Guns, Germs, and Steel

I recenyly saw this on PBS, It was great and I agree with most of Jared;s Theory! But to be fair there are many who disagree!

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at UCLA. It won the Pulitzer Prize for 1998, as well as the Aventis Prize for best science book in the same year. In July of 2005, PBS broadcast a documentary based on the book, produced by the National Geographic Society.

According to the author, "An alternative title would be: A short history about everyone for the last 13,000 years." But the book is not merely an account of the past; it attempts to explain why Western civilization, as a whole, has survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that European hegemony is due to any form of European intellectual superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops.

The theory outlined
Before anyone developed agriculture, people lived as hunter-gatherers, as some still do.

Diamond argues that European civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity. That is, civilization is not created out of sheer will or intelligence, but is more like a house of cards, each level dependent upon the levels below it. Specifically, the key to civilization is agriculture. The keys to agriculture are domesticable plant and animal species for food and work. The demands for domesticability of an animal species are particularly stringent. Diamond identifies six criteria including the animal being sufficiently docile, gregarious, willing to breed in captivity and having a social dominance hierarchy.


Transition
GGS argues that cities require an ample supply of food and thus depend on agriculture. As farmers do the work of providing food, others are free to pursue other functions, such as mining and literacy. (Division of labour.)

Essential to the transition from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies was the presence of large domesticable animals, raised for meat, work and long-distance communication. Diamond identifies a mere 14 suitable candidate species world wide. The 5 most important (cow, horse, sheep, goat and pig) are all native to Eurasia. Of the remaining 9, only one (the llama of South America) is indigenous to a land outside the temperate region of Eurasia. None of the 14 is native to Africa. The Holocene extinction event eliminated many of the candidate species, and Diamond argues that the pattern of extinction is more severe on continents where humans arrived later and with more devastating hunting techniques.

Smaller domesticable animals such as dogs, cats, chickens and guinea pigs may be valuable in various ways to an agricultural society, but will not be adequate in themselves to sustain large-scale agrarian society.


Geography
Diamond also explains how geography shaped human migration, not simply by making travel difficult (particularly by longitude), but by how climates affect where domesticable animals can easily travel and where crops can ideally grow.

Modern humans are believed to have developed in the southern region of the African continent, at one time or another (see Out of Africa theory). The Sahara kept people from migrating north to the Fertile Crescent, until later when the Nile river valley became accommodating. Some peoples, such as the Aborigines of Australia, are believed to have been early emigrants from Africa, leaving by boat.

Diamond continues to explain the story of human development up to the modern era, through the rapid development of technology, and its dire consequences on hunter-gathering cultures around the world.

Germs
In the later context of the European-American conquest of the Americas, 95 percent of the indigenous populations are believed to have been killed off by diseases unwittingly brought by the Europeans.

How was it then that disease native to the American continents did not kill off Europeans? Diamond points out that the combined effect of the increased population densities supported by agriculture, and of close human proximity to domesticated animals leading to animal diseases infecting humans, resulted in European societies acquiring a much richer collection of dangerous pathogens to which European peoples had acquired immunity through natural selection (see the Black Death and other epidemics) during a longer time than was the case for Native American hunter-gatherers and farmers. (He mentions the tropical diseases that limited European penetration into Africa as an exception.)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs_and_Steel