Guns, Germs, and Steel Notes (Part I)
Guns, Germs, and Steel is centered around answering one question: “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they are, as opposed to some other way?” Put in other words, what was it that lead to Colombus and the Spanish conquistadors annihilating the Native Americans, as opposed to say the Aztecs looting Spain? Sure, there’s the immediate answer that the Spanish had all sorts of insurmountable advantages, in more advanced weaponry, deadly germs, etc. This book aims to answer the root cause question; what lead to Europeans accumulating all these advantages that the Native Americans did not? I should note, the author constantly reiterates that the answer is environmental factors (which is really the essence of the entire book), not racial superiority.
From Eden to Cajamarca
Up to the Starting Line
Humans originated in sub-saharan Africa somewhere in the range of 7 million BC. This marker is of the human species diverging from apes, and it’s not until 50,000 B.C. that you seen Cro-Magnons become the dominant evolutionary group. Relative to previous development, these Cro-Magnons spread quickly and in 11,000 B.C. we finally reach the level of human societal life, where humans have more or less spread across the full global landmass.
Natural Experiment of History
The Polynesian islands serve as sort of a microcosm test of what driving forces impact human development across the rest of the globe. Polynesia has many separate islands with totally disparate sets of environments, yet we know the people who first occupied those islands all shared similar ancestors and societal development. In the coming centuries these people undergo a radical transformation in development. Those occupying the smaller islands unsuitable for agriculture actually revert back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while the larger islands with friendlier climates produce densely populated multi-island proto-empires. It’s sort of an A/B test for societal outcomes, with the island environment acting as the treatment.
Collision at Cajamarca
This is the most dramatic instance of what happens when two long-separated societies collide. Francisco Pizarro’s small band of conquistadors showed up on the doorstep of the Incas (the largest empire of the Americas) and are outnumbered by some preposterous margin. Yet, the proximate advantages of technology, horses, and germs prove to outweigh the absurd differentials in population. Within the first night of their staying in the Incan capital, Pizarro and his band annihilate the entire Incan ruling class. As a small aside, if you want to capture the relative importance of these proximate advantages it would go something like 1) Germs, 2)Germs, 3)Everything else. Every large-scale annihilation that occurs seems to rely on Germs to do the vast majority of the dirty work. It’s estimated that the first contact of the Eurasians ultimately resulted in the death of 95% of New World Native Americans.
Eden to Cajamarca sets the stage for the rest of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He offers a little background on the origin of humans, introduces evidence for his argument for geographic determinism, and finally tells a story of the Guns, Germs, and Steel that we try to establish an origin for.
