Guns, Germs And Steel Flashcards
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Q: There are four primary reasons Europeans rose to power and conquered the natives of North and South America, and not the other way around:
1) the continental differences in the plants and animals available for domestication, which led to more food and larger populations in Europe and Asia,
2) the rate of diffusion of agriculture, technology and innovation due to the geographic orientation of Europe and Asia (east-west) compared to the Americas (north-south),
3) the ease of intercontinental diffusion between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and
4) the differences in continental size, which led to differences in total population size and technology diffusion.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Summarise the key question the book seeks to explain
The book seeks to explain why some civilizations have been more successful than others, and argues that geographical and environmental factors played a crucial role in shaping the development of human societies.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
What is the role of guns in the book’s argument?
Guns are used as an example of a technology that was developed in some societies but not others, and are used to illustrate how the uneven distribution of technology contributed to the uneven distribution of power and wealth in the world.
Example: the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in South America. When the Spanish arrived, they had guns and horses, which were not available to the Incas. The Spanish used their superior technology to conquer the Incas and establish their own empire in the region.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
What is the role of germs in the book’s argument?
Germs are used as an example of a biological factor that affected the development of human societies, and are used to explain why some populations were more susceptible to disease than others.
Example: the arrival of European explorers and colonizers in the Americas. European explorers brought with them diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which the native populations had no immunity. As a result, the diseases spread rapidly and decimated the native populations, making them more vulnerable to European colonization and conquest.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Diseases from Europe wiped out most of the Indians, so why didn’t the Europeans also get wiped out by diseases from America?
Europeans had…
… more robust immune systems than Native Americans.
… been the caretakers of domestic animals for thousands of years, and had grown somewhat immune to the common diseases that accompanied the domestication of such food sources.
Europeans lived in more densely populated areas, exposing them to numerous pathogens that their immune systems had to adapt to.
People and animals moved around a lot in Europe, resulting in the spread of disease across continents, and eventually some level of immunity for the survivors.
Europeans were regularly exposed to many more pathogens than Native Americans were, resulting in greater immunity.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
What is the role of steel in the book’s argument?
Steel is often cited as an example of a technology that was developed in some societies but not others, and which had a profound impact on the development of human societies. The production of high-quality steel requires a combination of factors, including access to the raw materials needed to make it, a deep understanding of metallurgy, and advanced technology for smelting and forging the metal.
The Industrial Revolution was largely driven by advances in steel production technology. The ability to produce large quantities of high-quality steel was a key factor in the development of new machines and technologies that transformed agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing, and which contributed to the rise of the Western powers and the modern world as we know it.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Why didn’t societies in the New World develop steel as a technology?
Lack of demand can be explained by a lack of..?
Armour and weapons were mostly based on..?
The role of the metalworker was..?
No access to r.. m…….. in the q……… r……. .
Mesoamerican and Andean cultures had rich traditions in bronze-working before the Spanish conquest.
BUT
The lack of demand for more advanced metallurgy in the Americas can be explained by a lack of domesticated draft animals, and primitive transportation technology to support trade or wider dispersal.
In the Andes, armor and weapons were almost entirely based on cloth, which was better suited to defend against the club-like weaponry that was commonly used.
Despite having abundant copper, metallurgy did not develop further in the Americas because the role of metalworker was not valued as much as it was in Eurasia, and the demand for bronze, iron, and steel was not created before the Europeans arrived.
No access to the necessary raw materials in quantities required for large-scale steel production. Iron ore was not widely available in the Americas in the same quantities as in other parts of the world, such as Europe and Asia.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Why was the occupation of Australia ‘an incredible feat’?
When did this happen?
The occupation of Australia was an incredible feat. It was the first use of water craft and range extension by humans.
People first arrived on the Australian mainland by sea from Maritime Southeast Asia between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Did agriculture lead to an unequivocally better lifestyle?
Agriculture did not lead to an unequivocally better lifestyle. In fact, for those who actually grow food life tends to be worse than it would be as a hunter gatherer. If this is true, and the evidence seems to point that way, then it means that advancement of civilization has essentially happened on the backs of society’s have-nots. In other words, the entire system we live within – agriculture, capitalism, etc. – requires inequality to function.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
What is the Anna Karenina principle?
What questions does Diamond us it to address?
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - successful outcomes tend to share common characteristics, while failures can result from a wide range of factors.
Question: why have so few wild animals have been successfully domesticated throughout history?
Answer: a deficiency in any one of a great number of factors can render a species undomesticable. Therefore, all successfully domesticated species are not so because of a particular positive trait, but because of a lack of any number of possible negative traits.
Possible deficiencies: Diet / Growth rate / Captive breeding / Disposition / Tendency to panic / Social structure
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Why didn’t people domesticate zebras?
To survive in an environment where there is an abundance of large predators including lions, cheetahs and hyenas, the zebra evolved into a particularly alert, responsive animal that flees in the face of danger but also possesses a powerful response if captured.
The kick of a zebra can break a lion’s jaw. They can be savage biters and possess a ‘ducking’ reflex that helps them avoid being caught by lasso. Familiarity with human hunter-gatherers may also have fostered a strong avoidance response in the zebra.
All of this means that zebra are not really “people friendly” and as a species they do not fit the criteria for domestication.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Why does the East / West axis matter?
Locations along the same east-west axis share similar latitudes and thus have similar day lengths, seasons, climate, rainfalls, and biomes. All of which increase the speed of innovation relative to north-south axes.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
On average, farming sustains populations that are ..?
On average, farming sustains populations that are 10x to 100x larger than hunting and gathering.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
When Columbus landed in 1492, North America was populated by about…?
Within two centuries ..?
‘Once Columbus had come, they fell 20 to 1.’
North America was populated by about 20 million Native Americans when Columbus landed in 1492. Within two centuries, 95 percent of the native population had died, most of them from infectious diseases.
The native Americans, when Columbus had come
Were reduced in two centuries from 20 million to 1
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Why does Jared Diamond emphasise the technology of writing (and printing)?
Writing — and printing — acted as an additional agent of conquest for the Europeans. Thanks to printed accounts, Pizarro and his conquistadors read about successful tactics employed by their predecessors elsewhere in the New World. In particular, they pored over Hernan Cortes’ best-selling account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire, just 10 years before. Printing gave Europeans access to a wealth of historical, cultural and military knowledge from previous eras, which the Inca — a non-literate society — could never have had.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Why wasn’t writing invented in South American societies?
There were few trade networks to carry new technologies beyond the Mexican plateau — particularly south, through the impassable isthmus of Panama.
There weren’t even any load-bearing mammals to transport humans across such trade networks, had they existed.
The people of the Americas communicated only sporadically, from shore to shore — which meant there was never the consistency of communication to necessitate using the written word.
So Mayan symbols remained local only to central America — seized upon and largely destroyed when Europeans arrived.
Where?
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
Papua New Guinea
Describe the diagram
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
The Fertile Crescent (Arabic: الهلال الخصيب) is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine (SLIP) and Jordan, together with the northern region of Kuwait, southeastern region of Turkey and the western portion of Iran.[1][2] Some authors also include Cyprus and Northern Egypt.
The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the very first region where settled farming emerged as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished as a result.[3] Technological advances in the region include the development of agriculture and the use of irrigation, of writing, the wheel, and glass, most emerging first in Mesopotamia.
Name places / features (3 starts M)
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
- Tigris river
- Euphrates river
- Mesopotamia
Places / peoples?
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
- Anatolian peoples
- Semetic peoples
- Mesopotamia
Name?
Guns, Germs and Steel: Jared Diamond
- Polynesia
- Cook Islands
Polynesia[a][b] (UK: /ˌpɒlɪˈniːziə/, US: /-ˈniːʒə/) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians.
