The synthesis of various human societies

This is a very interesting book, and reading it proved a very enjoyable and enlightening experience; it put things in perspective and gave a clearer understanding of anthropology from one angle. This book tries to explain why the West diverged and became the world's hegemonic power. As if the whole human race had started in the same place some time ago. It is written that humanity was a hunter-gatherer society for most of its existence until about 10,000 years ago, after the last ice age. He believes it has nothing to do with the race being linked to intelligence or any other racial superiority theory, as he knows that some Papua New Guineans, of the recent past, lived in what could be described as the Stone Age but were very inventive, inquisitive, intelligent and quick to learn as required of modern-age thinking. This book is also very controversial, as some see Prof Jared Diamond's work as too simple and superficial, calling it pseudohistory and arguing that it relies heavily on the Mercator projection, which makes Africa appear relatively small compared to its real size and makes other continents appear larger. He has also been criticised for being too deterministic and for downplaying the role that actual people's cultures, religions, social dynamics, etc., play in their development. In his book, he claims that societies were determined by their geography, which provided access to domesticated animals and plants, which provided food, clothing, transport, disease, muscle power, and eventually germs, steel, and guns.

Prof Jared Diamond

Prof Diamond had postulated that the domestication of animals and plants had more effect on us than we had initially realised. This modified our behaviour and led us to adapt to one another. He had stated that looking at the world's major food cereals (wheat and barley) and major domesticated mammals (cows, sheep, goats and pigs), they originated from one area, the Fertile Crescent, and were able to spread to other areas because they were on the same latitude, to Europe, North Africa and Asia, and eventually to the Americas. Because Eurasia has the largest landmass, ideas, seeds, animals, etc., could spread across nearly the same latitudes, where they were exposed to relatively similar temperatures and climate conditions. We inadvertently selected the features in the seeds we needed, thereby enhancing these features through this selection. After the domestication of plants, people were able to live in hamlets due to the surplus food, which in turn led to the domestication of animals, allowing people to live in villages. This, in turn, led to other discoveries, such as the wheel, which made towns possible. This required organisations and institutions. Large numbers of people living together, due to the excess food, led to further improvements and specialisation, including occupations, laws, and empires. His idea is that the more people think about a particular problem, the faster they will find a solution. Hence, people living in small bands as they did in the rainforest will not be able to solve a problem as quickly as people living in towns and cities. The use of animals in food production and other technologies allows us to free others from food production; they were able to use their time and energy in other fields, like metallurgy, food processing, writing, transportation with animals leading to the invention of the wheel, storage, etc. With time and energy taken away from finding our daily sustenance, we could develop in other areas. The animals brought their own diseases, and he states that most of the diseases we suffer from stem from our interactions with our animals. From flu to malaria, they all had animal equivalents. A sad story is that this built up immunity in the Old World, and because those in the Americas did not have a wide variety of domesticated animals, they had not built immunity, so up to 95% of their population was wiped out by a variety of European diseases they had no immunity to when these two worlds met. The only major disease they were able to give back in the Columbian Exchange is Syphilis. At the same time, the Old World decimated them with Smallpox, Influenza, tuberculosis, Typhus, Measles, Malaria, Yellow Fever, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, etc., all of which were zoonotic.

Although the technically superior Spanish, with their steel swords, guns, cannons, and horses, were able to take over the major empires of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas with relatively little effort and were relatively few in number, while we're using only bronze and stone weapons, by Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. This story did great injustice to the millions that died from diseases, in which villages and towns were annihilated, leaving empty or ghost towns for the Europeans to settle in. Prof Diamond has insinuated that Africa would have suffered a similar fate, i.e., been invaded, conquered and decimated, if it were not for our diseases, malaria and yellow fever, which killed people in their thousands. In addition, Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) "protected" us, and hence we did not suffer a similar fate to the Native Americans and the Aboriginal Australians; the Europeans were not able to come until they had found a cure for some of their diseases, which wiped out civilisations. They decimated the Australian aborigines and expelled them from the coast and all habitable land to infertile lands, leaving them to roam the desert. Also, Malaria and Yellow Fever, when transferred to the New World via African slaves, prevented further exploration of the New World; for example, they prevented the construction of the Panama Canal, with a death rate of more than 500 per day at one time, and the Americans had been trying since 1880. They tried numerous times and succeeded, draining the area and making it mosquito-free.  

Writing is seen as a significant form of development, as it stores, conveys, instructs, or transfers information in the most concise, portable, reproducible format. The knowledge of writing was previously restricted to the ruling class, scribes, priests, and bureaucrats in any society with institutions, rather than mass literacy, especially before the invention of printing. Writing was there to ensure and continue the enslavement of a particular group of people. The rulers, not wanting to facilitate the transmission of dissent or help hatch plots, made sure it was complex, difficult, and inaccessible to the common masses. There have been only 3 distinct regions of origin for writing: Sumerian, Chinese, and Mexican. All others have just picked it up by processes of blueprint copying or idea diffusion. So all subsequent writings were based on these three, from Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, Greek and Roman alphabets, to our present-day English, French, German, Turkish, African writings, etc., spread by trade, religion and conquest. The spread of writing can be seen alongside the spread of other technologies and inventions. Prof Diamond noticed that inventions, although we might wish it so, were not one-off affairs nor due solely to the inspiration of a single inventor, however brilliant he or she might be. But they were also "standing on the shoulders of giants" and did need inspiration or illumination from a previous source. From writing, Gutenberg's printing press, the wheel, cars, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, vaccination, indoor plumbing, the steam engine, electricity, the nuclear age, aeroplanes, rockets, space exploration, etc. Were based on imperfect or ineffective predecessors that did not see the light of day, by unknown or overlooked persons whose work was tinkered with or changed to make it more effective and then exposed to a critical mass. Here, the progress of human invention had always been gradual and cumulative rather than in sudden giant steps. And the system that encourages such inventions, rewards new creative thinking, does not stamp out progress, and is open to new ideas will develop faster. What he was saying is that they needed no particular person; the environment was set up so that these inventions would meet a specific need and the individuals would be adequately rewarded.

Why the West is on top now is not as simple as people might believe. There are a variety of factors and issues. It might not be as simple as a resource like having bananas drop on your head, and having an excessive or abundant food supply should free up hunter-gatherer time so they could indulge in other activities. Also, the type of government might affect it, as there was a time when the autocratic Chinese were the most developed nation on earth, giving the West inventions such as gunpowder, windmills, canal systems and water-lock systems, hydraulics, the compass, paper, porcelain, wheelbarrows, etc. Then the centre of power moved to the Islamic world from the 8th to the 13th Century AD, and, with its House of Wisdom, it was from there that the West, through the writings of Greek philosophers long lost to antiquity, gained access to mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, medicine, etc. He constantly asks the question of why the Aztecs, Incas, Aboriginal Australians or Chinese did not invade Europe or carry Europeans in slave ships as they did for Africans in the Atlantic. He described how China became Chinese, and the effects of China on the South China Sea, Japan, South and North Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. Why Africa is black: due to the Bantu migration, it remained black; Australia was black and became white; and Papua New Guinea was black and still is. The Khoisan (the clickers) and Pygmies were displaced to the desert and the thick jungles by the Bantus. Madagascar was South Asian and is still mixed. He was able to see, from DNA evidence and language specialists' findings, how people migrated thousands of years ago.

The book tries to explain the theories, and the epilogue was interestingly explicit; he went into detail. The domestication of plants and the building of settlements led to the domestication of animals. This led to villages, towns, cities and then empires. Explaining that domestication of large animals was difficult in Africa because for an animal to be domesticated it has to meet certain criteria: it has to be gentle, be able to reproduce in captivity, be able to reproduce twice a year or more, must be a herd animal and social animal, must be a herbivore, etc. Hence, many African animals, such as zebras, which are known to be aggressive and short-tempered, did not meet these criteria. Nor do other animals, such as hippopotamuses, elephants, rhinoceroses, large apes, etc who are massive and strong; they could be tamed but not domesticated. Lions, Leopards, Cheetahs, etc., who are carnivores, do not meet the criteria. The presence of domesticated animals spurred the development of the wheel for transportation, which in turn led to further innovations. The wheel was absent among the Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans because they lacked domestic animals. On reflection, he noticed that, at times, it may be favourable for a continent not to be unified; during the 15th Century, China was richer than the whole of Europe. It was a single, united nation; at the time, they had sent three state-sponsored fleets to the eastern shores of Africa. But due to internal politics and a fight between the royalty and the eunuchs, they withdrew and closed themselves off internally until they were rediscovered by the British. The edict was made at the top and affected all of China. The Japanese, too, closed themselves under the Shogun, only to be reopened by the Americans in the 19th Century. In the 15th Century, an Italian named Columbus travelled to Portugal, England, and France. Still, due to their disunity and their competition with each other, he finally went to the Queen of Spain, who sponsored him with 3 small ships. Columbus was wrong in his calculations, as he thought the globe was smaller, and he was trying to find a quicker way to China/India, not via the Turks; subsequently, Spain was able to become the richest nation in the world, and it started the age of discovery, pushing other nations to seek their riches abroad. Columbus crossed the Atlantic in three surprisingly small ships. The largest, the Santa María, was only about 18–21 metres (58–70 ft) long, around 100 tonnes, and carried about 40 men. The Pinta and Niña were smaller still — roughly 15–17 metres long and carrying 24–26 men each. Altogether, about 90 men crossed the Atlantic in vessels closer in size to small cargo or fishing boats than to the grand "explorer ships" people often imagine, and they remained at sea for about 70 days before reaching land. Geography and luck do mark our development more than we do realise.