the narrator said ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, you’d be drunk in thirty minutes. I got sick of hearing the phrase and changed the channel.
I did, actually. My point was that it’s not at all surprising to me that, say, people on Eurasia would end up more “advanced” than people on Borneo. That’s a pretty obvious conclusion, one which I don’t need to fancy pants book to come to. The interesting thing about GG&S was that it fleshed that idea out a TON, added many additional details (for instance, the “horizontal continent good, vertical continent bad” idea, a lot of stuff about domesticatable species, etc.), but did not at ALL (as far as I can recall) address India/China vs. Western Europe.
factoid:
Corn, unlike wheat, needs human help to germanate.
Brian
Actually, in the book, it does talk about China vs. Europe. It say that China had the misfortune to dominate the area(with no empire of comparable power in competition), causing it to stagnate. In Europe, on the other hand, because you had several nations of similar size and power, no one nation could ever conquer the rest, so you had constant competition.
Diamond also gives his theory on why China was the only dominant force over the landmass, rather than the many throughout Europe. He presents two maps, one of Europe, and one of China. He claims that because Europe has many peninsulas and otherwise isolated locations, different cultures formed and started competing against each other. He goes on to say that in China, the landmass was shaped in such a way that there would be a more homogenized culture, and less competition for the land in the long run.
I think that his explanations are much more logical in the beginning of the book (ie. the explanations that are very obvious) than at the end. His geographic explanations do little to explain the “ultimate factors” of more recent history.
What crummy distribution. The wheel was invented in Central America, but without any big animals, they didn’t have anything to hitch a plow to, while in South America they had the animals, but no wheel.
Yeah. I personally thought that this part of the book was relatively weak, but I think the underlying question is misguided. The forces Diamond is talking about operate on average and over the long haul. Since China has been “ahead” of Europe as often as not over the past couple millenia, it doesn’t make much sense to me to even ask “Why Europe and not China?” since half the time the question would have been “Why China and not Europe?” Anyways, China and Europe have had enough contact with one another throughout history (part of that whole east-west orientation thing) that key developments have always spread from one to the other. It’s just that some recent developments (industrial revolution, etc) have had a very large and rapid impact that it gives the appearance of a greater difference between Europe and China than there really is if looking at things on a historical scale.
Wrong way around. People originated in Africa and migrated to the Americas from Asia. Horses and camels evolved in the Americas and migrated to Asia.
Diamond did address that. In brief his hypothesis is that the properity of the fertile crescent was almost exclusively built on floodplain cultivation. The rest of the region has mostly shallow, fragile soils with limited rainfall. The area could only ever support a few larger concentrated population centres on the best floodplains. Those population centres became essentially city states that controlled the surrounding subsistence farmers and grazers. Even though the floodplain states were often forged into empires the civilisations were always entirely dependent on the floodplains. Being so concentrated made them extremely vulnerable to military overthrow, disease and natural disaster. In contrast when Europe finally managed to get agricutural civilisations they were dispersed. Almost every square mile could support a self-sustaining kingdom. That made military overthrow of systems extremely difficult and prolonged forcing cultural/technological integration.
As a result when the Romans conquered the region that had been Babylon/Medo-Persia etc. they destroyed the culture entirely by controlling the floodplain cities. In contrast when several waves of people invaded Rome the capital and culture simply dispersed.
I can’t see any flaw in that reasoning nor can I see how Diamond glossed over it. Floodplain cultivation was ideal for forcing the adoption of agriculture and civilisation, but once it was a perfected lifestyle the dispersed agriculture allowed by fertile and wet European conditions gave it a huge advantage. Thus the fertile crescent dominated in the early stages but wained rapidly due to its specific vulnerabilities as Europe took off.
Diamond doesn’t say that though.
Whether an area becomes a great power base doesn’t just depend on it being defensible. It needs to be defensible but it also needs excess resources to allow it to project its culture onto its neighbours. That’s what it all hinges on really. 20 miles underground is highly defensible but it lacks any exploitable resources and so no one even lives there. Desert or mountain regions have enough resources to permit existence, but not enough to permit the inhabitants to project their influence.
Whether anyone could or would want to invade such areas is rather moot. In the case of Afghanistan for example everyone form Alexander to Victoria has wanted to control it because it controls a vital trade and military route. But that didn’t make Afghanistan a great power, not did the Afghanis ability to resists invasion because they lacked the resources to ever control anyone else’s territory.
It may not be surprising to you that that the island of Borneo didn’t dominate the world while the island of Britain did, but it has been a great mystery to many people for many centuries.
I suspect the answer is not as simple as you suggest. Borneo matched Britain in terms of size, resources, population, foreign trade etc at various times in history, so why was it in any way obvious that Borneo wouldn’t be as advanced as Britain?
I don’t know what answer you came up with, but the fact that some of the greatest minds inn history couldn’t come up with a convincing answer beyond God favouring the white man should tell you that the answer is not at all obvious. In fact the answer is so terribly obscure and complex that none of us, you included, know what it is. We can only speculate.
Perhaps you could tell us your obvious answer as to why Britain dominated the much larger island of Borneo?
What does this mean? I know that I can plant several varieties of maize and they will all germinate without scarification etc. What help does it need that wheat doesn’t?
My own take on it is that people are only reading half of Diamond’s thesis. It isn’t just about why Britain dominated Borneo and vice versa. The other half of it, which is equally important, is why do white people living in Australia or Canada manage to sustain a high technology agricultural civilisation when the people beforehand couldn’t manage to do so.
Quite clearly there is nothing intrinsic about Australia or Canada that prevents a technological civilisation from thriving there, and the current civilisations could readily kick the arse of the mightiest armies of even 100 years ago. So why didn’t these areas develop mighty civilisations? Why did they stall?
So far everyone in this thread has been concentrating on the inherent differences in the lands, but that is clearly only part of the question since no inherent difference can exists to explain the differences when white people have managed what the locals couldn’t in precisely the same environment with the same limitations.
For along time this was put down to the inherent superiority of white people, not surprisingly. After all white people managed in a few decades what the locals hadn’t managed in millennia. Then after that lost favour nobody could address the question at all until Diamond’s work.
And that is why Diamonds work is both groundbreaking and controversial. It attempts to explain something that has been puzzling people for a long time, and it does so while explicitely denying that racial or genetic factors come into play at all.
Could you please give a brief summary of your qualifications? I’m not being snarky, it would be easier framing arguments if we knew exactly what level you were approaching them from. If you really are an expert in the areas he’s discussed, then of course your going to be annoyed. He’s a popular science writer trying to write about some very controvesial fields from an outsiders perspective. It’s inevitable that he’s going to make a number of factual errors or side with the faction that you personally don’t agree with. What makes it remarkable is not that he got everything right, it’s that he managed to do it at all.
Well, 98% isn’t terribly unreasonably as an upper bound. Dobyn in “Estimating Aboriginal American Populations” (sorry, no online cite) pegged the number at 95% and Perttula has gone as high as 96%. Granted, there have been reams of papers criticising any number put out. But it’s awfully hard even for an expert to seperate idealogical attacks from genuine methedological criticism.
Sorry, I was refering to the megafauna extinctions of approximately 10,000BC. Archelogical records have quite firmly established that such an extinction occured. The only debate is as to why it happened.
Gorsnak wen’t into this quite admirably.
I admit that I’m certainly nowhere near an expert in these areas and I am doing to book a gross disservice by paraphrasing it like this.
I watched the shows but haven’t read the book. That said:
In Episode 2, he explained how the Europeans kicked ass against the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas in the Americas. One of the contibuting factors was that the European germs spreas to the Natives, but not the other way around. The reason most germs spread one-way is that Europeans had enhanced immune systems because they had been domesticating animals in close quarters for ages. No mention was made of Europeans setbacks due to American germs.
Fast forward to Episode 3. He says the Europeans landed in South Africa and prospered. Then, they moved north and eventually hit the tropics. The Europeans, their crops, and their animals couldn’t hack the tropics. One huge reason is tropical germ malaria.
QUESTION: Why would Europeans kick ass in tropical America but suck ass in tropical Africa?
The problem with the epidemic theory is that, as Shalamanese points out, the mass extinction occurred, that’s indisputable. It wasn’t just horses and camels that were exterminated but flightless birds, dogs, cats, hyaenas, bears, sloths, elephants, elk, armadillos and so forth. There were also at least two other species of bison that didn’t survive the extinction. Even allowing for the predators all dying as a result of prey loss it’s somewhere between highly improbable and impossible that any epidemic could have taken out groups as disparate as birds, sloths, camels and bison without afflicting one specific species of bison. That is less plausible than a suggestion that humans killed all the rest but not the bison. Humans are capable of being both selective and generic simultaneously like that, viruses are not.
The reasons why the bison survived may have been many and varied, but the point to remember is that few if any scientists actually ascribe the mass extinctions solely or primarily to hunting. Hunting combined with massive ecological change from fire misuse is the likely culprit, and there are traits that bison possess that make them uniquely suited to benefiting from increased fires. And of course the ancestors of the surviving bison species were quite familiar with hominid predators, something that the other species probably were not.