The highlands of New Guinea posess some of the most fertile sols on theplanet. The agriculture of New Guinea supported the highest population densities on the planet until less than 1000 years ago. They still suport the highest population desnities of agricultrual people that have ever existed anywhere on the planet, and that largley without the aid 20th century fertilisers, irrigation or engineered crops.
Saying that New Guinea isn’t very fertile, can’s support many people, can;t be used for intensive agriculture and can’t produce a surplus is nonsense. New Guinea is an island but it’s a freakin’ big island. Larger than middle east. Syaing that New Guinea is any of those things is like saying that the middle east is any of those things.
As others have said, Diamond is a reasonable anthropologist but that means he can study what humans do, it gives him no ability at all to study what they can do. I haven’t read this latest book and I don’t think I will do, but I suspect that it depends, as does a lot of Diamond’s more strident environmentalist stuff, on cherry-picking references and ignoring obvious counter examples.
Easter Island itself is a classic example of this. Diamond has said many times before this book was published that Easter Island was essentially pillaged and that this is an example of how technology can’t save a society. Yet he ignores the fact that technology did save the Easter islanders.
Diamond simply ignores the fact that after a period of civil war the Easter Islanders invented a new technology, Writing. They are the only Polynesian people ever to invent writing and with the Mesopotamians and Meso-Americans may be tone of only three people anywhere in the world to make this technological breakthrough. That’s not to shabby for an isolated population of a few hundred thousand people. What’s more astounding is that using this new technology the Easter islander’s produced a novel social system found nowhere else in the world, another technological breakthrough. And by doing this they managed to unite the warring tribes and produce a sustained peace and sustainable lifestyle.
Diamond says that today Easter Island is “a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock” Well of course it is. The people were enslaved, deported, raped, forcibly converted to Christianity and scourged by European diseases. That the island is barren and empty is not the result of environmental degradation, it’s the result of European and later South American colonialism.
At the time of first European contact Easter Island supported a thriving, vibrant and more importantly advancing society of some 2000 people. That was certainly less than the peak population of some 6000 but the island was far from the “barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock” that Diamond tries to portray it as. The fall of Easter island is just another of the many examples of the catastrophic impact of European contact on indigenous cultures so well references in “Guns, Germs & Steel”. What it is *not[/I[ is an example of a society that advanced so far that it destroyed its environment and couldn’t invent technology to save itself.
Indeed Easter Island is a stirling example of exactly the opposite. It’s a premier example of where people, faced with challenges caused by resource depletion, swiftly evolved a range of technologies to overcome those problems and produce a new and sustainable society.
I would have a lot more respect for Diamond if he would at least acknowledge these facts. He can choose to interpret them any way he likes but to date he has simply pretended they don’t exist. He has repeatedly portrayed Easter Island as an uninhabited rock because of environmental changes when in fact it supported very high population densities before being decimated by European contact.
This webpage says first contact was what 1722? And the island was “barren” then.
Also, that website mentions that Fischer in 1995 translated some of the heiroglyphics, and claims that the writing was a late introduction copied from the Spanish in 1770.
Well it would strike me that are similarly situtated geographical patterns in Asia, South America and Africa. How does he account for the rise of the Greeks for example?
I’m reading GGS currently, and will move on to Collapse next. I find all sorts of resonance between Diamond’s work and the ideas proposed by Daniel Quinn.
Further, I think the global vs local culture/societal facets of this debate can be put in an interesting perspective if you use Quinn’s Taker vs Leaver dichotomy.
It is the Taker world view that is at risk of collapse with our current trajectory and momentum. The Taker world view just happens to bring all sorts of other species and resources down along with it.
The “technology will save us” perspective is largely species-centric as well. Even if, hypothetically, we are able to eventually develope and impliment technology that is able to sustain a stable human population indefinitely, if we continue on the same path that we’re on currently, I fear the only species left on the planet will be species that directly support humanity, and that is not a world of which I would want to be a part.
Well, the first problem you’re having is that he’s not specifically talking about Europe for most of the book, he’s talking about Eurasia as a whole. Basically, he’s asking why was Eurasia so advanced, while most of Africa and the Americas were still stuck in the stone age. Essentially, it comes down to geographic luck of the draw.
Eurasia had native wild crops like wheatgrass that were extremely easy to domesticate. Not only that, but the east-west axis of Eurasia meant that crops developed in Europe could easily be transplanted to Asia and vice versa. You had a lot of agricultural sharing that way. The Americas and Africa didn’t really have those easily domesticated native crops that were basically ready to go, they had to gradually develop them over thousands of years. Moreover, the north-south axes made it more difficult to transplant crops through normal trade.
Eurasia also had a variety of native animals that were easily domesticated than either Africa or the Americas. He gives the example of the horse. Why didn’t native Africans domesticate zebras the way that central Asians domesticated the horse? Well, it’s not because the Africans were stupider, it’s that the zebra is nearly impossible to domesticate, unlike the native horses of the central Asian steppes.
Essentially, Eurasia had huge advances over the other continents in terms of things necessary to start and maintain large civilizations.
The highlands of New Guinea had even less population density 1000 years ago than 300 years ago. The greatest limiting factor on agricultural cultivation (and thus population) in the highlands was altitude. Yam falls out of cultivation by about 1800 m, marita pandanus shortly afterwards and by 2100 m bananas, sugar cane and a number of vegetables are also not cultivated, while taro’s limit is effectively 2100 m. Sweet potato, however, can be cultivated at an altitude of up to 2700 m. The introduction of the sweet potato (most likely by Europeans in the 16th century) allowed people to settle at higher altitudes. The sweet potato was also more prolific than taro (the previous staple) and could be cultivated over a wider range of soils.
In the eastern highlands in particular, which had little or no history of intensive cultivation, the sweet potato radically altered life there, with greatly increased human and pig populations. However, this state of affairs is only three centuries old. In the Arona valley, for example, there is no evidence of human occupation older than 200 years. Fore groups are even believed to have only adopted the sweet potato only 100 years ago, while for other eastern highlands societies it was adopted within living memory. Before the arrival of the sweet potato, eastern highlands societies were probably small and scattered in population.
Yes, it is a source of debate how revolutionary the introduction of sweet potato really was, but the contention that the sweet potato allowed greater intensification of plant production and pig husbandry is an uncontroversial one.
To reiterate: the population density of highland New Guinea is a historically recent phenomenon. I don’t even see how you can argue that New Guinea’s population density is the highest of agricultural people that have ever existed, since population density is notoriously hard to estimate before state censuses, and practically any city would have more. Obviously, ethnographic analogy would not hold, either. It is nonsense to think that present conditions can be projected onto the past, or to assume that New Guinea’s Neolithic prehistory is a uniform entity. The introduction of yams and taro, the abandonment of swamp cultivation, the creation of anthropogenic grasslands – these all happened before New Guinea’s recorded history.
Anyway, perhaps I should have said, “Not much surplus could be produced relative to state-level societies.” I stand by the rest of what I said. Surplus in horticulture-based societies cannot support as large a non-productive population as in intensive agriculture. Note that when I say agriculture I am referring specifically to farms, which New Guinea never had before historical times. What it did have was horticulture.
However, I retract what I said about New Guinea chiefdoms. They never existed, and I was thinking of Polynesian examples.
To those taking issue with the environmental determinism in GGS, it would actually be more accurate to refer to Diamond’s viewpoint as environmental possibilism. That is, the form of a society is not determined by the environment, but the environment does limit what a society can become. One would not expect subarctic dwellers to form vast empires, nor inhabitants of land-locked countries to form vast merchant fleets.
Diamond’s fixation on the environment in GGS is a legitimate criticism of the book though, as well as his avoidance of the role of individual agency in social change and his strategic blindness to contradictory data (his dismissal of precolonial African history, for instance).
That said, I still think his book is a brilliant synthesis of the knowledge of diferent disciplines. I view Diamond’s mistakes the same way I view Marx’s reliance on shaky ethnographic data: while the details can be argued on, the general thrust of the work is something not to be ignored. Who would even argue now against the view of economics being the driving force (or at least a major one) of social change?
While most of what Diamond says is not new to anyone who has studied anthropology (or should not be), his popularization of these issues is certainly a good thing.
Interesting. What role does he ascribe to culture and religion though? For example, the reformation clearly resulted in social and scientific development. Further, does he suggest that humans evolved differently? Mind you this is a dangerous area but if one culture were more technologically inclined due to geography would this have a long-term affect on succeeding generations?
He argues that due to the fractured nature of europes geography, the reformation would have been developed somewhere and then gradually spread to other regions via traders. Asia on the other hand was much flatter which allowed a single ruling party to control most of the land so good ideas had to be developed within the ruling system which limited innovation.
Personally, I thought that was the weakest point in his book but that’s his opinion as far as I can grasp it.
The webpage claims it was barren, and then goes on to say that it was grassland. Which was it, barren, or grassland? The problem here is the idea that grassland is somehow barren. That’s a nonsense. Most of the British isles were grassland not so long ago, yet they were no means barren.
bar·ren
a) Not producing offspring.
b)Incapable of producing offspring.
Lacking vegetation, especially useful vegetation
Unproductive of results or gains; unprofitable:
Easter island was covered in vegetation. It supported a stable population of around 2000 people on an island of around 150km[sup]2[/sup]. By no stretch of the definition was it barren. At best one might say it was barren of trees, but it requires that specific qualifier to make the statement in any way accurate.
He did indeed claim that, a claim that has been pretty much universally rejected. A decent critique of Fischer’s so-called ‘tranlation’ is given here (http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rongo2.html). There is no actual evidence that it was copied form the Spanish or any other language. All the archaeological evidence and hence majority opinion says that the writing predates European contact.
But once again you make the mistake of referring to the highlands as though it is an homogenous area. It’s akin to referring to “The Middle East” and then averaging the desert, mountain and alluvial areas to arrive at population densities. If we do that then Mesopotamia never supported high population densities either.
This is the problem I’m having with your statements. You say that the NG highlands have infertile soils, can never be productive and can never support high populations, all the while ignoring that some areas are immensely fertile and support extremely high populations. This is no different to the situation in the Middle East where most areas are essentially unproductive while there are small area of immensely productive land.
No. it isn’t. As far as can be established it has been that way ever since the first Melanesian farmers settles there.
Umm, city densities may be higher, but those densities aren’t supported by cities. This is a strawman position. You’re saying that because 12 people sleep in one room in a city therefore that area supports a population of 12 people/10m[sup]2[/sup]. That’s neither sensible nor true.
Yes. And this is a stirling example of special case pleading. When you want to argue that NG can’t support high populations you are quite happy to pretend you have some idea of what past population was like. When I point out that NG can and does support massively high populations suddenly present conditions can’t be projected.
What are you basing your claims that PNG never supported high populations on?
[q.uote]Anyway, perhaps I should have said, “Not much surplus could be produced relative to state-level societies.”
[/quote]
But you’d still be wrong. Because those areas are so incredibly production huge surpluses could be produced.
In that case I’m calling you out. Can I please have a reference that New Guinea “is not very fertile”. I can provide any number that show that parts of it are incredibly fertile, some of the most fertile andproductive soils on the planet.
I will also ask a reference that “intensive agriculture would not be possible as a long-term survival strategy”. I can provide references showing that intensive agriculture has been practised in some areas for centuries.
I’m on chapter three but I guess I am fundamentally disturbed by any book that has such as pat answer as “geography” to the development of the planet. I’m not sure I have every seen a problem, big or small, that has such a simple answer. Just a gut feeling.
The author’s thesis does not just boil down to “geography”. The number, diversity, and productivity of domesticatable plants and animals that are indigenously available to settlers in a particular region; the ease at which diffusion of these commodities as well as people (and indirectly, ideas and technology) can progress from area to another, and the kind of government that characterizes a region (which are mostly the product of all those other factors, plus others that Diamond postulates towards the end of the book) are the main thrusts of the book’s message. When you start out with the premise that agriculture is crucial for the development of a technological society, then you should consider what environmental factors made agriculture less feasible in some areas as opposed to others. Interestingly enough, those areas that had the best conditions for agriculture (right climate, right kind of plants, close proximity to other centers of food production, right kind of animals to help till the ground, etc.) also happened to develop into technologically advanced societies. Throw in the presence of disease resistance and you have a technological society that can conquer other societies with weapons as well as epidemics like small pox and measles.
Although I found the book to be very interesting and informative, I didn’t think that Diamond’s thesis was all that ground-breaking. Who can really argue that the Austrialian aboriginee started out on an even playing field as the Chinese or the Italian? One can argue that some cultures are superior to others, but then we are still plagued with the question of where did these cultural differences come from?
It’s a little more complex than “some miraculous technology will save us”. What people like Gates are arguing is that we need to research new technologies now to try and solve these problems before they become too large. Quite frankly I don’t know what the alternatives to finding a technological solution are.