As for Native American languages, the majority view that recognizes many separate language families is exemplified by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, The Languages of Native America (Austin: University of Texas, 1979). The opposing view, lumping all Native American languages other than Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene languages into the Amerind family, is presented by Joseph Greenberg, Language in the Americas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World’s Languages, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
Standard accounts of the origin and spread of the wheel for transport in Eurasia are M. A. Littauer and J. H. Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1979), and Stuart Piggott, The Earliest Wheeled Transport (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983).
Books on the rise and demise of the Norse colonies in Greenland and America include Finn Gad, The History of Greenland, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1971), G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Christopher Morris and D. James Rackham, eds., Norse and Later Settlement and Subsistence in the North Atlantic (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1992). Two volumes by Samuel Eliot Morison provide masterly accounts of early European voyaging to the New World: The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). The beginnings of Europe’s overseas expansion are treated by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (London: Macmillan Education, 1987). Not to be missed is Columbus’s own day-by-day account of history’s most famous voyage, reprinted as Oliver Dunn and James Kelley, Jr., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).
As an antidote to this book’s mostly dispassionate account of how peoples conquered or slaughtered other peoples, read the classic account of the destruction of the Yahi tribelet of northern California and the emergence of Ishi, its solitary survivor: Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). The disappearance of native languages in the Americas and elsewhere is the subject of Robert Robins and Eugenius Uhlenbeck, Endangered Languages (Providence: Berg, 1991), Joshua Fishman, Reversing Language Shift (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1991), and Michael Krauss, “The world’s languages in crisis,” Language 68:4–10 (1992).
Chapter 19
Books on the archaeology, prehistory, and history of the African continent include Roland Oliver and Brian Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, 5th ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), J. D. Fage, A History of Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1978), Roland Oliver, The African Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), Thurstan Shaw et al., eds., The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals, and Towns (New York: Routledge, 1993), and David Phillipson, African Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Correlations between linguistic and archaeological evidence of Africa’s past are summarized by Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky, eds., The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). The role of disease is discussed by Gerald Hartwig and K. David Patterson, eds., Disease in African History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978).
As for food production, many of the listed further readings for Chapters 4–10 discuss Africa. Also of note are Christopher Ehret, “On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia,” Journal of African History 20:161–77 (1979); J. Desmond Clark and Steven Brandt, eds., From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Art Hansen and Della McMillan, eds., Food in Sub-Saharan Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1986); Fred Wendorf et al., “Saharan exploitation of plants 8,000 years B.P.,” Nature 359:721–24 (1992); Andrew Smith, Pastoralism in Africa (London: Hurst, 1992); and Andrew Smith, “Origin and spread of pastoralism in Africa,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 21:125–41 (1992).
For information about Madagascar, two starting points are Robert Dewar and Henry Wright, “The culture history of Madagascar,” Journal of World Prehistory 7:417–66 (1993), and Pierre Verin, The History of Civilization in North Madagascar (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1986). A detailed study of the linguistic evidence about the source for the colonization of Madagascar is Otto Dahl, Migration from Kalimantan to Madagascar (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991). Possible musical evidence for Indonesian contact with East Africa is described by A. M. Jones, Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and Cultural Factors (Leiden: Brill, 1971). Important evidence about the early settlement of Madagascar comes from dated bones of now extinct animals as summarized by Robert Dewar, “Extinctions in Madagascar: The loss of the subfossil fauna,” pp. 574–93 in Paul Martin and Richard Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). A tantalizing subsequent fossil discovery is reported by R. D. E. MacPhee and David Burney, “Dating of modified femora of extinct dwarf Hippopotamus from Southern Madagascar,” Journal of Archaeological Science 18:695–706 (1991). The onset of human colonization is assessed from paleobotanical evidence by David Burney, “Late Holocene vegetational change in Central Madagascar,” Quaternary Research 28:130–43 (1987).
Epilogue
Links between environmental degradation and the decline of civilization in Greece are explored by Tjeerd van Andel et al., “Five thousand years of land use and abuse in the southern Argolid,” Hesperia 55:103–28 (1986), Tjeerd van Andel and Curtis Runnels, Beyond the Acropolis: A Rural Greek Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and Curtis Runnels, “Environmental degradation in ancient Greece,” Scientific American 272(3): 72–75 (1995). Patricia Fall et al., “Fossil hyrax middens from the Middle East: A record of paleovegetation and human disturbance,” pp. 408–27 in Julio Betancourt et al., eds., Packrat Middens (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), does the same for the decline of Petra, as does Robert Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), for Mesopotamia.
A stimulating interpretation of the differences between the histories of China, India, Islam, and Europe is provided by E. L. Jones, The European Miracle, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), describes the power struggle that led to the suspension of China’s treasure fleets. The further readings for Chapters 16 and 17 provide other references for early Chinese history.
The impact of Central Asian nomadic pastoralists on Eurasia’s complex civilizations of settled farmers is discussed by Bennett Bronson, “The role of barbarians in the fall of states,” pp. 196–218 in Norman Yoffee and George Cowgill, eds., The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).
The possible relevance of chaos theory to history is discussed by Michael Shermer in the paper “Exorcising Laplace’s demon: Chaos and antichaos, history and metahistory,” History and Theory 34:59–83 (1995). Shermer’s paper also provides a bibliography for the triumph of the QWERTY keyboard, as does Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1983).
An eyewitness account of the traffic accident that nearly killed Hitler in 1930 will be found in the memoirs of Otto Wagener, a passenger in Hitler’s car. Those memoirs have been edited by Henry Turner, Jr., as a book, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Turner goes on to speculate on what might have happened if Hitler had died in 1930, in his chapter “Hitler’s impact on history,” in David Wetzel, ed., German History: Ideas, Institutions, and Individuals (New York: Praeger, 1996).
The m
any distinguished books by historians interested in problems of long-term history include Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1943), Patrick Gardiner, ed., Theories of History (New York: Free Press, 1959), Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Henry Hobhouse, Forces of Change (London: Sedgewick and Jackson, 1989).
Several writings by the biologist Ernst Mayr discuss the differences between historical and nonhistorical sciences, with particular reference to the contrast between biology and physics, but much of what Mayr says is also applicable to human history. His views will be found in his Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), chap. 25, and in Towards a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), chaps. 1–2.
The methods by which epidemiologists reach cause-and-effect conclusions about human diseases, without resorting to laboratory experiments on people, are discussed in standard epidemiology texts, such as A. M. Lilienfeld and D. E. Lilienfeld, Foundations of Epidemiology, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Uses of natural experiments are considered from the viewpoint of an ecologist in my chapter “Overview: Laboratory experiments, field experiments, and natural experiments,” pp. 3–22 in Jared Diamond and Ted Case, eds., Community Ecology (New York: Harper and Row; 1986). Paul Harvey and Mark Pagel, The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), analyzes how to extract conclusions by comparing species.
2003 Afterword
Two articles and one book summarize discoveries of the last half-dozen years about domestication of plants and animals, spreads of language families, and the relation of the spreads of language families to food production: Jared Diamond, “Evolution, consequences and the future of plant and animal domestication,” Nature 418:34–41 (2002); Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, “The first agricultural expansions: archaeology, languages, and people,” Science, in press; and Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew, Examining the Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2002). Those two articles and that book give references to the detailed recent literature. A recent book-length account of the role of agricultural expansion in the origins of the modern Japanese people is Mark Hudson’s Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).
For a detailed account of New Zealand’s Musket Wars, see the book by R.D. Crosby, The Musket Wars: a History of Inter-Iwi Conflict 1806–45 (Auckland: Reed, 1999). Those wars are summarized much more briefly but placed in a larger context in two books by James Belich: The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1986) and Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders (Auckland: Penguin, 1996).
Two recent efforts by social scientists to identify proximate causes behind Europe’s and China’s divergence include an article by Jack Goldstone, “Efflorescences and economic growth in world history: rethinking the ‘rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13:323–89 (2002), and a book by Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). The opposite approach, the search for ultimate causes, is exemplified by a recent article by Graeme Lang, “State systems and the origins of modern science: a comparison of Europe and China,” East-West Dialog 2:16–30 (1997), and by a book by David Cosandey, Le Secret de I’Occident (Paris: Arléa, 1997). Those articles by Goldstone and by Lang are the sources of my quotations above.
The two papers analyzing the connection between economic indicators of modern wealth or growth rate, on the one hand, and long history of state societies or agriculture, on the other hand, are: Ola Olsson and Douglas Hibbs, “Biogeography and long-term economic development,” in press in European Economic Review; and Valerie Bockstette, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman, “States and markets: the advantage of an early start,” Journal of Economic Growth 7:351–73 (2002).
CREDITS
Chapter 12: J. Beckett/K. Perkins, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 2A17202.
Chapter 12: Courtesy of V.I.P. Publishing.
Chapter 12: Courtesy of Myoung Soon Kim and Christie Kim.
Chapter 12, and 233: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Chapter 13: Heracleion Museum, Hellenic Republic Ministry of Culture.
BETWEEN PP. 96 AND 97
Plates 1 and 8. Irven DeVore, Anthro-Photo.
Plates 2–5. Courtesy of the author.
Plate 6. P. McLanahan, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 337549.
Plate 7. Richard Gould, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 332911.
Plate 9. J. W. Beattie, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 12.
Plate 10. Bogoras, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 2975.
Plate 11. AP/Wide World Photos.
Plate 12. Judith Ferster, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 13. R. H. Beck, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 107814.
Plate 14. Dan Hrdy, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 15. Rodman Wanamaker, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 316824.
Plate 16. Marjorie Shostak, Anthro-Photo.
BETWEEN PP. 288 AND 289
Plate 17. Boris Malkin, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 18. Napoleon Chagnon, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 19. Kirschner, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 235230.
Plates 20, 22, 24, 30, and 32. AP/Wide World Photos.
Plate 21. Gladstone, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 23. Above, AP/Wide World Photos. Below, W. B., American Museum of Natural History. Negative 2A13829.
Plate 25. Marjorie Shostak, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 26. Irven DeVore, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 27. Steve Winn, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 28. J.B. Thorpe, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 336181.
Plates 29 and 31. J. F. E. Bloss, Anthro-Photo.
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
Jared Diamond
READING GROUP GUIDE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What are the other commonly espoused answers to “Yali’s question,” and how does Jared Diamond address and refute each of them?
Why does Diamond hypothesize that New Guineans might be, on the average, “smarter” than Westerners?
Why is it important to differentiate between proximate and ultimate causes?
Do you find some of Diamond’s methodologies more compelling than others? Which, and why?
What is the importance of the order of the chapters? Why, for example, is “Collision at Cajamarca”—which describes events that occur thousands of years after those described in the subsequent chapters—placed where it is?
How are Polynesian Islands “an experiment of history”? What conclusions does Diamond draw from their history?
How does Diamond challenge our assumptions about the transition from hunter-gathering to farming?
How is farming an “auto-catalytic” process? How does this account for the great disparities in societies, as well as for the possibilities of parallel evolution?
Why did almonds prove domesticable while acorns were not? What significance does this have?
How does Diamond explain the fact that domesticable American apples and grapes were not domesticated until the arrival of Europeans?
What were the advantages enjoyed by the Fertile Crescent that allowed it to be the earliest site of development for most of the building blocks of civilization? How does Diamond explain the fact that it was nevertheless Europe and not Southwest Asia that ended up spreading its culture to the rest of the world?
How does Diamond refute the argument that the failure to domesticate certain animals arose from cultural differences? What does the modern failure to domestic
ate, for example, the eland suggest about the reasons why some peoples independently developed domestic animals and others did not?
What is the importance of the “Anna Karenina principle”?
How does comparing mutations help one trace the spread of agriculture?
How does civilization lead to epidemics?
How does Diamond’s theory that invention is, in fact, the mother of necessity bear upon the traditional “heroic” model of invention?
According to Diamond, how does religion evolve along with increasingly complex societies?
How is linguistic evidence used to draw conclusions about the spread of peoples in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Africa?
What is the significance of the differing outcomes of Austronesian expansion in Indonesia and New Guinea?
How does Diamond explain China’s striking unity and Europe’s persistent disunity? What consequences do these conditions have for world history?
How does Diamond refute the charge that Australia is proof that differences in the fates of human societies are a matter of people and not environment? In what other areas of the world could Diamond’s argument be used?
What aspects of Diamond’s evidence do lay readers have to take on faith? Which aspects are explained?
Diamond offers two tribes, the Chimbu and the Daribi, as examples of differing receptivities to innovation. Do you think he would accept larger, continent-wide differences in receptivity? Why or why not? How problematic might cultural factors prove for Diamond’s arguments?
How, throughout the book, does Diamond address the issues he discusses in the last few pages of his final chapter, when he proposes a science of human history?