Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies Quotes
"Why did history unfold differently on different continents?"
"The roots of western Eurasian dominance in the modern world lie in the preliterate past before 3,000 B.C."
"History focused on western Eurasian societies completely bypasses the obvious big question."
"Why didn't capitalism flourish in Native Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, scientific inquiry in China, advanced technology in Native North America, and nasty germs in Aboriginal Australia?"
"The question, 'Why did human societies have such diverse fates?' has usually received racist answers."
"Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it."
"History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves."
"The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide."
"The rise of food production... ultimately led to the immediate factors permitting Pizarro’s triumph."
"History is not 'just one damn fact after another,' as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating."
"Jonathan Kingdon and Tim Flannery have noted that the colonization of Australia/New Guinea required humans to learn to deal with new environments they encountered."
"It was a hitherto unprecedented golden age of successive human population explosions."
"Perhaps those cycles of colonization, adaptation, and population explosion were what selected for the Great Leap Forward."
"With hindsight, we know that Eurasia was the one [continent where human societies developed most quickly]."
"The brutal outcome of this collision between the Moriori and the Maori could have been easily predicted."
"The tragedy of the Moriori resembles many other such tragedies in both the modern and the ancient world."
"Moriori and Maori history constitutes a brief, small-scale natural experiment that tests how environments affect human societies."
"Scientists must look for 'natural experiments,' in which something similar befell humans in the past."
"Polynesian history constitutes a natural experiment allowing us to study human adaptation."
"Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory."
"Humans concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff."
"Moderate but reliable returns are preferable to a fluctuating lifestyle with a high time-averaged rate of return but a substantial likelihood of starving to death."
"The first people who adopted food production could obviously not have been making a conscious choice or consciously striving toward farming as a goal."
"Food production tends to lead to increased population densities because it yields more edible calories per acre than does hunting-gathering."
"A gradual rise in population densities impelled people to obtain more food, by rewarding those who unconsciously took steps toward producing it."
"Once people began to produce food and become sedentary, they could shorten the birth spacing and produce still more people, requiring still more food."
"As population densities rose, food production became increasingly favored because it provided the increased food outputs needed to feed all those people."
"Different factors may have been decisive in different parts of the world."
"The invention of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process - one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle."
"In most areas of the globe suitable for food production, hunter-gatherers met one of two fates: either they were displaced by neighboring food producers, or else they survived only by adopting food production themselves."
"Such studies generally show that peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species."
"As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost."
"Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones."
"Knowledge of wild species was presumably even more detailed before the rise of food production, when everyone on Earth still depended entirely on wild species for food."
"The first farmers were heirs to that knowledge, accumulated through tens of thousands of years of nature observation by biologically modern humans living in intimate dependence on the natural world."
"The other, related question is whether ancient hunter-gatherers and farmers similarly put their ethnobiological knowledge to good use in selecting wild plants to gather and eventually to cultivate."
"Indeed, Mark Blumler's worldwide survey of locally available large-seeded wild grasses mentioned in this chapter, and the worldwide survey of locally available big mammals to be presented in the next chapter, agree in showing that all those areas of nonexistent or limited indigenous food production were deficient in wild ancestors of domesticable livestock and cereals."
"Instead, I note that regions differed greatly in their available pool of domesticable species, that they varied correspondingly in the date when local food production arose, and that food production had not yet arisen independently in some fertile regions as of modern times."
"Rapid spread of domesticates... is a major determinant of civilization."
"Agriculture's spread depends greatly on geographic and climatic factors."
"Difficulties of diffusion shape the course of human history."
"The spread of agriculture played a crucial role in shaping world history."
"The development of food production was a pivotal event in human history."
"The rise of dense human populations facilitated the evolution of epidemic diseases."
"The spread of writing marked a significant step in cultural evolution."
"Invention and diffusion of writing systems were crucial in transmitting knowledge."
"Blueprint copying and idea diffusion are key in the spread of technologies."
"The independent invention of writing is an extraordinary human achievement."
"The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots."
"The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions."
"All humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago."
"The band is the political, economic, and social organization that we inherited from our millions of years of evolutionary history."
"The chief's orders might be transmitted through one or two levels of bureaucrats, many of whom were themselves low-ranked chiefs."
"Kleptocracies with little public support run the risk of being overthrown, either by downtrodden commoners or by upstart would-be replacement kleptocrats."
"Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death."
"The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy."
"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 may either combine the offices of political leader and priest in a single person, or may support a separate group of kleptocrats."
"Shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other."
"The paramount chief's location may become the state's capital city."
"In democracies today, crucial knowledge is available to only a few individuals, who control the flow of information."
"Economic specialization is more extreme, to the point where not even farmers remain self-sufficient."
"Early states had state religions and standardized temples."
"States are organized on political and territorial lines, not on the kinship lines that defined bands, tribes, and chiefdoms."
"The longterm trend has still been toward large, complex societies, culminating in states."
"The official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally."
"To anyone familiar with any modern grouping of people, that's obvious."
"Within one century of European colonization, 40,000 years of Aboriginal traditions had been mostly swept away."
"The only societies that survived more or less intact were those in areas of northern and western Australia useless to Europeans."
"The resolution of this problem is simple. White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia."
"The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians."
"Before European settlement, the mainland United States was home to hundreds of Native American tribes and languages."
"All but one of the world's six most populous nations are melting pots that achieved political unification recently."
"China's apparent linguistic near-unity is also puzzling in view of the linguistic disunity of other long-settled parts of the world."
"We can use several types of reasoning to try to reconstruct the linguistic map of East Asia as of several thousand years ago."
"Another fragmented language group is the Austroasiatic family, whose most widely spoken languages are Vietnamese and Cambodian."
"China's size and ecological diversity spawned many separate local cultures, distinguishable archaeologically."
"China developed just a single well-attested writing system."
"China's head start in food production, technology, writing, and state formation had the consequence that Chinese innovations also contributed heavily to developments in neighboring regions."
"China became Chinese, and peoples from Thailand to Easter Island became their cousins."
"The Austronesian language family consists of four subfamilies, three of them confined to Taiwan and one widespread."
"The Austronesian expansion occupies a central place, as one of the most important phenomena to be explained."
"Pacific island history is encapsulated in an incident that happened when three Indonesian friends and I walked into a store in Jayapura."
"Tensions among the groups that Achmad, Wiwor, Sauakari, and Ping Wah represent dominate the politics of Indonesia."
"The Austronesian expansion was among the biggest population movements of the last 6,000 years."
"The population movement that brought Achmad's and Sauakari's ancestors to Java and New Guinea, respectively, termed the Austronesian expansion."
"The speedboat to Polynesia represents the last phase of Asian exploration, which began when Wiwor's ancestors spread through Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia."
"Native American farming served for a long time just as a small supplement to food acquisition by hunting-gathering."
"Eurasia's east-west major axis permitted diffusion without change in latitude and associated environmental variables."
"The limitations imposed by locally available domesticates in the New World are well illustrated by the transformations of Native American societies themselves."
"Some specific consequences of these barriers within the Americas deserve mention."
"Food production never diffused from the U.S. Southwest and Mississippi Valley to the modern American breadbaskets of California and Oregon."
"Mesoamerican corn and beans took 3,000 and 4,000 years, respectively, to cover the 700 miles from Mexico's farmlands to the eastern U.S. farmlands."
"European-transmitted epidemics made major contributions, by killing the emperors themselves, as well as a large fraction of the population."
"The end result has been the elimination of populous Native American societies from most temperate areas suitable for European food production."
"The original Native American population has been reduced by a debated large percentage: estimates for North America range up to 95 percent."
"The demographic shift of the last 500 years - the most massive shift on any continent except Australia - has its ultimate roots in developments between about 11,000 B.C. and A.D. 1."
"Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic, and political units by high mountains."
"Once China was finally unified, in 221 B.C., no other independent state ever had a chance of arising and persisting for long in China."