How Is Writing a Major Advantage in Combat Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel
by Jared Diamond

• History
• Ashto = 2/10
• Jonesy = 9/10

Jared was studying bird watching in New Guinea when he came across a local politician Yali; who asked the question he asked was "why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people have little cargo of our own?" It was a simple question and this book is the answer.

Diamond shows us how "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves"

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Guns, Germs and Steel Summary

" History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves "   – Guns, Germs and Steel

 Jared was studying bird watching in New Guinea when he came across a local politician Yali; who asked the question he asked was "why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people have little cargo of our own?" It was a simple question and this book is the answer.

The Ultimate Causes

The Fertile Crescent (near Iraq, Egypt and Jordan)

One of the central facts of human history is the early importance of the Fertile Crescent. That area appears to have been the earliest site for a whole string of developments. Cities, writing, empires, and civilization. All those developments sprang from dense human populations, stored food surpluses, and feeding of nonfarming specialists made possible by the rise of food production in the form of crop cultivation and animal husbandry. Food production was the first choice of major innovations to appear in the fertile crescent. Hence any attempt to understand the origins of the modern world must come to grips with the question why the Fertile Crescent domesticated plants and animals.

Domesticating Plants and ANimals

It turns out that the earliest Fertile Crescent crops, such as wheat, barley and peas domesticated around 10,000 years ago. They arose from wild ancestors offering many advantages.

Domestication animals is an ongoing co-evolutionary process rather than an event or invention. In all of the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals – the candidates for domestication – only 14 pass the test.  Eurasia had 72 large mammals with 13 domesticatable species, Africa had 51 species but 0 could be domesticated, America's had 1 that could be domesticated, Australia had 0 that could be domesticated.

The Tilt of the Axis

On the map of the world, some continents have clear differences to others. The Americas and Africa span a great North/South distance with a huge area. In contrast, Eurasia is East West. Axis orientations affected the rate of spread of crops and livestock, and possibly that of writing, wheels and other inventions. In the Americas for example, it is hard for corn in Mexico to grow in Canada's snow. It is much easier if it is east west in the same latitude, as it is in Eurasia.  Most food production, the wheel, writing, metalworking techniques, milking, fruit trees, beer and wine production could easily spread around the large mass.

Population Density

A hunter gatherer mother shifting from camp can carry one child with a few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the toddler can walk fast enough. Sedentary people by contrast are unconstrained by the problem of carrying young children, and can bear and raise many children as they can feed. The birth interval for farm people was half of hunter gatherers, around 2 years. That higher birth-rate of food producers together with their ability to feed more per acre led them to achieve higher population densities.

The Proximate Causes

Germs: The Lethal Gift of Livestock

Some adults even more children, pick up infectious diseases from pets, but very few evolve into something serious. The major killers in history are smallpox, flue, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera. Infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic diseases are paradoxically confined to humans.

For most infectious diseases and their antibodies, to sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, so there is constant new babies/crops to attract. Obviously crowd diseases couldn't sustain themselves in hunter gatherers or slash and burn farmers. Thus almost an entire tribelet can be wiped by an epidemic brought by an outside visitor – because no one in the tribe had antibodies against hte microbe.

Literature

The 19th Century authors tend to interpret history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Early writing served the needs of political institutions, users were full time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food producing peasants. Writing was never developed in hunter gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses or early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating food surpluses to feed scribes.

Technology

Nomadic hunter gatherers are limited to what they can carry. Your possessions are confined to babies, weapons and a minimum of absolute necessity. Those who had developed agriculture had a clear advantage.  Food production was  decisive in the history of technology. It permitted sedentary living and hence accumulation of possessions. It also became possible for the first time in human evolution to develop economically specialized societies consisting of nonfood producing specialists, fed by food producing peasants. So food production, barriers to diffusion and human population size led to the observed intercontinental differences in the development of technology.

Institutions

Institutionalized religion brings two important benefits to centralized society. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of letting unrelated individuals live with each other without killing each other by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. It also gives people a motive other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on the behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies and resisting attacks. The centralized decision maker has the advantage at concentrating troops and resources and the religion makes the troops fight suicidally.

Thus food production, and competition and diffusion between societies, led as ultimate causes to such centralized authority.

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How Is Writing a Major Advantage in Combat Jared Diamond

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