Book Reviews: Guns, Germs, and Steel

I think the author would point out that Eurasia (by way of the Fertile Crescent) had a significant head-start on the Native Americas in terms of intensive food production.  North Americans were hunters and gatherers until they aquired Mesoamerican crops and found ways to adapt such crops to the colder climate and shorter growing season of their environment.  Mesoamerican crops, once established, spread slowly due to the North-South axis of the Americas, which presented obstacles of climate and topography. 

The author also points out that the East-West axis of the Europe-Asia landmass facilitated the quick spread of agriculture there.  If you've ever looked at the "climate zones" favorable for a plant you'd like to grow, or the favorable times of year to grow such plants, you would see that the zones typically spread from east to west--not north to south.

Although some domesticable plants and large mammals are native to the Americas, the numbers are disproportionally greater in Eurasia.  For domesticable animals, Eurasia had the wild ancestors of the dog, sheep, goat, pig, cow, horse, donkey, water buffalo, and camels.  Only dogs were domesticated throughout the Americas, and the only other domesticable large animal was the llama/alpaca, which was confined to the Andes due to barriers of climate and topography.  Due to its size, aggressiveness, and speed, attempts to domesticate the American bison have yielded minimal success, even to this day.  Thus, the Americas had no animals capable of pulling carts or plows.

The numbers of domesticable food crops were also disproportionally in the Eurasians' favor.  Of the world's large-seeded grass species, 32 occur in Eurasia's Mediterranean zone, as opposed to only 11 in all of the Americas. 

Although Natives of the Americas had to work harder and with fewer resources to independently invent and establish agriculture, they did it.  The author states his belief that--given enough time--Native Americans indeed might have achieved the technological advances and germs capable of taking them to Eurasia and killing and conquering the populations there.  Due to Eurasia's head start, however, the opposite was more likely to occur and did, in fact occur.

Rob, domestication--at least as defined by the author--would require human contact.  It occurs when humans control the food, environment and reproduction of a wild plant or animal in order to develop characteristics which are desirable for human purposes and to diminish those characteristics which are undesirable.  Dogs are believed to have been domesticated in Eurasia first, and independently domesticated in the Americas later.

Regarding the author's assumptions about the New World which are known to be incorrect, he mentions the theory that Polynesians may have visited South America before Europeans, but he dismisses the theory entirely.  Last year, however, it was proven that domesticated chickens arrived in South America via Polynesia, and that they did so prior to European contact.

Another theory Diamond mentions (multiple times) which is today believed to be incorrect is the theory that the many large animal species which died off suddenly at the end of the last ice age did so because the Clovis people hunted them to extinction. 

This is an excerpt from Charles C. Mann's 1491:

[In the mid-1990s] paleontologists learned that about two-thirds of the species that vanished did so a little before Clovis appears in the archaelogical record.  Finally, Clovis people may not have enjoyed hunting so much.  Of the seventy-six U.S. paleo-Indian camps surveyed by Meltzer and Donald K. Grayson, an archaeologist at University of Washington, Seattle, only fourteen showed evidence of big-game hunting, all of it just two species, mastodon and bison. 

Quote from Grayson: "The overkill hypothesis lives on...not because of [support from] archaeologists and paleontologists who are expert in the area, but because it keeps getting repeated by those who are not."

Also, the author mentions ongoing research into evidence of pre-Clovis humans.  This, too, is dismissed.  He even goes so far as to say that if there had been people in the Americas before the Clovis people, we would know it with certainty, and there wouldn't be any debate in the scientific community.  (What a stupid statement!)  Today, ten years later, although a few dissenters persist, there is enormous support for the existence of pre-Clovis people.  Obviously, if there wasn't such a large time gap between the first settlements in the Americas and those of West Asia, the author's theory would be weakened, and so his views are naturally biased.

Finally didn't like the way he attempted to give equal weight to the effectiveness of germs, weaponry, and other technology in defeating the Native Americans.  The weaponry and technology of Native Americans was well suited to their environment, so much so  that the Spaniards adopted much of  what they encountered. We'll never know if the Inca empire would have fallen so quickly to Pizarro, had 90% or so of the population, including important members of the ruling family, not fallen to European diseases before they ever laid eyes on a white man.