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red sexy prom dresses New Arrival Red Sexy Slit Prom Dresses, A-Line Backless Prom Dresses, – Dairy BridalNew Arrival Red Sexy Slit Prom Dresses, A Line Backless Prom Dresses, D1291 The dress is fully lined, 4 bones in the bodice, chest pad in the bust, lace up back or zipper back are all available, total 126 colors are available. This dress could be custom made, there are no extra cost to do custom size and color. Description of dress 1, Material: elastic silk like satin . 2, Color, there are 126 colors are available, please contact us for more colors 3,
New Arrival Red Sexy Slit Prom Dresses, A-Line Backless Prom Dresses, D1291
The dress is fully lined, 4 bones in the bodice, chest pad in the bust, lace up back or zipper back are all available, total 126 colors are available.
This dress could be custom made, there are no extra cost to do custom size and color.
Description of dress
1, Material: elastic silk like satin .
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4.3 ★★★★★
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★★★★★ 4
Great scope and central thesis, but tries too hard
[Strong 3.5 stars for its scope and development of the central thesis, but loses points for trying too hard to explain away non-European cultural failures.]
The first line of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning opus is: "This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years." His central thesis is that luck of genetic distribution of domesticable plants and animals, particularly cereals and large mammals, gave a tremendous leg up to western Eurasia in the development of civilization. In other words, it wasn't poor choices or innate inferiority that caused most of the world to be dominated by European culture -- just luck.
In a book with greatly wider scope than most nonfiction Pulitzer winners, Diamond pulls together long-term threads of farming, herding, languages, disease, technology, government, and religion. He attempts to explain how trends in all these disparate areas rather inexorably led to the cultural and economic state of the world today. While many of the author's arguments are subject to debate, the writing is lucid; it's easy to see why the Pulitzer committee gave Diamon the prize.
To take to task all the debatable points in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" would be a huge undertaking. I'll try to highlight a few.
Diamond argues that the temperate Mediterranean climate (featuring wet winters and dry summers) of southwest Asia aided greatly in early development, then has to explain why similar climates in California, Chile, and southwest Australia didn't spur development in those places. Human actions (particularly deforestation and overgrazing) have turned what used to be called the "Fertile Crescent" into a wasteland, whereas this didn't happen in the similar southern European area. Thus southwestern Asia possessed the seeds of human development, but the locals squandered their head start. At that point Europe and eastern Asia had an equal chance of pulling ahead, and Diamond proposes that the geographical fragmentation of Europe gave it a competitive advantage over China's cohesiveness. But because he earlier claims that easy movement (for the spread of domesticable species) gave Europe a competitive advantage over America and Africa, this argument is not compelling.
Diamond thinks that the different parts of the world were on a developmental par about 13,000 years ago. At that time there were many more potentially domesticable large mammals in the Americas than there are now. The evidence as to what the human presence at that time is mixed, but Diamond pushes hard to dispute evidence of any prior human occupation. He favors the "Clovis first" theory, which has humans first entering from Siberia across the ice age Bering land bridge not more than 13,000 years ago, carrying stone "Clovis point" weapons. Clovis points have been found in large numbers in mammoth carcasses in North America, and Diamond thinks they were developed in Asia and transported across Beringia. Mammoths are one of the many now-extinct large mammals. From the mammoth kill evidence, Diamond assumes hunting by immigrants from Siberia caused the extinction of not just mammoths but horses, elephants, lions, and all the other megafauna. But there are several problems with this argument. Firstly, there are more recent findings than those Diamond disputes to back up the earlier human occupation theory. Secondly, there are no Clovis points north of British Columbia, which would mean these genocidal immigrants fasted all through Alaska. And thirdly, while there are thousands of Clovis points in mammoth skeletons, to date we've found just ONE clovis point in an American horse carcass, and NONE in elephants, lions, or giraffes -- all at one time widely found in North America.
All of this debate for later occupation of the Americas appears designed to buttress a secondary argument that American development got started too late to catch up with the Eurasians. But ironically, the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, linked to a single overwhelming swarm of human invaders, argues against Jared Diamond's central thesis. If he's right, it WAS the Native Americans' own fault that they were later overrun by Europeans on horses, becaused they killed and ate all the existing horses on arrival.
Diamond also has to resort to some hand-waving to explain why independent Mesoamerican invention of writing and wheels (used only in toys, rather than tools like wheelbarrows) never went anywhere. Similar weak arguments are used to explain why China went into cultural stagnation centuries ago. Ultimately, the author tries too hard to make all of history fit his model.
In trying to explain why superior technology isn't necessarily accepted, Diamond trots out the old myth about the Dvorak keyboard being superior to the standard QWERTY layout, yet never finding much demand. However, Diamond's book came out in 1997, and the Dvorak myth had been debunked 7 years previously (Journal of Law & Economics vol. XXXIII (April 1990)). Diamond is left with no argument other than cultural superiority to explain why societies that adopt better technology succeed, and he rejects that position a priori.
In his professional career the author has spent much time working in New Guinea. He thinks constant local warfare has made the average surviving New Guinea tribesman superior to the average descendant of European culture, and wants to explain why the people of New Guinea have so little "cargo" (wealth). But Diamond's focus on New Guinea as a model for global development is more elucidating to the author than to his readers.
There are some problems with the book layout itself, including a surprisingly poor index. For instance, trying to look up horse extinctions in the Americas, I found references to horses under "Americas, animal extinctions in" that didn't appear under "horses, in Americas". Also, there are a variety of different maps with different levels of detail to show the migrations of peoples, languages, and domestic species. It's necessary to flip back and forth between the maps to follow the narrative thread.
This is a good book to read, but a skeptical perspective is necessary while doing so.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2003
★★★★★ 3
Guns Germs & Steel Book Review
Format: Hardcover
Guns, Germs, And Steel is an influential treatise of competitive plausibility regarding the challenging question why population groups on different continents experienced widely divergent paths of development. Contrary to the voluminous objections cited in the many of the revisionist historians and anthropologists, the famous biologist Jared Diamond tackles the most important question of global history in one compelling volume: "Why did Europeans come to dominate the New World?" This question has been answered by others before and Diamond's idea that Europe's geography is the cause geographical determinism has also been proposed before. Any student of history or anthropology can drag up a case or two of this thesis. Baron Montaigne, for example, suggested that Europe's predominance curtailed from its superior government, which could be derived directly from the coolness of its climate. However as an enthusiastic proponent of environmental determinism, Jared Diamond presents a set of premises consistent with evidence provided from a wide range of disciplines, but he does not attempt to answer the question of genetic diversity, including segregated intelligence among racial groups as many reviewers have inferred. If anything, implicitly, the author appears to support promulgations of differentiated intelligences; he sets out to demonstrate intelligence was not the root cause to Eurasian dominance.
The deep significance of this book is that Diamond's thesis is not simply idle conjecture. He proves that the Eurasian land mass had by far the best biological resources with which to develop agricultural societies, and was thus more able to form large, coherent, and powerful social entities. In order to back this idea, Diamond introduces a set of well-researched data on what kinds of plants and animals are necessary to support a farming society. He investigates the biological resources available to potential farmers in all parts of the world. The people of Eurasia had access to a suite of plants and animals that provided for their needs. Potential farmers in other parts of the world did not have such access and so, their fertile soil went uncultivated. Beginning 13,000 years ago, the author illuminated the circumstances that may have smoothed growth for some groups and repressed the same for others. Diamond accepts the out of Africa theory for the dispersion of Homo sapiens to the other continents as well as the importance of location that they went. For Diamond, food production is the definitive cause of capricious rates of development for different peoples. He demonstrates how the abundance of wild plants subject to domestication and availability of large mammals served as immediate factors to transition from hunter/gatherer bands and tribes to sedentary agriculturally based chiefdoms and states. In this context, Eurasia was home to important number of crops and animals that readily and successfully domesticated. This domestication resulted in mass food production, which the author claims is the "ultimate" cause of Western dominance. Food production in turn, led to a number of adjoining causes related to the rise of the West:- farms and animal herds led to stationary populations and excess food to support a specialized class of bureaucrats and soldiers and it also increased population density.
After establishing this strong foundation, Diamond falls into reiterating ideas about the creation of large-scale societies. These ideas, while clichéd, are still enthralling and Diamond presents them in a very clear and well-written way. His other major original contribution comes when he discusses the diseases that helped the Old World conquer the New World. Building on his earlier chapters dealing with Old-World domesticated animals, he shows that these very animals were the sources of the major plagues such as smallpox which virtually annihilated New World populations. The fact that Old World people had immunities to these diseases was a direct result of their agricultural head-start. Finally, Diamond concludes, the unique East-West axis of Eurasia and the absence of any impenetrable geographic barriers fostered the spread of new crops, technologies which gave rise to many competing communities, whose competition further increased the western lead over the rest of the world.
These technical details, while complete, are presented in a very easy to fathomable way and Diamond's writing style is fun and engaging. Diamond's arguments are persuasive on the surface, and even the prevalent skeptic will have reason for pause after reading his book.
However, I have some concerns with respect to the credibility of this book. I felt that I had to second guess most of his evidence, because it was equivocal, lacking or incorrect. Firstly, Diamond uses the term "Eurasian" to describe cultures and societies. However, the term is essentially used to describe a geographical landmass or tectonic plates. All the way through the book, he uses the term "Eurasian" when it supports his hypothesis and replaces the term with European or western Eurasian to support another part of his thesis. He does not separate Europe and Asia to explain societies and cultures even though Europe and Asia contain different religions, cultures and languages. But then again, he separates "North Africa" from "Sub-Saharan Africa" even though they are part of the same continental landmass and have more commonalties. On page 161, Diamond attempts to explain his reasoning behind using the broad and vague term "Eurasian" when he states that: "my use of the term "Eurasia" includes in several cases North Africa, which biogeographically and in many aspects of human culture is more closely related to Eurasia than to sub-Saharan Africa". I believe Diamond confuses contemporary North African culture with the cultures that inhabited Northern Africa from 10,000 BC to 8th century AD. For example, from pre-dynastic to the mid-late stages of the Ancient Egyptian civilization, the ancient Egyptians had contact and traded with cultures in Ethiopia (sub-Saharan Africa). The Ancient Egyptian and Amharic language (Ethiopia) belong to the same language group which is Afro-Asiatic, and also belong to the same sub language group, which is Semitic. Diamond makes vague generalities in supporting his thesis and fails to engage significant evidence that challenges his thesis.
In addition, when studying the development of different cultures and the spread of food production and technology, he modifies the definition of different terms to fit his hypothesis. Any hypothesis can be supported if you continuously alter the variables you are challenging. I found this to be the most distracting facet of this book. He does this with the terms "North African" and "Sub-Saharan African" which are terms that carried little meaning between 13,000 BC until the 7th century, but are used to separate the significant accomplishments of Ancient Egyptians (Africans) with other Africans. On page 92, he states that: "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." That statement is false, since written records of the Ancient Egyptian (African) language have been dated from about 3200 BC, making it the oldest and longest documented language. The Sumerian language, as Diamond claims is the oldest language, developed around 3000 BC. Additionally, a recent archaeological discovery has suggested that some Gerzean pottery with early hieroglyphics located in Egypt could have originated since 4000 BC.
Ancient Egyptians were also the first to develop mathematic concepts such as the Decimal system and science such as astronomy and medicine during that time period and significantly influenced Greek science and mathematics. Diamond does not mention any of this and I believe that he leaves out noteworthy attainments by non-Europeans to support his thesis. Throughout the book, Diamond also poses the following question in the background: "Why were Eurasians, rather than Native Americans or sub-Saharan Africans, the ones to invent firearms, oceangoing ships, and steel equipment?" Nevertheless, Diamond does not engage in the most basic question relating to the motivations of these cultures: Did Native Americans or Sub-Saharan Africans have a need for firearms/oceangoing ships? More to the point, did the Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and other so-called non-Eurasians, want firearms or oceangoing ships? The answer would have forced Diamond to research the cultures and religions of Native Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans in more detail, rather than explaining it with geography and/or food production.
Also, he does not include the significant accomplishments of Ancient Egypt, including papyrus, an early form of paper that originated in Africa not Europe or Asia. On page 190, Diamond states that: "Continental differences in axis orientation affected the diffusion not only of food production but also of other technologies and inventions." It is known that Ancient Egyptian technology including scientific or medical discoveries traveled along the north or south axis towards the Middle-east and eventually to ancient Greece. Diamond doesn't mention any of this, which further questions the credibility of the book. Another problem with Diamond's style is that he seems to negate the influences of Non-Europeans, specifically Africa and China, to the current Western hegemony such as gunpowder from China, natural resources from Africa by either not mentioning them at all or under-emphasizing their importance. It is quite likely that without the influences from non-European civilizations that current Western hegemony would not exist today. He also makes downright false statements such as in page 247 when he states that: "Delivered in grenades, rockets, and torpedoes, those incendiaries played a key role in Islam's eventual defeat of the Crusaders." According to historical records, there is no evidence to suggest that grenades, rockets and torpedoes were used during the Crusades.
I agree that the domestication of plants and animals could predispose agriculturalists to further development. However, geography and domestication of animals and plants alone is inadequate to support his thesis without explaining the role of the people and societies occupying the geography. Geography might be a factor to explain how Western Civilization became the dominant civilization in the world today. Though, European civilization did not arise in a vacuum. Regardless of the plausible geographic advantage of Europe and Asia, factors such as political intentions, morals, ethics, religion and culture all served to explain why some civilizations were determined to expand and build empires through conquest, while others did not. Diamond claims that his theories offer an alternative explanation to traditional racist dogma. Conversely, I believe his theories do just the opposite. By stating that Europeans developed into the dominant civilization by "chance" or "luck" with respect to geography strengthens racist theories that European civilization was "destined" to become the most powerful.
Moreover, Diamond dismisses politics, religion, culture, individuals, and timing. For example, consider Cortez's victory over the Aztecs. Cortez's victory was not assured. Many elements had to be aligned for a few hundred Spaniards to overcome a mighty empire. The odds were really in Montezuma's favor. Even with horses, armor, and guns, the Aztecs were easily a match for Cortez. The Spanish armor was superfluous. According to Keegan, they even shed their heavy armor in favor of the native quilt vests. The firearms at that time were not quick to reload, so sheer numbers could have overwhelmed the Spanish. The Aztecs lost because of politics, religion, and individuals. The brutal politics and religion of the Aztecs made their subjects hate them. The Spanish were immediately supported with armies and food by the smaller nations like the Totonacs that hated the Aztecs for their cruelty. The insatiable appetite of the Aztec gods for human sacrifices insured that Cortez found ready allies. If either Montezuma or Cortez had been composed of slightly different temperaments the war could easily have gone the other way. Had Montezuma been more decisive, he could have had Cortez killed at the coast. Had Cortez not been so incredibly determined to take the country, he could have just returned to Spain with a load of the early gold presents sent to him.
History is determined by far more than geography, plants, and animals. Culture, religion, individuals, politics, and timing all play important roles. My criticisms have nothing to do with "political correctness", but rather I take issue with Diamond's style of revisionist history that does not emphasize the influence and significance of non-European civilizations towards current Western civilization. While reading the book, I was frequently second guessing the facts of Jared Diamond because they were either inexact or vague.
In closing, as an introduction to anthropology and a cogent depiction of one school of thought on the rise of the West this book is marvelous. However, it needs to be approached with an open-mind as it has some of its faults. Reflect on the thesis and the supporting evidence, and then draw your own conclusions. Love it or hate it, you owe it to yourself to read this book. As for me, this book is one of the best revisionist histories on the Ancient Civilizations but as the case with revisionist history, it has its share of one sided and extreme arguments. It is a good book but not great. Still, it is very simple to read and very easy to cognize which I think deserves the Pulitzer Prize it won.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2011
★★★★★ 5
One of my favorite books and the inspiration for my World Regional Geography courses that I teach.
Format: Hardcover
Two decades ago when I served in the Missouri National Guard we had an extended drill weekend at Ft. Leonard Wood for a live fire artillery exercise. This was a three day drill and I remember it clearly because it was the same weekend as Princess Diana’s funeral on September 6, 1997. I had been at the local library the day before we rolled out and saw an interesting book that promised to explain why western civilization had been the one to colonize the New World and rise to ascendency over much of the world for a long period of time. That had always been an interesting question for me and one which many people do not know the answer to. I checked out the book and during some downtime I began to read. To say that the book grabbed my attention is an understatement. I started it on Friday and finished it on Saturday. My whole conception of how history had seen the rise of Western Civilization was fundamentally altered and would never be the same.
At the time I thought that using Guns, Germs, and Steel as an educational tool would be a great idea. My dream of teaching history had never been realized and in 1997 seemed like it would never happen. However, history is full of strange things and in 2009 I got the chance to return to college and pick up my degrees. I began teaching American History in 2013 and was then asked to teach World Regional Geography for the Spring 2014 semester. They handed me a textbook and said, “Good luck.” As I drove back home I considered how I would teach this course and my mind recalled Jared Diamond and his Pulitzer Prize winning book. To make the story short, I built a course that used the textbook, Diamond’s book, and the National Geographic series based on the book.
Obviously I take what Diamond said in Guns, Germs, and Steel seriously. I think Diamond did some outstanding work in doing three decades of research and then writing a book which to me is resonates with readers. For many years the idea that Western Civilization was superior to any other form has been the dominant world view. Diamond rejects that completely by saying Western Civilization had advantages that others did not have due to geography, or literally where it was. When you stop and think about it, why were the Europeans so superior to others for so long? Was it their race, their ideals, or what? Diamond said it was because of where they started that they developed into the world spanning civilization we know.
What advantages did the Europeans have over others? They arrived with technology superior to all others, were better organized, and had the lethal gift of germs which in the Americas killed over half the population and was the biggest reason as to why the Europeans took those lands over. When Diamond explored the germ theory he realized that these germs came from contact with domesticated mammals such as horses, cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats. These same mammals were what enabled Europeans to transport materials as well as have a convenient food supply and a power source such as horses pulling plows.
This idea works when you look at the Americas and Australia, but not when you look at Africa and Asia. The lethality of germs did not affect the people in those regions like it did the Americas. In fact, some of the diseases in Africa killed the Europeans and prevented them for exploiting Sub-Saharan Africa for centuries. Some of these germs are now known to have come from Asia as well along with domestic animals that came from there. Many of the larger mammals Europe had were also found in Asia. In fact, some of the technology such as gunpowder came from Asia as well. Diamond acknowledged this in his book and sought to explain why Europe was able to expand while Asia did not.
This is something I really stress in my class and it is something which the book and National Geographic series does not explore as deeply as it should. Diamond saw a decision made in the 15th century by a Chinese emperor as being the decisive event that altered human history. At that point China was the leading power in the world. It had a great navy, the largest country, gunpowder, advanced technology and far more people thanks to its agricultural practices than any other nation at that time. The decision by emperors in China’s Ming dynasty led to China losing its technological advantage over Europe although no one had any idea that this was happening. These decisions or orders are called Haijin.
Diamond did not explore this in any depth other than to point to it and say that China’s inward looking policies which had existed for centuries were the result of its location, its geography. Its singular form of government used Haijin to build up its power at the expense of expanding China’s culture and boundaries. There is a lot here to work with, but Diamond seems to casually bring it up in the book’s epilogue. Instead he focuses heavily on the Americas where his theory of environmental determinism is the strongest. I think he gets the theory right, but in the case of Asia he needed to go deeper.
Since Diamond is an ornithologist by education, and his world journey’s focused on New Guinea, I think his point of view was heavily influenced through his contact with hunter-gatherers. His theory is at its weakest in Asia and specifically China. That again reflects his preference for focusing on one type of people versus another. This does not mean his theory is wrong. It just needs expansion and I do not think Diamond will be doing that any time soon. His recent works have dealt with different ideas.
Even with this glaring problem, I think this book is outstanding. It does answer the question of why Western Civilization dominated the world for the most part. For my geography class it is a wonderful tool. I focus heavily on how man domesticated two grains from the Middle East, wheat and barley, and built Western Civilization upon them. Coupled with the domestication of large mammals, the forerunners of Western Civilization spread through Europe. Geography played a huge role in why it went west and why there are so many differences between East and West on a cultural level. It also explains why there are such huge differences between North Africa and the lands to the south of the Sahara.
The role of geography in shaping mankind is without a doubt the single underlying reason as to why history occurred like it did. This is really hard for students to understand because they seem to have been taught a much different concept prior to taking a geography course. Only by explaining the human-environment interaction do students begin to realize that geography caused man to make decisions which would reverberate for millennia. The people of the Middle East followed the Tigris and Euphrates rivers northwest into Anatolia and out of the desert. Man’s movement west, north, and south with the crops and animals of the Middle East were shaped by geographical barriers.
Diamond points out how man overcame these barriers over time. The civilization that was able to do so developed greater technologies than others. He points to both European and Chinese naval developments in this regard. China’s need to continue to build its naval forces was negligible due to a lack of naval enemies while in Europe those enemies were often themselves as nations competed for resources and trade. Since China controlled all of its trade which was mostly internal or land based, its need for a navy was reduced. Europe surged ahead while China languished.
In my classes I point to the barriers as we explore the world’s regions. I show how these barriers played such big roles. We play a board game by Avalon Hill that helps to illustrate this as well. Diamond’s book plays a big role in my class and so do his theories. I find it really helps students take the principles and ideas from the first part of the class and begin to apply them to the world regions we study. They are able to make the mental leap to the realization that the people of the world are different for many reasons, the foremost being the place in which they live more than anything else. It helps them to break down and discard the erroneous belief which many of them have regarding their place in the world. Using Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel I am able to use Transformative Learning Theory to overcome the disorientating dilemma they find themselves in at the beginning of class.
I could build a new class out of Diamond’s book that encompasses geography, history, and sociology if my school would let me. In fact, I could build two classes out of it. One would focus on why Western Civilization developed like it did and expanded to the Americas while the second one would focus on the development of Eastern Civilization and its failure to expand beyond Asia itself. While courses exist that dive into those ideas, they are built around history more than anything else. Few instructors use environmental determinism in explaining how early mankind developed in the places it did. The ultimate objectives of these courses would be why they developed like they did, not just their history.
Diamond has written several other books such as Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, and The World Until Yesterday. He is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been awarded all kinds of prizes and awards for his research and work in multiple fields. I find it interesting that he began to study environmental history in his fifties which led to this book and many others. This to me is proof that you are not bound by formal rules regarding your education, but rather by using your interests coupled with the research capabilities your education has provided you new careers beckon. This book is a testament to following one’s interests and using one’s intellect. I highly recommend it to all readers. It is one of my favorite books and I have read through it multiple times.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2015
★★★★★ 5
Outstanding work of history, one of the best ever
_Guns, Germs, and Steel_ by Jared Diamond is one of the most informative, epic, well-written, and fascinating "macrohistory" books I have ever read. In this book, Diamond discussed the rise of complex human societies in the last 13,000 years, seeking to answer one fundamental question; why did some civilizations come to dominate others? Why did the Fertile Crescent and China for instance develop advanced societies with, as the title suggests, guns, germs, and steel, while other areas of the world, such as Polynesia, Australia, and the Americas, did not? Or in those cases where some civilizations were beginning to acquire such things, why did they get off to such a late start? Why did the Spanish conquer the Incans instead of vice versa?
In a nutshell, he concluded that societies developed differently on different continents not because of racial differences in attitudes or intelligence, but because of differences in continental environments. Advanced technology, centralized political organizations, writing, and professional armies (or simply put the military advantage of simply having large numbers of people), etc. could only emerge in dense, sedentary populations capable of accumulating food surpluses.
Unfortunately, domesticable wild plant and animal species needed for agriculture to arise were very unevenly distributed around the world, with the most valuable species concentrated in only nine small areas of the globe (Southwest Asia, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes and the adjacent Amazon basin, the eastern U.S., Africa's Sahel, West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea), all of which became the earliest homelands of agriculture and thus regions that got a head start on developing guns, germs, and steel.
Animals were vital to a society as a source of meat, milk products, fertilizer, transportation, leather, for military use, plow traction, and wool and those areas that lacked suitable animals to domesticate suffered accordingly in terms of societal development. The Late Pleistocene extinctions of large mammals in the Americas and Australia deprived humanity in those areas of potentially very valuable domesticable species. Of the big (over 100 pound) herbivores and omnivores, 148 potential candidates for domestication, they are mostly located in Eurasia (72 candidate species, versus 51 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 24 in the Americas, and 1 in Australia). Further, out of those candidates, only 14 were actually domesticated, 13 of them in Eurasia; what he called the "Major Five" - sheep, the goat, cow, pig, and horse, and the "Minor Nine" - the Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, mithan (wild ancestor the gaur, found primarily in India and Burma), and the one American one, the llama and alpaca (two well-differentiated breeds of the same species). The other 134 potential candidates were eliminated due to problems with diet, growth rate, problems of captive breeding, nasty disposition, tendency to panic, and/or social structure, any one problem enough to preclude domestication even in modern times. Of further interest, Southwest Asia had seven of the wild ancestors naturally occurring, a huge advantage.
In the world of plants there were similar disparities in distribution; of the 56 species of grass with the heaviest seeds, at least 10 times heavier than median species, Eurasia's Mediterranean zone had 32 of them, with barley and emmer wheat 3rd and 13th respectively in seed size. In contrast, of the 56 species, only 6 were found in East Asia, 4 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 11 in the Americas, and 2 in Australia.
Another set of differences lead to a variation in societal evolution in the case of plant and animal domestications as well as in technological innovations and political institutions, as most societies acquire much more from other societies than they invent themselves (his discussion on the evolution of writing and in particular the alphabet in this regard was fascinating). Diffusion and migration within and between continents played a very important role in the development of a society, and in some continents diffusion and migration was considerably easier, most rapid in Eurasia because of its east-west major axis and its relatively modest ecological and geographical barriers. As crops and animals depended strongly on climate and hence on latitude, huge areas ranging almost from the Atlantic to the Pacific were open to the movement of domesticated plants and animals. Diffusion was slower in Africa and especially in the Americas due to those continents north-south major axes (traveling just a few hundred or a thousand miles north or south can render a society's crops and animals completely unsuitable for use) and much more pronounced geographic and ecological barriers (such as the Sahara Desert in Africa). Similarly, diffusion in the last 6,000 years has been easiest from Eurasia to sub-Saharan Africa, while long completely absent between Eurasia and the Americas (isolated at low latitudes by broad oceans and at high latitudes by geography and by a climate suitable just for hunter-gatherers).
The last set of major factors he analyzed related to continental differences in area or total population size. A larger area or population meant more inventors, more competing societies, more innovations that exist to be adopted, and more pressure to adopt and retain those innovations, as those societies that fail to do so tend to be eliminated or absorbed by competing societies. Among the world's landmasses, area and the number of competing societies were greatest for Eurasia, while considerably smaller for Australia for instance. The Americas, despite their rather large total land area, were in effect fragmented by ecology and geography into a series of poorly connected smaller continents.
Relating to both population size and the "Eurasians' long intimacy with domestic animals" was the development of germs. Crowd diseases could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn farmers, nor perhaps would they develop at all, as only human association with cattle gave us for instance measles (evolved from rinderpest) and smallpox (evolved from cowpox).
Obviously I have just scratched the surface in my review. This is an excellent book that ties together findings in history, archaeology, paleontology, epidemiology, and linguistics in an extremely readable and informative format.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2005
★★★★★ 4
Monumental Thesis, Richly Researched & Carefully Argued
Motivating this book are two questions 1) When Spanish conquistador Pizzaro encountered Inca emperor Atahualpa, how did the former, with fewer than two hundred men overwhelm the latter with over 80,000? and 2) When the Europeans set up colonies on the island of new Guinea, why was it that they had so much stuff to trade, but the natives of the island had so little?
The answer to the first question is, of course, that the Spanish had Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond does an outstanding job arguing for the pivotal importance of Germs in the equation. He clearly explains - using the idea of germs - why Europeans overran the Americas and Australia but not Africa. His agument regarding steel is notably weaker; but I think it does support his thesis adequately. I failed to detect a compelling argument for why Europeans had guns but others did not.
The book's primary focus is on how civilization got started. He looks first at the cultivation of plants and then at the domestication of animals. Examining areas in Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, and Australia, he totes up the lists of suitable flora and fauna and evaluates their merits. He notes that it was the fertile crescent that harbored the most suitable grains, legumes (or pulses), and domesticable animals. No other location comes close to having this rich combination of natural resources. He shows that this explains the very early appearance of agricutlure and therefore of writing, religion, and law in this area (and in China).
He also shows how any human advancement would spread more quickly in Eurasia than it would within the Americas and Africa. This gives Eurasia a double advantage; it can harbor more people by virtue of its agricultural practices and each person has greater access to new ideas because of strong east-west trade currents. Thus cultures in Eurasia could easily adapt ideas based on those of other societies instead of creating them from scratch.
He concludes that any person who accepts his thesis of the forces shaping civilization - at least the necessary precondition to get started - would necessarily conclude that civilization's advances must inevitably run quickest on the Eurasian continent.
A large portion of the book is focussed on the factors influencing the establishement of an agricultural system that is capable of supporting a whole large class of non-agricultural workers. The assumption, I believe, is that we already know that this is the primary requirement for the birth of a civilization. Still I was looking forward to Diamond's take on what happens after we all learn to read and write. I was hoping he might explain the ascent of the west since 1000 BC or 1500 AD. But he does not.
He does not, for instance, argue why it was the British and Spanish, not the Turks and Indians who settled Australia and the Americas. This, perhaps is a different question. Yet it seems to be linked to the idea of frontiers and access to resources. For it is always when the full set of advanced cultural practices reach populations in the richest, most uncultivated frontiers and these ideas cast anew in the light of a new environment that civilization seems to gain its greatest momentum.
He uses Polynesia as a microcosm for the world. In this laboratory, a group of people with the same genetic cross-section and same cultural practices embarked on a grand venture to settle all the islands of the Pacific some two millenia ago or so. The systems of government they set up and the level of civilization they reached were highly dependent upon the agricultual productivity of their citizens. Colonists on small islands unsuitable for agriculture became hunter-gatherers and lived in egalitarian societies. Those in productive lands organized into small states with strong chiefs or kings, each with their own little standing armies.
The book is richly researched and solidly argued as far as it goes. But there are a handful of quibbles one might raise.
1) The author tends to repeat himself. As the book progresses, the portion of prose that is a restatement of something said before becomes so high that this reader found himself skipping whole chapters.
2) The author fails to provide a compelling argument about why China lagged Europe at some point after 1500. One wonders why the author did not simply use the argument at hand. Colonialism provided to Europe the raw materials necessary for industrial production. China was closed until two or three decades ago and so did not have adequate access to the raw materials that vaulted Europe and North America to their current place. The opening of China to the world has quickly closed this gap. In other words, the cultural practice that gave frontier states the advantage was the high value they realized in trade: of getting required natural resources and finished goods from other places instead of being closed off. The book's central thesis is that the first and most necessary condition for the success of a society lies in its access to the required resources, and that transport of goods and ideas is crucial to the success of this enterprise. For this book to fail to make this connection I find to be an astonishing lapse.
3) Unless it is hidden in one of the skipped chapters, Diamond never starts to answer the second motivating question about 'stuff', even though it is a simple and direct extension of his fairly robust argument.
This book is of crucial importance in counter-balancing our Darwinian view of the world. It was not that Europeans were better people by some genetic measure. (Darwin seemed to assume a single measure of fitness. But each environmental variable provides a different metric of fitness so the whole notion of one group being generally 'more fit' is utter nonsense.) It was that they had a body of technologies, cultural practices and diseases that naturally tended to overwhelm other groups. And that these ideas and practices (and sometimes diseases) are an inevitable advantage any agrarian or post agrarian society has over a less highly organized one. Europeans simply got a head start thanks to geography.
There is much to learn, and much to contemplate in this book. Read It.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2005
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