Book Review

So its farming, germs and government that made some societies dominate over others. Farming seems most essential, since it brought the other two into existence since without a steady supply of food to feed people, one cannot create a largely populated society, nor find exotic diseases from animals and not even possess a centralized government. I thought I would have never guessed the answer to the discrepancies that are present in societies across the world today. When I started the novel, I was one of those people who were biased and thought that there must be some God-willed force that allowed some groups to be predominant over others. I just could not think of any way that people could develop into groups that were so different over just a time span of 6000 years. But this book has told me the answer, and I am pleased to say that my inherent bias has completely washed away into sufficient and plausible information that I can describe fully and convincingly.

If I can portray this book in just a phrase, I would say an 'information roller coaster', since there is so much information that describes the growth of human societies but there are along the way small anecdotes and stories that make the novel fun, especially the opening anecdote in the epidemiology chapter and various opening anecdotes in the various chapters I have read. The most important thing I have learned from the book is the fact that intelligence cannot be measured since what people value as smart in America might be different in the tribal areas in New Guinea where they value hunting prowess and physical strength over grades and SAT scores. We always think that natives are stupid, but this book has opened me up to the bias that has shrouded the Western country about those who were 'incompetent' and 'native-like'.

Overall, it was a great novel although it was boring and repetitive sometimes as shown by my frustration in one of my posts earlier. Sorry Mr. Diamond!

9.3/10 stars is my rating.

Word Count- 336

The extremes of society

My final book post will be about the chapter named "From Egalitarianism to Kelptocracy".

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.

Diamond opens us this chapter about governments and societies that have been present in world by the introduction of a secluded tribe in New Guinea named the Fayu. They lived similar to how most societies lived at the end of the last ice age, where most were hunter-gatherers, nomads and lacking political and social mechanisms.

The Fayu are actually an extreme in the range of societies present today, with modern America as the opposite extreme. Both groups differ by their "distinctions between rich and poor, and many other political, economic, and social institutions". Furthermore, the Fayu are classified as a Band, also known as the tiniest societies. Bands are the lowest and smallest of the types of societies present today and it is marked by 5 to 80 people, just like an extended family. Most secluded societies are bands, notably the African Pygmies, African Bushmen, Aborigines and the Eskimos. Obviously they do not have any formalized social class unlike ours and leadership is rare.

Next is the tribe, which is much larger than a band and consisting of hundreds of citizens rather than just under a hundred for bands. A key difference here is that tribes consist of fixed settlements instead of the nomadic bands. Tribes were first noticed around 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, where as we examined is the birthplace of writing and farming techniques. Thus the availability of farming assisted in obtaining resources in just one concentrated area. But there are similarities between the tribes and bands. Reading over, I guessed that tribes and bands both lacked a systematic government and social classes. I was right, but I missed 'police, taxes and specialists'.

The next two groups are chiefdoms and states. Simply put, chiefdoms were obviously larger than tribes and bands and consisted of a chief who was a permanent centralized authority. Furthermore, to support the chief, farming and agriculture was necessary and food surpluses were distributed among the specialized people who would work to create new technologies or necessities for the chiefdoms. The most notable economic feature of chiefdom is the shift from simple exchanges between A and B, where A gives B a gift and A expects something form B in the near future, to a system where redistribution from the chief to the commoners was present.
Redistribution

States are what we are most familiar with today. Those in Mesoamerica, China and West Africa in the past are all classified as states. They were marked with a king, who exercised an even greater power than a chief. Internal conflict has been well maintained from laws and police, which were uncommon in the types of societies described before. But most of all, states contained religion and common areas of worship.

As Diamond puts it, religion:
1) Brings people together by providing them with a bond not based on kinship
2) It gives people a motive to sacrifice their lives for others.

But I also believe religion can destroy societies and tear them apart. Just like conflicting ideals erupt in a fight, so do conflicting religions. Most notable are the crusades which decimated two states because of differing religious views and missionaries who tried to convert natives from their original beliefs.

So what created these states comparative to chiefdoms, tribes and bands? We go to philosopher Rousseau who "speculated that states are formed by social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest, came to the agreement that they would be better off in a state than in simpler societies" His philosophy

Another interesting theory is the necessity of a centralized figure/government who could maintain such large-scale irrigation systems that began to emerge in areas such as Mesoamerica, China and Mexico. Farming is a key to the success of societies and to unite the people from small chiefdoms into one large state to distribute the wealth, a government is necessary. Thus, food production not only assists in increasing population size (which is essential for states) but also makes the premises of complex societies possible. Why is it possible? Three facts:

1) Societies of thousands can exist only if they develop centralized authority to monopolize force and resolve conflicts
2) A large society must be structured and centralized if it is to reach decisions effectively
3) Goods in excess of an individual's needs must be transferred from the individual to a centralized authority, which then redistributes the goods.

Word Count: 772

Knowledge is power

Writing marched together with weapons, microbes and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.

Once again the question that Diamond raises is: why did some areas obtain writing while others did not? What is the discrepancy here? By now I know his writing patterns and I can already guess that he will give us a brief introduction to the history of writing. Oh how I am right!

Fertile Crescent-Origin of Sumerian cuneiform, which has spread throughout the fertile crescent, noticeably to the Mesopotamian civilization and the Egyptian Civilization

The first independent invention of writing that is known comes from the Sumerian cuneiform, which as you can see from the website is a simplified form of drawing specific places, items or actions into lines and dots. Furthermore, the clay that it was written on was carved out with pointed tools and later with reed styluses. The Sumerian writing style also foreshadowed a significant rule present today about writing: "writing should be organized into ruled rows or columns and the lines should be read in a constant direction from left to right".

To develop writing further, these pictorial descriptions must be translated so that phonetics and sounds that can be derived from them can transmit the information on the clay tablets. This would help resolve the difficulty in describing words that could not be portrayed by drawings, such as life.

Besides the Sumerian civilization, the Mayan/Mesoamerican writing is organized similarly to the Sumerian writing form. They both use logograms (referring to a whole word or name) and phonetic signs. Furthermore, similar syllabic signs were found among many languages such as Japan's kana and the Mycenaean Greece's Linear B and the two languages described earlier. This show the "universality of human creativity" where a language that was developed in 3000 B.C (Sumerian) is shown up at 600 B.C (Mayans).

Most of the writing found across the world has been a derivative or a descendant of a systematic writing modified from the Sumerians or Mesoamericans. The spread of writing can be classified by two methods:
1) Blueprint copying: one copies or modifies an available language/blueprint
2) Idea diffusion: one receives little or no information than the basic idea and reinvents the details by oneself. From this, the solution that one thinks of may be completely different that the original that one first saw.

Prime example of blueprint copying and idea diffusion is not because of writing as Diamond states is how the Russians were able to build their own atomic bomb. I thought it was interesting to compare this to writing, but the idea makes sense. Did the Russians have spies that took 'blueprints' of the bomb and created them or did the Russians realized the devastating effect it had on Japan and thus went to create their own with next to nothing instruction?

Similar questions arise from the history of development of wheels, pyramids and gunpowder

Kind of reminds you of the paradoxical question "did the chicken come first or the egg?". It's a mind-boggler and nonetheless it got me thinking. I still do not have an answer nor will I in the close future.

Jared's example of idea diffusion is the Korean hangul, which was derived from the block format of Chinese characters but was developed differently so that by grouping letters of different syllables, one can produce a letter and combine the different syllables into one and be able to pronounce it together. How to Learn Korean

But this shows idea diffusion because we know that Korea was in close contact with China and was able to derive its language from that.

Other languages that are significant include the Chinese language, which is known to be independently created and not influenced by any other language. I am surprised that Diamond did not examine the Chinese language with much emphasis because the Chinese language developed so much over its growth into the traditional representation we know today. As a former resident in China, I went to various museums that plotted the growth of the Chinese language, and I must say although it may look different now, it was in the beginning similar to the Sumerian cuneiform, where simple lines were used to create representations of items of the world. Evolution of Chinese language.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics is the other heavyweight among the early writing systems, but Diamond, along with myself, are critical to the actual proof that it was developed out of nothing compared to the Chinese who were too far from the Indus valley civilization and the Sumerian civilization. Looking at the earlier map plotting the Fertile Crescent, I assumed that the Egyptian civilization would have at least had some contact from the Sumerian civilization to obtain some influence for their writing.

That is, Egyptians and other peoples may have learned from Sumerians about the idea of writing and possibly about some of the principles, then devised other principles and all the specific forms of the letters for themselves.

Tricky indeed.

So after much history of writing, we end up at the conclusion and the final few paragraphs to answer our question from the beginning. Obvious discrepancies occur with the ability of food production along with political agendas needed for writing. Hunters never got around to writing because they lacked the agriculture and social needs to feed scribes and to use writing. It is also obvious to note that hunters do not really need writing because they rarely need to tally and distribute foods among people. Diamond also notes isolation as a cause for an absence of writing, notably in Hawaii and Tonga and other places such as the Andes, West Africa's kingdoms and the mouth of the Mississippi river which were blocked out by water and mountains.

The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar way in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

Word Count- 978

Europe's Sinister Gift

Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European Guns and Swords

We all know about how smallpox decimated the Incan and Aztec civilizations from an initial population of 20 million to around 1.6 million in just a hundred years. But where does such disparity come from and how do the Europeans possess such deadly and grim allies? Diamond explains this phenomenon in chapter 12, titled 'The lethal gift of livestock', by opening up with my opinion of the funniest and most awkward anecdote I have read in the novel.

A short recap of the anecdote:
There was a couple were the husband was sick because he contracted a mysterious illness. The doctor, who was stressed-out from over-work asked him if he had any sexual experiences that might have caused the infection. This was illicit because it breached patient confidentiality. But the husband goes on and whispers the answer where the wife heard it and turned into a fitful rage and smashed a heavy metal bottle on the husbands head. Through the husband's broken English, the doctor finally understood what he said that got his wife so mad: "He had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm".

I laughed out loud when I read this, but I realized that Diamond did not tell this story just for the heck of it (maybe), but it was to bring a connection that most of our current infectious diseases were all some sort of derivative of an illness that came from animals. For example:

Measles	cattle (rinderpest)
Tuberculosis	cattle
Smallpox	cattle (cow pox) or other livestock with related pox viruses
Flu	pigs, ducks
Pertussis	pigs, dogs
Falciparum malaria	birds (chickens and ducks?)

Reading over this chapter, I could not forget the spread of swine flu that has plagued the world today and how it has exploded across the world because as Diamond notes, "The explosive increase in world travel by Americans is turning us into another melting pot- not of immigrants of different nations but this time, of microbes that we previously dismissed as just exotic diseases in far-off countries".

In fact, we cannot forget where swine flu is originated: pigs. In addition, this website dictates some of the diseases that originated from animals, also known as zoonosis. But it was missing one significant infection: AIDS that is known to have originated from African monkeys. Some of these diseases have known to be so deadly due to their abilities to evolve and recycle new strains. Evolution, which has created mankind from just a few small cells has also created mankind's greatest enemy and a conquering force that decimated native populations.

So where is the connection between agriculture and the rise of diseases? We bring up agriculture once again to note how important it was to the developmental of civilizations comparative to hunter-gatherer societies where they could not develop such necessary tools for domination. One main reason is population densities of agricultural nations are much higher and denser than hunter-gatherer lifestyles. In fact, since many of these hunters are nomadic, their wastes are left all over the place unlike the farmers who run amok in their own sewage. This sewage, as we know now, is the birthplace of infections and harmful bacteria.

Farmers also utilized their own sewage or poop as a form of fertilizer, thus sometimes eating this food. Runoff was common as they would bathe in rivers that were polluted with their feces and thus contract diseases there. One infamous example is rodents that would be attracted to the farmer's food. Rodents were the main cause for the spread of the black plague that decimated Europe's population in 1346 A.D. This infection was proliferated across half the world due to the silk road. The silk road was known to be the trading gateway between China and Europe but it also turned the world into "one giant breeding ground for microbes". Bubonic Plague

I liked this chapter a lot. My interest in epidemiology jumped in and absorbed me into this chapter. But most of all, that awkward anecdote of the chapter made the reading so much more smoother and easier. Thanks Mr. Diamond!

word count-687

Poop to Food

Latrines are merely one of the many places where we accidentally sow the seeds of wild plants that we eat. As parts of fruit that we actually take into our mouths, strawberry seeds are tiny and inevitably swallowed and defecated. Thus, our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories."

That passage caught my eye because I realized the first humans did not even realize the experimentation that was taking place in the pooping places of humans. But even before that, I learned the history of berries and nuts, first starting from the almond. Most wild almonds were bitter and it contained a chemical called amygdalin that breaks down to create the chemical cyanide. (This is one deadly nut) Other ancestors that were bitter or poisonous was the watermelon, potatoes and cabbages. Watermelons? Watermelon's bitter cousin

So how did people get to domesticate these crazy nuts so that it became edible and crunchy?

Jared Diamond explains that individual almond trees has slowly mutated over the years to prevent them from creating such bitter nuts. Then people would have collected these non-bitter nuts and thus cultivate and grow them unintentionally (from poop) and later intentionally. Same goes towards other berries or nuts. People would unconsciously try to pick the largest berries, so size obviously matters. In addition, many plants were selected for its oiliness, especially in the Mediterranean area of the birthplace of olive oil. Crops that contained oily seeds were selected for growth just as the sweet and tasty nuts were cultivated.

I especially liked Jared Diamond's chart that describes the various crop types across the ancient world. One can see from the chart how foods that have been at a specific region for an extremely long time became the stable food that people eat today. For example, in the Mesoamerica region, ancient crops consisted of corn, beans and squash, which are extremely common in hispanic cuisine. Likewise in ancient china where their crops were rice and soybeans, rice is the number one grain in asia along with soybeans that are used to create tofu, miso soup and much more.
Staple foods of the world today

This chapter that talks about nuts and grains is probably one of the last that will talk about farming and its virtues. Skimming over to the next few chapters, I can see that Diamond finally fixes his focus to geography and how it affected the growth of socities. Yes, it is still a little tedious, but this chapter that was full of various informative and intruiging facts brought me back into the novel.

Word Count: 430

Farmer Power

We all know that the world in the pre-historic times have been occupied by humans that fed themselves by hunting and gathering. But as Jared Diamond states, that eventually died down and was replaced by food production: the way we currently obtain our food today by farming, cultivating livestock and crops and domesticating plants to produce edible objects. This is, according to Diamond, the essential and decisive factor in how one civilization ended up with guns, writing and diseases while others were devoid of these things.



























As you can see in this chart taken from page 87 of the book, one can see how vital farming production is towards the development of empires and civilizations. Obviously there are 'ultimate' factors; factors that cannot be changed or altered such as the east/west axis that might have contributed to the location of suitable species or species spreading.

So what made hunters and gatherers slowly adopt farming procedures and practices? Diamond states that the origins of food productions evolved from observation and conscience. By observing neighbors who tilled the land and reaped its benefits, other people adopted this procedure while others completely rejected them. I sneered when I read that people actually rejected farming. But maybe its because I live in a first-world country brimming with food and supplies while those in the early 6000 B.C never fully understood the benefits of farming and what tangible benefits it could bring in the future. If they only knew what I knew now...

Five factors pulled many hunter-gatherers towards farming: decline in available wild foods, depletion of wild game, development of food processing technologies, the link between human population density and rise in food production and the decisive geographic boundaries between hunters and farmers. Out of these, the link between population density and food production is important in my opinion. To feed a boom in population, farming is necessary. Hunting cannot support a large population, as reinstated over and over again in the last few chapters in the book. Food production yields a higher 'edible calorie per acre' as Diamond puts it, and due to this growth in population, this catalyzes itself into a positive feedback loop that grows exponentially, like when the industrial age hit the world. Exponential Growth.

Diamond also stresses the importance of the exact locations of food production and its origins. There are only five such areas: "Southwest Asia (Fertile Crescent), China, Mesoamerica, the Andes of South America and possible the Amazon Basin and the eastern U.S".






















Neighboring areas might have been affected by this growth of farming areas and thus the technique of farming proliferated. Those with this head start also gained an extra step in approaching the production of technologies, pathogens and population growth that many non-farming socities did not have.

As a result, those who still tried to keep hunting and gathering techniques as opposed to farming, were met with two outcomes. They were displaced by those who farmed (also noted as farmer power) by their technologies and man power, or soon assimilated into the agricultural mix. Only three notable hunting groups were able to survive until the 20th century: Native Americans in California, Khoisan hunters from the South African Cape and the Bantu farmers in the Australian continent. But it was not because they produced much better weaponry or a large army to resist conquering forces, but instead of the area's inability to support farming.

Reading this book up to now, I think its intriguing but extremely tedious because Jared Diamond loves to tell a story inside another story. Instead of getting to the point, he spends almost six chapters to tell us that farming was one key to the success of civilizations. He also places various side stories about his chapters which are interesting in some cases but confusing and page-fillers in others.
Word count: 628

David vs. Goliath

You must wonder why I named it David vs. Goliath,

It is because I felt it was a perfect analogy to how the Spaniards dominated the Incas in this chapter called “Collision at Cajamarca”. The chapter discussed the one of the biggest moments between the European and Native Americans: The meeting between Incan emperor Atahuallpa and Spanish conquistador Pizarro. The chapter has a short anecdotal excerpt (which I thought was extremely interesting) from six of Pizarro’s companions who described the siege at Cajamarca where they completely dominated a 80,000 or more Incan army with just sixty two cavalry units and hundred and six foot soldiers. See the comparison?

Jared Diamond traces this ‘chain of causation’ and asks some extremely important questions to address this extraordinary and unbelievable encounter. This first thing he tackled was the technological advantages that the Spaniards had over the Incans. Equipped with guns, steel armor, steel swords and weapons, those were merciless massacre weapons compared to the futile wooden clubs, quilt armor and slingshots that Atahuallpa’s troops had. Furthermore, he stresses the importance of horses and its advantages in the open area that dominated in Cajamarca. Horses not only had “its speed charge, maneuverability but also a raised fighting platform that made many foot soldiers helpless in the open” Out of all of these elements, horses and steel swords were extremely important in the conquest because to me, they spread a physiological fear among the Incans who never witnessed such animals and the obvious strength of steel swords that could hack and cut through quilt armor like cheese. Incan weaponry and Side by side comparison

I thought that it was interesting how Jared Diamond told side stories while describing the Spaniards at Cajamarca. The story about Charlie Savage, a British sailor who was just equipped with muskets and his excellent aim was able to “single-handedly upset Fiji’s balance of power.” He used his muskets by setting up just a few feet from the village fence and massacred the natives. Not only is this story unbelievable, but one can witness how much a person’s power increases greatly when using a gun against those who lacked guns.

Another factor greatly assisted Pizarro to dominate Atahuallpa and his massive army. The silent but deadly friend of diseases decimated many people in other continents and a smallpox epidemic was the reason why the Incas were divided. Previous Incan emperors tried to unite the country but smallpox killed them and if it was not for the epidemic, Pizarro would have fought one gigantic and consolidated empire instead of a split and vulnerable one. Atahuallpa was situated at Cajamarca because of a large civil war where he was victorious in. One can see the many causes that slowly came together for this fateful meeting.

Finally, the travel of information proved to be vital in the downfall of the Incans. Compared to information that is transmitted by the mouth which can be easily distorted and messed up, information traveled by writing is fast, accurate and reliable. Just nine months after Pizarro’s execution of Atahuallpa, “a steady stream of Spanish colonists arrived in South America to tighten his grip on Peru”. Furthermore, writing also allowed more reinforcements to come quickly and orderly for Pizarro and his troops who needed to control the Atahuallpa and his army. Conversely, because Atahuallpa did not have enough information about the Spaniards due to the lack of writing and the transport of limited information from mouth to mouth, he disregarded the Spanish invasion and listened to an envoy’s description of “disorganized, non-fighting men and weak”. Pizarro arrived in South America with no information on the Incas, but by living in a country where literacy was a form of spreading knowledge of behavior and history, that experience allowed Pizarro to successfully ambush Atahuallpa and trap him.

But why were the Incas or the Aztecs the ones who had widespread literacy, horses, steel weaponry and guns? The diseases that decimated their populations; why were they not immune to it like the Europeans? Diamond states that these are not questions of "proximate causation" as seen is the description of the Maori and the Moriori in the previous entry or the fall of the Incans in this entry, but the questions must be tackled in a more global sense. History has to scanned entirely and the ultimate causes will be soon answered. I can't wait!

Word count: 734

To see the big picture, small is necessary

Most people know who the Maori is, a major native tribe located in the Polynesian island chain (mainly New Zealand) known for their ferocious face paintings. But does anybody know the Moriori people from the Chatham Islands? Probably not, because as Jared Diamond states, "history constitutes a brief, small-scale natural experiment that tests how environments affect human societies". Even though both tribes were from the same ancestry, it was the differing environments that molded the Moriori and Maori. Located close to the South, the Chathams' cold climate could not support any crops for development and the Moriori became hunter-gatherers. Thus, this made them unable to store foods or "feed non-hunting craft specialist, armies, bureaucrats and chiefs" Their technologies were limited and they only captured animals that were easy prey. Furthermore, the small size of the Chathams island chain could only support a total population of 2000. Polynesian Islands Map.
All these factors constituted to a "small, unwarlike popluation with simple and crude technology without strong leadership or organization" that saw its downfall to their dominant neighbors of the Maoris in 1835.

As one can witness in the map, the island of New Zealand is much larger and northern that the Chathams, which meant that agriculture and crops were abundant in this area. The Maori grew to almost 100,000 and the crop surpluses helped them grow and produce varied tools for growing their crops, fighting and making arts. In addition, Diamond goes on by comparing the both islands by examining six major factors: island climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation and isolation. Reading through his explanations until the end of the chapter, isolation and climate affected me the most because areas with beneficial weather overall and the ability to connect with the outside world that is constantly changing would be extremely beneficial to the growth of a civilization. I remember that the Moriori had at best, crude weapons made of wood, but the Maori had guns, axes and swords that came from interactions with foreigners because of the availability of New Zealand when the explorer Cook first discovered it.

Furthermore, climate affects the whole hierarchy of a islands' government as well because with a surplus of food, the density of people grows which can be used to feed non-farmers, such as warriors, labor forces and the upper class. This social complexity would allow the culture to spread out and do many jobs at once, instead of utilizing the whole population to only farm or hunt.

Polynesia only gives us a slice of what the world is like, but as Diamond says "it should not surprise us". Why you ask? Well, this inspection of the growth of Polynesian civilizations due to many external factors can infer that it can also happen in a larger scale of continents. Watch out, here comes the bigger picture.

*Side note:
Jared Diamond talks about Easter Island and its mysterious set of large 30-ton stone statues that he says have been "created by no other source than their muscles". I liked how he compared it to the Egyptian pyramids who are well known for the immense labor force associated with it. But the Easter island statues? Well, its a mystery no one has been able to solve yet. The size of Easter Island can only fit at most 5000 people, just like the island of Chatham, which to me is extremely perplexing. The geographical features also belie the ability of the natives to erect such statues. Extremely confusing indeed.
The Mystery of Easter Island

Word Count: 591