| Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices. History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves. Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate. Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots. The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs. In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions. What makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help. Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy. Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world. Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives. People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem! Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture. History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency. My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need. It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World. To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices. We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened. Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas. All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments. Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book. It seems logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities. Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. 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. Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other—by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. |
아마도 종으로서 우리의 가장 큰 특징은 반진화적 선택을 할 수 있는 동물들 사이에서 독특한 우리의 능력일 것입니다. 역사는 민족들 사이의 생물학적 차이 때문이 아니라 환경의 차이 때문에 민족마다 다른 과정을 따랐습니다. 유럽의 아프리카 식민화는 백인 인종차별주의자들이 가정하는 것처럼 유럽인과 아프리카인 사이의 차이점과는 아무런 관련이 없습니다. 오히려 그것은 지리학 및 생물 지리학의 우연, 특히 대륙의 서로 다른 지역, 축 및 야생 동식물 종의 집합에 기인했습니다. 즉, 아프리카와 유럽의 서로 다른 역사적 궤적은 궁극적으로 부동산의 차이에서 비롯됩니다. 인류 역사의 대부분은 가진 자와 못 가진 자 사이의 불평등한 갈등으로 이루어져 있습니다. 사람들이 부적절한 조건에서 가장 고집스럽게 집착하는 가치는 이전에 가장 큰 승리의 원천이었던 가치입니다. 세계 대부분의 지역에서 부유한 사람들은 폐쇄된 지역 사회에 살고 생수를 마십니다. 제가 태어난 로스앤젤레스에서는 점점 더 그런 경우가 늘고 있습니다. 그래서 세계 대부분의 부유한 사람들이 그들의 행동의 결과로부터 격리됩니다. 애국적이고 종교적인 광신자를 그토록 위험한 적으로 만드는 것은 광신자 자신의 죽음이 아니라, 이교도적인 적을 전멸시키거나 분쇄하기 위해 그들 중 일부의 죽음을 기꺼이 받아들이려는 그들의 의지입니다. 약 7,500년 전 족장의 출현으로 사람들은 역사상 처음으로 낯선 사람을 죽이려고 시도하지 않고 규칙적으로 만나는 방법을 배워야 했습니다. 은유는 너무나 명백합니다. 태평양에 고립된 이스터 섬. 일단 섬에 문제가 생기면 빠져나갈 방법이 없었습니다. 그들이 도움을 받을 수 있는 다른 사람들은 없었습니다. 지구에 있는 우리와 마찬가지로 우리 자신의 [세상]을 망치면 도움을 받을 수 없습니다. 언어가 적다는 것은 세상 사람들 사이의 의사소통이 더 쉽다는 것을 의미하기 때문에 언어 손실이 좋은 것이 아닙니까? 아마도, 그러나 그것은 다른 면에서 나쁜 것입니다. 언어는 구조와 어휘, 인과관계, 감정, 개인적 책임을 표현하는 방식, 따라서 우리의 생각을 형성하는 방식이 다릅니다. 단일 목적의 "최상의" 언어는 없습니다. 대신 다른 언어가 다른 목적에 더 적합합니다. 예를 들어, 플라톤과 아리스토텔레스가 그리스어로 쓴 반면 칸트가 독일어로 쓴 것은 우연이 아닐 수 있습니다. 이 두 언어의 문법적 입자와 복합어 형성의 용이성은 두 언어를 서양 철학의 뛰어난 언어로 만드는 데 도움이 되었을 것입니다. 라틴어를 공부한 우리 모두에게 친숙한 또 다른 예는 고도로 굴절된 언어(단어 어미가 문장 구조를 나타내기에 충분한 언어)가 영어로는 불가능한 뉘앙스를 전달하기 위해 어순의 변형을 사용할 수 있다는 것입니다. 우리의 영어 단어 순서는 문장 구조에 대한 주요 단서 역할을 해야 하므로 심각하게 제한됩니다. 영어가 세계어가 된다면 영어가 반드시 외교를 위한 최고의 언어였기 때문은 아닐 것입니다. 과학은 종종 '실험실에서 복제된 제어 실험을 수행하여 얻은 지식의 체계'로 잘못 표현됩니다. 사실 과학은 더 광범위한 것, 즉 세상에 대한 신뢰할 수 있는 지식의 획득입니다. 두 가지 유형의 선택이 [다양한 사회의 역사] 결과를 성공 또는 실패로 돌리는 데 중요한 역할을 한 것 같습니다. 장기적 계획과 핵심 가치를 재고하려는 의지입니다. 곰곰이 생각해 보면 우리는 또한 우리 개인의 삶의 결과에 대한 이 동일한 두 가지 선택의 중요한 역할을 인식할 수 있습니다. 사람들은 종종 "오늘날 세계가 직면한 가장 중요한 환경 인구 문제는 무엇입니까?"라고 묻습니다. 뒤집힌 대답은 "가장 중요한 단일 문제는 가장 중요한 단일 문제를 식별하는 데 잘못 집중하는 것입니다! 12,000년 전 지구상의 모든 사람들은 수렵채집인이었습니다. 이제 거의 모든 사람들이 농부이거나 농부가 먹여 살리고 있습니다. 그 소수의 원산지에서 농업이 확산된 것은 일반적으로 수렵 채집인들이 다른 곳에서 농업을 채택한 결과로 발생하지 않았습니다. 수렵 채집인은 보수적인 경향이 있습니다.... 대신 농업은 주로 농부의 이종 교배 사냥꾼을 통해 확산되어 더 강력한 기술을 개발한 다음 사냥꾼을 죽이거나 농업에 적합한 모든 땅에서 몰아냈습니다. 삶 자체와 마찬가지로 역사도 복잡합니다. 삶도 역사도 단순함과 일관성을 추구하는 사람들에게는 사업이 아닙니다. 나의 두 가지 주요 결론은 기술이 고립된 영웅적 행동이 아니라 누적적으로 발전하고, 예견된 필요를 충족시키기 위해 발명되기보다는 발명된 후에 대부분의 용도를 발견한다는 것입니다. 인디언이 구세계로부터 받은 많은 파괴적인 전염병에 대한 대가로 아메리카 원주민이 유럽인에게 줄 파괴적인 전염병을 진화시키지 않았다는 것은 놀라운 일입니다. 나에게 대중이 대기업의 행동에 대한 궁극적인 책임을 진다는 결론은 실망스럽기보다는 힘을 실어주고 희망적입니다. 내 결론은 누가 옳고 그른지, 존경할 만한지 이기적인지, 좋은 사람인지 나쁜 사람인지에 대한 도덕적 결론이 아닙니다. 대신 내 결론은 내가 과거에 일어난 일에 근거한 예측입니다. 대중이 다른 행동을 기대하고 요구하게 되면서 기업은 대중이 원하는 행동에 대해 기업에 보상하고 대중이 원하지 않는 행동을 하는 기업을 어렵게 만들면서 변화했습니다. 과거와 마찬가지로 미래에도 기업의 환경 관행 변화에는 대중의 태도 변화가 필수적일 것이라고 예측합니다. 우리는 최근의 역사를 통해 영어가 단지 인디언의 귀에 음악적으로 들렸다고 해서 영어가 미국 인디언 언어를 대체하지 않았다는 것을 알고 있습니다. 그 대신 영어를 사용하는 이민자들이 전쟁, 살인, 도입된 질병으로 대부분의 인디언을 죽이고 살아남은 인디언들은 새로운 다수 언어인 영어를 채택하도록 압력을 받았습니다. 20세기 초가 되어서야 유럽의 도시 인구는 마침내 자급자족할 수 있게 되었습니다. 그 이전에는 군중 질병으로 인한 도시 거주자의 끊임없는 죽음을 보충하기 위해 시골에서 건강한 농민의 지속적인 이민이 필요했습니다. Rhino를 탄 Bantu 돌격 부대는 로마 제국을 전복시킬 수 있었습니다. 그런 일은 일어나지 않았습니다. 무엇보다도 원주민을 공정하게 대우하기 위해 원주민의 환경 관행에 대한 역사적 가정을 인용하는 것은 잘못된 생각이고 위험해 보입니다. ... 원주민에 대한 공정한 대우를 정당화하기 위해 [즉, 그들이 다른 민족이나 현대 사회의 일부보다 더 나은 환경 관리인이라는] 가정을 불러일으킴으로써, 우리는 그 가정이 반박될 수 있다면 그들을 학대해도 괜찮을 것임을 암시합니다. 사실, 그들을 학대하는 것에 반대하는 주장은 그들의 환경 관행에 대한 어떤 역사적 가정에 근거한 것이 아닙니다. 그것은 도덕 원칙, 즉 한 사람이 다른 사람을 강탈하거나 예속시키거나 말살하는 것은 도덕적으로 잘못되었다는 것입니다. 이질적인 사람들 사이의 상호 작용의 역사는 정복, 전염병 및 대량 학살을 통해 현대 세계를 형성한 것입니다. 이러한 충돌은 수세기가 지난 후에도 여전히 사라지지 않는 반향을 일으켰고 세계에서 가장 문제가 많은 일부 지역에서 활발하게 계속되고 있습니다. 모든 인간 사회에는 창의적인 사람들이 있습니다. 단지 어떤 환경은 다른 환경보다 더 많은 시작 재료를 제공하고, 발명품을 활용하는 데 더 유리한 조건을 제공할 뿐입니다. 세계화는 현대 사회가 과거 이스터 섬과 그린란드 노르웨이처럼 고립된 채 붕괴하는 것을 불가능하게 만듭니다. 오늘날 혼란에 빠진 모든 사회는 아무리 멀리 떨어져 있어도 ... 다른 대륙의 번영하는 사회에 문제를 일으킬 수 있으며 또한 영향을 받을 수 있습니다(도움이 되든 불안정하게 되든). 역사상 처음으로 우리는 세계적인 쇠퇴의 위험에 직면해 있습니다. 그러나 우리는 또한 오늘날 세계 어느 곳에서나 사회의 발전과 과거 사회에서 전개된 것으로부터 빠르게 배울 수 있는 기회를 가장 먼저 누리고 있습니다. 그것이 제가 이 책을 쓴 이유입니다. 역사의 패턴이 사람들 사이의 타고난 차이를 반영한다고 가정하는 것이 논리적으로 보입니다. 물론 우리는 공개적으로 그렇게 말하는 것이 예의가 아니라고 배웠습니다. 우리는 일상 생활에서 일부 정복 민족이 정복이나 노예 수입이 발생한 지 수세기가 지난 후에도 계속해서 하층 계급을 형성하는 것을 봅니다. 우리는 이것 역시 어떤 생물학적 결점 때문이 아니라 사회적 불이익과 제한된 기회 때문이라고 들었습니다. 그럼에도 불구하고 우리는 궁금해야 합니다. 우리는 사람들의 지위에서 확연하고 끈질긴 차이를 계속 목격하고 있습니다. 우리는 A.D. 1500년 당시의 세계 불평등에 대한 명백해 보이는 생물학적 설명이 틀렸다는 것을 확신하지만 올바른 설명이 무엇인지는 알지 못합니다. 광범위한 역사 패턴에 대한 설득력 있고 상세하며 합의된 설명이 나올 때까지 대부분의 사람들은 인종 차별적 생물학적 설명이 결국 옳다고 계속 의심할 것입니다. 그것이 이 책을 쓰는 가장 강력한 논거인 것 같다. 제도화된 종교는 도둑에게 부를 이전하는 것을 정당화하는 것 외에도 중앙집권화된 사회에 두 가지 다른 중요한 이점을 제공합니다. 첫째, 공유된 이념이나 종교는 혈연 관계에 기반하지 않은 유대감을 제공함으로써 서로를 죽이지 않고 함께 살 수 있는 방법의 문제를 해결하는 데 도움이 됩니다. 둘째, 타인을 위해 자신의 생명을 희생할 동기를 사람들에게 부여합니다. |
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets.
Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues.
It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?
Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.
...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
THE IMPORTANCE OF lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans’ conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors’ morale.
Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer’s biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food.
The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.
I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We don't have proof that there aren't palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering"? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.
Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.
The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.
Yes, world history is indeed such an onion!
In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities.
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick.
It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.
Those who study just one country end up
understanding no country.
The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.
Still later, after the invention of saddles and stirrups, horses allowed the Huns and successive waves of other peoples from the Asian steppes to terrorize the Roman Empire and its successor states, culminating in the Mongol conquests of much of Asia and Russia in the 13th and 14th centuries A.D. Only with the introduction of trucks and tanks in World War I did horses finally become supplanted as the main assault vehicle and means of fast transport in war. Arabian and Bactrian camels played a similar military role within their geographic range. In all these examples, peoples with domestic horses (or camels), or with improved means of using them, enjoyed an enormous military advantage over those without them.
Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? (asked Yali)
Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms. Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one’s own choices as one was growing up.
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.
Nations and individuals accept national and individual responsibility to take action to solve the problem, or else deny responsibility by self-pity, blaming others, and assuming the role of victim.
“To us today, it is tempting to ask why societies with early writing systems accepted the ambiguities that restricted writing to a few functions and a few scribes. But even to pose that question is illustrate the gap between ancient perspectives and our own expectations of mass literacy. The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to recorded numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancients writing’s main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive
When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.
(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)
Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats and hereditary chiefs, and to have small-scale political organization at the level of the band or tribe. That’s because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers are obliged to devote much of their time to acquiring food.
There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth’s net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world’s human population now doubling every forty-one years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world’s fixed pie of resources. In addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world’s species will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our own life support.
success is not guaranteed to well-intentioned decent people, nor necessarily denied to evil people.
food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.
The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Most New Guineans don’t have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn’t have signs saying ‘Jump at your own risk,’ because it’s obvious. Why would I jump unless I’m prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible. In New Guinea I was able to grow up, play creatively, and explore the outdoors and nature freely, with the obligatory element of risk, however well managed, that is absent from the average risk-averse American childhood. I had the richest upbringing possible, an upbringing inconceivable for Americans.
That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides
African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead
Pizarro captured Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the two leaders first set eyes on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom—enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet—was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.
Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole.
Finland’s crisis (Chapter 2) exploded with the Soviet Union’s massive attack upon Finland on November 30, 1939. In the resulting Winter War, Finland was virtually abandoned by all of its potential allies and sustained heavy losses, but nevertheless succeeded in preserving its independence against the Soviet Union, whose population outnumbered Finland’s by 40 to 1. I spent a summer in Finland 20 years later, hosted by veterans and widows and orphans of the Winter War. The war’s legacy was conspicuous selective change that made Finland an unprecedented mosaic, a mixture of contrasting elements: an affluent small liberal democracy, pursuing a foreign policy of doing everything possible to earn the trust of the impoverished giant reactionary Soviet dictatorship. That policy was considered shameful and denounced as “Finlandization” by many non-Finns who failed to understand the historical reasons for its adoption. One of the most intense moments of my summer in Finland unfolded when I ignorantly expressed similar views to a Winter War veteran, who replied by politely explaining to me the bitter lessons that Finns had learned from being denied help by other nations.
As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster-reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.
(4) Modern capitalism is, and the ancient Roman economy was not, organized in a way that made it potentially rewarding to invest capital in technological development. (5) The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and supported.
Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions.
In short, we evolved, like other animals, to win the reproduction game. That contest has a single aim, to leave as many descendants as possible.
Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base.
people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed. The birth interval for many farm peoples is around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers. That higher birthrate of food producers, together with their ability to feed more people per acre, lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers.
1,000 out of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas,
food production evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences. Hence the question that we have to ask is why food production did evolve, why it evolved in some places but not others, why at different times in different places, and why not instead at some earlier or later date. Another
Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily drawn as a picture) by means of the sign for a depictable noun that had the same phonetic pronunciation. For instance, it’s easy to draw a recognizable picture of arrow, hard to draw a recognizable picture of life, but both are pronounced ti in Sumerian, so a picture of an arrow came to mean either arrow or life. The resulting ambiguity was resolved by the addition of a silent sign called a determinative, to indicate the category of nouns to which the intended object belonged. Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle.
Así pues, tanto las sociedades como los grupos humanos más pequeños pueden tomar decisiones catastróficas por toda una serie secuenciada de razones: la imposibilidad de prever un problema, la imposibilidad de percibirlo una vez que se ha producido, la incapacidad para disponerse a resolverlo una vez que se ha percibido y el fracaso en las tentativas de resolverlos
As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes. Many
(1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence. (3) Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China’s emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it. (4) Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.
In particular, while natural selection favors both males and females that leave many offspring, the best strategy for doing so may be different for fathers and mothers. That generates a built-in conflict between the parents, a conclusion that all too many humans don’t need scientists to reveal to them. We make jokes about the battle of the sexes, but the battle is neither a joke nor an aberrant accident of how individual father or mothers behave on particular occasions. It is indeed perfectly true that behavior that is in a male’s genetic interests may not necessarily be in the interests of his female co-parent, and vice versa. That cruel fact is one of the fundamental causes of human misery.
New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language groups (still with a mere 100,000 speakers) were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages. Each of those microsocieties alone was far too small to support chiefs and craft specialists, or to develop metallurgy and writing.
ONLY a few areas of the world developed food production independently, and they did so at widely differing times. From those nuclear areas, hunter-gatherers of some neighboring areas learned food production, and peoples of other neighboring areas were replaced by invading food producers from the nuclear areas—again at widely differing times. Finally, peoples of some areas ecologically suitable for food production neither evolved nor acquired agriculture in prehistoric times at all; they persisted as hunter-gatherers until the modern world finally swept upon them. The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history.
...invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at hight latitudes poses more diverses challenges that does a seasonally constant tropical climate
A suitable starting point from which to compare historical developments on the different continents is around 11,000 B.C.
Montana would have been better off in the long run if it had never mined copper at all but had just imported it from Chile, leaving the resulting problems to the Chileans! It
Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance of being murdered as the average human.
INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They
New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat. Protein
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated that states are formed by a 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, and voluntarily did away with their simpler societies. But
In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities. Hence moderate-sized agricultural societies are often organized in chiefdoms, and kingdoms are confined to large agricultural societies. Those complex political units are much better able to mount a sustained war of conquest than is an egalitarian band of hunters.
Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers,
Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death – and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies.
four suggested explanations are ideological, rather than economic or organizational: (1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence. (3) Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China’s emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it. (4) Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.
Britain never regained its naval and economic dominance over the world, and it remains notoriously conflicted (“Brexit”) about its role in Europe. But Britain is still among the world’s six richest nations, is still a parliamentary democracy under a figurehead monarch, is still a world leader in science and technology, and still maintains as its currency the pound sterling rather than the euro
Increasingly today, archaeologists are circumventing this problem by a new technique termed accelerator mass spectrometry, which permits radiocarbon dating of tiny samples and thus lets one directly date a single small seed, small bone, or other food residue. In some cases big differences have been found between recent radiocarbon dates based on the direct new methods (which have their own problems) and those based on the indirect older ones.
half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until
Animal populations that for one reason or another escaped control by predators and parasites have in some cases also escaped their own internal controls on their numbers, multiplied until they damaged their resource base, and occasionally have eaten their way into extinction.
Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland’s cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.
For example, missionary linguists are working on modified Roman alphabets for hundreds of New Guinea and Native American languages. Government linguists devised the modified Roman alphabet adopted in 1928 by Turkey for writing Turkish, as well as the modified Cyrillic alphabets designed for many tribal languages of Russia. In a few cases, we also know something about the individuals who designed writing systems by blueprint copying in the remote past. For instance, the Cyrillic alphabet itself (the one still used today in Russia) is descended from an adaptation of Greek and Hebrew letters devised by Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary to the Slavs in the ninth century A.D. The first preserved texts for any Germanic language (the language family that includes English) are in the Gothic alphabet created by Bishop Ulfilas, a missionary living with the Visigoths in what is now Bulgaria in the fourth century A.D. Like Saint Cyril’s invention, Ulfilas’s alphabet was a mishmash of letters borrowed from different sources: about 20 Greek letters, about five Roman letters, and two letters either taken from the runic alphabet or invented by Ulfilas himself. Much
Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds.
The table gives major crops, of five crop classes, from early agricultural sites in various parts of the world. Square brackets enclose names of crops first domesticated elsewhere; names not enclosed in brackets refer to local domesticates. Omitted are crops that arrived or became important only later, such as bananas in Africa, corn and beans in the eastern United States, and sweet potato in New Guinea. Cottons are four species of the genus
the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.
In areas where there were only hunter-gatherers to begin with, those groups of hunter-gatherers who adopted food production outbred those who didn’t.
For any ranked society, whether a chiefdom or a state, one thus has to ask, why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question raised by political theorists from Plato to Marx are raised anew by voters in every modern election. Kleptocracies with little public support run the risk of being overthrown, either by downtrodden commoners, or by upstart would be replacement kleptocrats seeking public support by promising a higher ratio of services rendered to fruits stolen.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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“By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.
But the question for our purposes is whether the broad pattern of world history would have been altered significantly if some genius inventor had not been born at a particular place and time. The answer is clear: there has never been any such person. All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.
Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
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“Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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“write these pages, Japan and the U.S. are still practicing widespread selective denial of major problems. Japan currently acknowledges some problems (its large government debt and aging population), and incompletely acknowledges the issue of Japanese women’s role. But Japan still denies other problems: its lack of accepted alternatives to immigration for solving its demographic difficulties; the historical causes of Japan’s tense relations with China and Korea; and denial that Japan’s traditional policy of seeking to grab overseas natural resources rather than to help manage them sustainably is now outdated. The U.S., as I write, is still in widespread denial of our own major problems: political polarization, low voter turnout, obstacles to voter registration, inequality, limited socio-economic mobility, and decreasing government investment in public goods.
The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal’s gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow on the latrine sites of aardvarks.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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“The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of wilful blindness.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Winston Churchill’s corresponding quip was “Never let a good crisis go to waste!” A”
― Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
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“Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own.
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.
Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
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“The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. “Modern” conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history; all human societies have been traditional for far longer than any society has been modern.
Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.
these we killed, and others we killed—but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.
In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification: it was still splintered into 1,000 independent statelets in the 14th century, into 500 statelets in A.D. 1500, got down to a minimum of 25 states in the 1980s, and is now up again to nearly 40 at the moment that I write this sentence. Europe still has 45 languages, each with its own modified alphabet, and even greater cultural diversity. The disagreements that continue today to frustrate even modest attempts at European unification through the European Economic Community (EEC) are symptomatic of Europe’s ingrained commitment to disunity.
As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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“Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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“a society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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“Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals played decisive roles in the European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific islanders.
Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.
The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.
Although the first known human cases in the United States appeared only as recently as 1962, Lyme disease is already reaching epidemic proportions in many parts of our country.
why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than those of the Fertile Crescent or China or India, the ones that colonized America and Australia, took the lead in technology, and became politically and economically dominant in the modern world?
Radiocarbon is plagued by numerous technical problems, of which two deserve mention here. One is that radiocarbon dating until the 1980s required relatively large amounts of carbon (a few grams), much more than the amount in small seeds or bones. Hence scientists instead often had to resort to dating material recovered nearby at the same site and believed to be “associated with” the food remains—that is, to have been deposited simultaneously by the people who left the food. A typical choice of “associated” material is charcoal from fires.
Horse. Wild ancestor: now extinct wild horses of southern Russia; a different subspecies of the same species survived in the wild to modern times as Przewalski’s horse of Mongolia. Now worldwide.
Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican
In effect, the Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.
the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.
A second problem in radiocarbon dating is that the carbon 14 / carbon 12 ratio of the atmosphere is in fact not rigidly constant but fluctuates slightly with time, so calculations of radiocarbon dates based on the assumption of a constant ratio are subject to small systematic errors.
All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity. While Sumerian and Mesoamerican languages bear no special relation to each other among the world’s languages, both raised similar basic issues in reducing them to writing. The solutions that Sumerians invented before 3000 B.C. were reinvented, halfway around the world, by early Mesoamerican Indians before 600 B.C.
From books, the Spaniards knew of many contemporary civilizations remote from Europe, and about several thousand years of European history. Pizarro explicitly modeled his ambush of Atahuallpa on the successful strategy of Cortés. In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trap and Atahuallpa to walk into it.
Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band’s own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands. With the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings, and bureaucrats. Such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains but also to maintaining standing armies, sending out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars of conquest.
Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han’gŭl alphabet.
Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick. Yet their stone tools were still crude by comparison with modern New Guineans’ polished stone axes and were usually not yet made in standardized diverse shapes, each with a clearly recognizable function.
America’s patriotic song “America the Beautiful” invokes our spacious skies, our amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea. Actually, that song reverses geographic realities. As in Africa, in the Americas the spread of native crops and domestic animals was slowed by constricted skies and environmental barriers. No waves of native grain ever stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of North America, from Canada to Patagonia, or from Egypt to South Africa, while amber waves of wheat and barley came to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the spacious skies of Eurasia. That faster spread of Eurasian agriculture, compared with that of Native American and sub-Saharan African agriculture, played a role (as the next part of this book will show) in the more rapid diffusion of Eurasian writing, metallurgy, technology, and empires.
or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).
Hence the real problem in understanding China’s loss of political and technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China’s chronic unity and Europe’s chronic disunity. The answer is again suggested by maps (see page 399). Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece, Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway / Sweden. China’s coastline is much smoother, and only the nearby Korean Peninsula attained separate importance. Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert their political independence and to maintain their own languages and ethnicities, and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major independent European power. But even China’s two largest islands, Taiwan and Hainan, have each less than half the area of Ireland; neither was a major independent power until Taiwan’s emergence in recent decades; and Japan’s geographic isolation kept it until recently much more isolated politically from the Asian mainland than Britain has been from mainland Europe. Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic, and political units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian border mountains), while China’s mountains east of the Tibetan plateau are much less formidable barriers. China’s heartland is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems (eventually linked by canals). As a result, China very early became dominated by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single core. Europe’s two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and connect much less of Europe. Unlike China, Europe has many scattered small core areas, none big enough to dominate the others for long, and each the center of chronically independent states.
In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools. The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others.
Individuals in crisis often receive help from friends, just as nations in crisis may recruit help from allied nations. Individuals in crisis may model their solutions on ways in which they see other individuals addressing similar crises; nations in crisis may borrow and adapt solutions already devised by other nations facing similar problems. Individuals in crisis may derive self-confidence from having survived previous crises; so do nations.
A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.
With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori had to remain in the Chathams, and to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization.
Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka
Fueron muchos más los indígenas americanos que murieron en la cama por gérmenes euroasiáticos que en los campos de batalla por las armas y las espadas europeas.
Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest;
Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. The visitor might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four-hour clock on which one hour of clock-time represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 pm we adopted agriculture. In retrospect, the decision was inevitable, and there is now no question of turning back. But as our second midnight approaches, will the present plight of African peasants gradually spread to engulf all of us? Or, will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us except in mixed form?
WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us
But not even ardent nut lovers eat wild almonds, of which a few dozen contain enough cyanide (the poison used in Nazi gas chambers) to kill us. The forest is full of many other plants deemed inedible.
The humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly evolved germs, but those humans then evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases. When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed. Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals played decisive roles in the European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific islanders.
Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.
Plant domestication may be defined 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.
The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.
our cognitive abilities as adults are heavily influenced by the social environment that we experienced during childhood, making it hard to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences.
Archaeologists often distinguish calibrated from uncalibrated dates by writing the former in upper-case letters and the latter in lower-case letters (for example, 3000 B.C. vs. 3000 B.C., respectively).
tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is.
Almost everywhere else in the world, my archaeologist friends have an uphill struggle to convince governments that what archaeologists do has any conceivable practical value. They try to get funding agencies to understand that studies of the fates of past societies may help us understand what could happen to societies living in that same area today. In particular, they reason, environmental damage that developed in the past could develop again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Most governments ignore these pleas of archaeologists.
Pleistocene
society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole.
Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flattest, most infertile, climatically most unpredictable, and biologically most impoverished continent.
The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise. As I previously
Those religions arose among peoples speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively.
After the arrival of Europeans, the Big Island’s King Kamehameha I rapidly proceeded with the consolidation of the largest islands by purchasing European guns and ships to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu.
Children in the New Guinea highlands have the swollen bellies characteristic of a high-bulk but protein-deficient diet. New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat. Protein starvation is probably also the ultimate reason why cannibalism was widespread in traditional New Guinea highland societies.
The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.
Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and
The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion. Hawaiian chiefs were typical of chiefs elsewhere, in asserting divinity, divine descent, or at least a hotline to the gods. The chief claimed to serve the people by interceding for them with the gods and reciting the ritual formulas required to obtain rain, good harvests, and success in fishing.
All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.
Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a First World lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world’s 7.5 billion people enjoy it.
Another is pottery, which may have arisen from observations of the behavior of clay, a very widespread natural material, when dried or heated. Pottery appeared in Japan around 14,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent and China by around 10,000 years ago, and in Amazonia, Africa’s Sahel zone, the U.S. Southeast, and Mexico thereafter.
plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers’ domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
Yes, world history is indeed such an onion! But that peeling back of the onion’s layers is fascinating, challenging—and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to grasp our past’s lessons for our future.
If our ethical code makes a purely arbitrary distinction between humans and all other species, then we have a code based on naked selfishness devoid of any higher principle.
Finland is world-famous for its architects and decorators, who know how to produce beautiful effects in simple ways. On my first visit to Finland, I remember being invited into the living room of one of my host’s homes, and immediately thinking to myself, “This is the most beautiful room that I’ve ever seen!” On reflection, I then wondered why I found it so beautiful, because the room was a nearly-empty cubicle with just a few pieces of simple furniture. But the materials and form of the room, and those few pieces of furniture, were typically Finnish in their simplicity and beauty
niche information.” When I was a teenager, cable TV didn’t exist; the first TV program of any sort didn’t come to my city of Boston until 1948; and for years thereafter, we Americans got our news from just three big TV networks, three major weekly newsmagazines, and newspapers. Most Americans shared those same sources of information, none of which was clearly identified with conservative or liberal views, and none of which slanted its information heavily. Now, with the rise of cable TV, news websites, and Facebook, and with the decline of broad-market weekly print newsmagazines, Americans choose their source of information according to their pre-existing views.
Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.
The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.
One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.
Similarly, in an autocatalytic expanison of a human population, some initial advantages that a people gains (such as technological advantages) bring them profits or discoveries, which in turn stimulate more people to seek profits or discoveries, which result in even more profits and discoveries stimulating even more people to set out, until that people has filled up all the areas available to them with those advantages, at which point the autocatalytic expansion ceases to catalyze itself and runs out of steam.
Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.
For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, “The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven’t found a solution to that dilemma.
breeds of dogs were developed and raised for food in Aztec Mexico, Polynesia, and ancient China.
By the same token, the overwhelmingly most important human population problem for the world as a whole is not the high rate of population increase in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other poor Third World countries, although that certainly does pose a problem for Kenya and Rwanda themselves, and although that is the population problem most discussed. Instead, the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact, as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World individuals moving to the First World and adopting First World living standards.
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.
If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them no so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.
the virus responsible for Korean hemorrhagic fever broadcasts itself in the urine of mice. For modification of a host’s behavior, nothing matches rabies virus, which not only gets into the saliva of an infected dog but drives the dog into a frenzy of biting and thus infecting many new victims.
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. While this book is thus ultimately
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.
For a similar example in humans, we have only to consider the surprising evolution of syphilis. Today, our two immediate associations to syphilis are genital sores and a very slowly developing disease, leading to the death of many untreated victims only after many years. However, when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today. Apparently, just as with myxomatosis, those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spirochete offspring into more victims.
small changes at a lower level of organization can lead to emergent changes at a higher level. A typical example is the effect of that one truck driver’s braking response, in Hitler’s nearly fatal traffic accident of 1930, on the lives of a hundred million people who were killed or wounded in World War II.
Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do. Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. If those first farmers could have foreseen the consequences of adopting food production, they might not have opted to do so. Why, unable to foresee the result, did they nevertheless make that choice?
In human societies possessing domestic animals, livestock fed more people in four distinct ways: by furnishing meat, milk, and fertilizer and by pulling plows.
When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to this debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention. Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.
When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations. That’s a good way to proceed if the old and new situations are truly analogies, but it can be dangerous if they are only superficially similar.
But the line most familiar to European and American readers is the one that led via the Phoenicians to the Greeks by the early eighth century B.C., thence to the Etruscans in the same century, and in the next century to the Romans, whose alphabet with slight modifications is the one used to print this book.
Problems of Captive Breeding. We humans don’t like to have sex under the watchful eyes of others; some potentially valuable animal species don’t like to, either. That’s what derailed attempts to domesticate cheetahs, the swiftest of all land animals, despite our strong motivation to do so for thousands of years.
New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.
Atahuallpa’s presence at Cajamarca thus highlights one of the key factors in world history: diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, by decimating many peoples on other continents.
the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.
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. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents.
even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond.
Some of those solutions include halting population growth, limiting or eliminating nuclear weapons, developing peaceful means for solving international disputes, reducing our impact on the environment, and preserving species and natural habitats.
That envoy saw the Spaniards at their most disorganized, told Atahuallpa that they were not fighting men, and that he could tie them all up if given 200 Indians.
Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth.”
La historia de las interacciones de los pueblos distintos es lo que configuró el mundo moderno mediante la conquista, las epidemias y el genocidio.
Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities. Nevertheless,
Similarly, throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.
New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world’s land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world’s 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.
After people reached Australia, that continent lost its giant kangaroos, its ‘marsupial lion’, and other giant marsupials.
For the Fertile Crescent, the answer is clear. Once it had lost the head start that it had enjoyed thanks to its locally available concentration of domesticable wild plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent possessed no further compelling geographic advantages. The disappearance of that head start can be traced in detail, as the westward shift in powerful empires. After the rise of Fertile Crescent states in the fourth millennium B.C., the center of power initially remained in the Fertile Crescent, rotating between empires such as those of Babylon, the Hittites, Assyria, and Persia. With the Greek conquest of all advanced societies from Greece east to India under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C., power finally made its first shift irrevocably westward. It shifted farther west with Rome’s conquest of Greece in the second century B.C., and after the fall of the Roman Empire it eventually moved again, to western and northern Europe. The major factor behind these shifts becomes obvious as soon as one compares the modern Fertile Crescent with ancient descriptions of it. Today, the expressions “Fertile Crescent” and “world leader in food production” are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. Today’s ephemeral wealth of some of the region’s nations, based on the single nonrenewable resource of oil, conceals the region’s long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty in feeding itself.
human genetic diversity is highest in Africa; perhaps more-diverse humans would collectively produce more-diverse inventions.
plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents.
Here, the results of recent molecular biological studies are illuminating in linking germs to the rise of food production, in Eurasia much more than in the Americas.
The biggest adjustment I had to make on moving from New Guinea to the U.S. was my lack of freedom. Children have much more freedom in New Guinea. In the U.S. I was not allowed to climb trees. I was always climbing trees in New Guinea; I still like to climb trees. When my brother and I came back to California and moved into our house there, one of the first things we did was to climb a tree and build a tree house; other families thought that was weird. The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Most New Guineans don’t have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn’t have signs saying ‘Jump at your own risk,’ because it’s obvious. Why would I jump unless I’m prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible. In New Guinea I was able to grow up, play creatively, and explore the outdoors and nature freely, with the obligatory element of risk, however well managed, that is absent from the average risk-averse American childhood. I had the richest upbringing possible, an upbringing inconceivable for Americans.
Immediate reasons for Pizarro’s success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing.
natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
Some Austronesian words borrowed into English include ‘taboo’ and ‘tattoo’ (from a Polynesian language), ‘boondocks’ (from the Tagalog language of the Philippines), and ‘amok,’ ‘batik,’ and ‘orangutan’ (from Malay).
When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed.
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.
The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.
Molecular studies (of so-called mitochondrial DNA) were initially also interpreted in terms of an African origin of modern humans, though the meaning of those molecular findings is currently in doubt.
The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and conventionally known as Java man
Eurasia’s east–west major axis, unlike the Americas’ north–south major axis, permitted diffusion without change in latitude and associated environmental variables. In contrast to Eurasia’s consistent east–west breadth, the New World was constricted over the whole length of Central America and especially at Panama.
In Africa as elsewhere in the world, some peoples were much “luckier” than others, in the suites of domesticable wild plant and animal species that they inherited from their environment.
Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.
The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today), or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. They concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods.