One of the most interesting books I have read is span style="font-style: italic;"Guns, Germs and Steel/span by Jared Diamond. I read it a few years ago and re-read it recently.br /br /Diamond tries to give an all-encompassing history of the world over the last 13,000 years. The key issues he considers are plant and animal domestication and how this development of agriculture spurred further developments – what could be called the development of ‘civilisation’.br /br /As of 11,000 BC, he thinks the world was still one of hunter-gatherers. Although anatomically-modern humans had been around for maybe 250,000 or 500,000 years and had managed to supplant other related species [such as the Neanderthals, Peking Man, Java Man etc] these anatomically-modern humans were still hunter-gatherers.br /br /The hunter-gatherer lifestyle did not move straightaway into the peasant lifestyle. Nothing in human social development happens that rapidly. The movement from hunter-gatherer to peasant lifestyle happened gradually and as a result of incremental agricultural development.br /br /Firstly, hunter-gatherers would have grown food crops in ‘gardens’ and field to supplement their hunting and gathering diet. They would have used it as a ‘back-up’ food source or a ‘basic’ food source in times when they could not gather enough food from the environment.br /br /The domestication of plants is only worthwhile in certain circumstances and for certain plants. The plants need to have [among other things] large seeds, grow quickly, provide significant nutrition, reproduce asexually but have the capability for occasional sexual reproduction [so that more productive strains can gradually evolve].br /br /Diamond points out that there are not that many species of plants that meet all these criteria to make them the ‘ideal’ plants to start off domestication with – and which provide sufficient nutritional value to justify gradually diverting labour from hunting and gathering to look after them.br /br /Various varieties of wheat, barley, rice, corn and potatoes are among the few plants that meet criteria for early domestication. Even today, when modern agriculture has domesticated many more varieties of fruits, vegetables and crops, a few basic cereals provide much of the calorie intake for the world’s population [especially the poor].br /br /Diamond says that the ancestral varieties of many of these domesticated plants were found in particular abundance in what he dubs the ‘Fertile Crescent’ – part of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and Iran. The area is not so fertile now, as the climate has changed slightly with perhaps greater heat and less rain – and, furthermore, millennia of intense agriculture have salinated fields and reduced their productivity. However, in around 9000BC or so, there is evidence that there was the development of agriculture here. People started growing crops like wheat and barley in significant quantities. Once developed the invention of agriculture seems to have spread to adjoining areas and areas with similar climates. Some crops only grow at certain latitudes, with certain seasons and certain rainfall levels. As such, some crops were confined to that ‘Mediterranean zone’ and to areas just north of it.br /br /Diamond also thinks that, independently, there was domestication of rice and other plants in China. This happened, perhaps, around the same time. Those areas which had suitable climate, rainfall, soil conditions and so forth started to become farmland.br /br /Areas which are suitable for agriculture could support far more peasants than they could hunter-gatherers. Poor peasants often were undernourished and, perhaps, less healthy than many hunter-gatherers. But there were many more of them. Because of this, societies based on agriculture were able to conquer or subjugate many hunter-gatherer peoples. Also, of course, under the influence of the example of their neighbours, some nomadic and semi-nomadic communities of hunter-gatherers settled down to an agricultural lifestyle over time.br /br /Due to the shortage of suitable crops in many other regions of the world, Diamond sees the Middle East and China as the two major cradles of plant domestication. The plants they domesticated spread to other areas which had similar climates and which were also able to grow them. Hence, Middle Eastern crops spread into Europe as wheat, barley and so forth could be grown there. And, as time went by, selective pressures meant that domesticated plants became larger and more nutritious than their wild counterparts.br /br /There were domestications of plants in West Africa, in Ethiopia, in New Guinea and in parts of the Americas. However, these areas did not have as many suitable plants that met the criteria for easy and nutritious domestication. The US and Canadian wheat-producing regions only became so when the European conquest of the Americans brought this crop over. The Native Americans tended to grow potatoes, corn and beans.br /br /Diamond also highlights that Eurasia has an east-west axis and the Americas and Africa have a north-south one. The east-west axis made it easy for crops to spread to other suitable areas at the same latitude. There were far fewer areas at the same latitude as the areas of first plant domestication in the Americas. Plants find it more difficult to grow in areas north or south of where they evolved than they do to grow east or west of where they did. This is because moving north or south will change the day length as well as the heat and the seasons they have to grow under. The effect of this was that crops diffused a lot more throughout the larger Eurasian continent in pre-history than they did in the rest of the world.br /br /Animal domestication is another key factor in the development of agriculture. Like plants, there are only a few animals that are suitable for domestication. Ideally, they need to be large and grow quickly, but they also need to be docile and comfortable around humans. They also need to be willing to breed in captivity. For a variety of reasons, these criteria rule out a lot of animals for easy domestication.br /br /Some of the main animals domesticated are cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens and horses. There are many other animals that have been domesticated but they have not tended to spread as widely or be as useful as these key species. br /br /Obviously, domesticated animals are useful for food. But they are also useful for milk and for their hides. Also, their manure can be used as a fertiliser. Further uses for domesticated animals are to catch other animals for food, to pull ploughs and to transport people/loads.br /br /Once again, the Fertile Crescent appears to be the point of origin of many domesticated species. The wild ancestors of the sheep, the cow and so forth lived in the area in question. Gradually, over generations, as humans captured, tamed them and bred them in captivity, the domesticated varieties of animals merged.br /br /The combination of animal power and nutritious domesticated plants gave great advantages to societies over those who lacked them. Those who lacked domesticated animals had to hunt more, faced dangers of protein deficiency and had to use human muscle power rather than animal power to carry loads, plough fields etc.br /br /The Americas had far fewer domesticatable species. The llama was not as useful as the horse or the donkey as a beast of burden. The lack of cattle and sheep meant that animals like the guinea pig had to be used for meat. You get a lot less meat from one of those!br /br /Another interesting point is that there may have been a wider variety of mammals in the Americas but some of them were hunted to extinction. The ancestors of domesticated animals in Eurasia had evolved ways to avoid humans as humans gradually evolved better hunting skills. However, it was about 11,000 BC when humans first came to the Americas – as this mini-Ice Age would have enabled them to cross the Bering Strait. By this stage, humans were probably a lot better at hunting than when they had left Africa 100,000 years earlier. They thus descended on the mammals of the Americas and killed off many of the large ones. The same fate probably faced the woolly mammoth in northern Eurasia.br /br /In contrast, animals in Eurasia and in Africa had been better able to evolve to escape humans [at least often enough to reproduce!]. Additionally, Eurasia being a larger continent meant that – even if an animal was wiped out in one region – it would still exist in other regions, enabling later hunting and domestication.br /br /Africa has a lot of large mammals. However, they are harder to domesticate than the usual domesticated animals. They are either carnivorous [and thus rather dangerous!] or travel too fast for people to catch, or don’t naturally live in herds, or aren’t docile or panic too easily. Some also grow very slowly – like elephants. And others don’t like breeding in captivity, thus making farming them impossible. Diamond says a few eccentrics have tried to get zebra to pull carriages like horses do, but it was a tricky business!br /br /With the advantages of more species suitable for plant and animal domestication, Eurasia was able to attain higher population densities – on average – than Africa, the Americas or New Guinea and Australia. Higher population densities are, as Diamond argues, crucial to further social, economic and technological development.br /br /If agriculture can enable a food surplus to emerge [as farmers in good areas can produce more than enough to feed their families] then specialists can emerge who can provide manufactured goods and services. These manufactured goods – like ploughs and carriages – can also prove useful in increasing agricultural productivity further and enabling produce to be carted further.br /br /The emergence of specialists enables more inventions to be made – and more science and technology to develop. It also enables people to live together in cities. The first cities perhaps emerged around 4000BC. These cities could only be fed by the fact that agriculture was producing a good surplus. In cities, lots of products and goods could be made.br /br /Furthermore, these cities were centres of political authority. A bureaucracy emerged. To enable this bureaucracy to record things, writing emerged. Cities, manufacturing and writing – these things were only made possible once a substantial number of people could be freed from the necessity to hunt and gather their own food.br /br /With the emergence of technology, there were innumerable advantages that a technologically-more-advanced society could have over a weaker one.br /br /The culmination of this process, to an American writer like Diamond, is the conquest of the Americas by Europeans. It is an example of where a society with lots of geographical, technological and scientific advantages confronts peoples who lack some of them. Unfortunately, because of the shortage of domesticatable species and the ensuing lower agricultural productivity, the populations of the Americas slipped behind the most advanced regions of Eurasia. It thus meant that, militarily, they could not stand up to the conquistadors and many perished as a result.br /br /There is one more by-product of the domestication of animals – diseases. Certain diseases (smallpox, influenza, bubonic plague and so forth) are the relatives of diseases that afflict animals. As people started to live in close proximity to animals – and to eat their meat and drink their milk – these diseases jumped the species barrier.br /br /With a lot of these diseases, they infect someone and – if they survive – they are then immune to it. They thus need a large enough population to continue. Otherwise, they will run out of people to infect. Diamond points out that the density of population in Eurasia – and the fact that different cities were linked to one another by trade routes – enabled diseases to keep going. This meant that more and more people gained immunity to them [and those who didn’t tended to die in childhood].br /br /In the Americas, though, the shortage of domesticated animals as well as the lower, average, density of population meant that these pandemic diseases did not develop in the same way. Thus, while most of the conquistadors had immunity to diseases like measles, flu, smallpox etc, the people they were conquering did not.br /br /The sudden arrival of these new diseases took the Native Americans by surprise and struck them down. The diseases spread so rapidly that some chiefdoms [like in the Mississippi Valley] collapsed even before European soldiers came to conquer them because they had lost so many people to these Old World diseases. Some estimates suggest 90% of Native Americans died in the first few decades after the conquest of the Americas because of these Old World diseases.br /br /So, in summation, Diamond is saying that some regions of the world were able to produce states that were able to conquer other regions because of the advantages of plant and animal domestication and their knock-on effects. The guns and the steel of colonial powers could only be developed because of a tradition of invention and manufacturing that was only possible because not everyone needed to be hunting, gathering or farming food all the time and so had time to devote to scientific and technological endeavour. Furthermore, native peoples faced a triple whammy – not only guns and steel but germs as well. Diseases evolved and developed in the Old World that did not exist in the Americas or Australia. This was very bad news for the Native Americans and Aborigines.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/38622711-7116709642458347549?l=vinospoliticalblog.blogspot.com'//div
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