Author: Jared Diamond
With the later rise of genetics, the explanations were recast once again, in genetic terms. Europeans became considered genetically more intelligent than Africans, and especially more so than Aboriginal Australians.
In fact, as I shall explain in a moment, modern “Stone Age” peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. Paradoxical as it may sound, we shall see in Chapter 15 that white immigrants to Australia do not deserve the credit usually accorded to them for building a literate industrialized society with the other virtues mentioned above
Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not
That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland’s cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate.
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves
Thus, the occupation of Australia / New Guinea is momentous in that it demanded watercraft and provides by far the earliest evidence of their use in history.
Thus, early Australians and New Guineans were probably capable of intentionally traveling over water to visible islands, and were using watercraft sufficiently often that the colonization of even invisible distant islands was repeatedly achieved unintentionally.
All of those Australian / New Guinean giants (the so-called megafauna) disappeared after the arrival of humans.
In contrast, most big mammals of Africa and Eurasia survived
into modern times, because they had coevolved with protohumans for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. They thereby enjoyed ample time to evolve a fear of humans, as our ancestors’ initially poor hunting skills slowly improved. and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously
HMS Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives colonized Pitcairn Island.
recent discovery of New Zealand by ancestral Maori
The discovery of numerous skeletons of mammoths with Clovis spearpoints between their ribs
it was the Maori who slaughtered the Moriori, not vice versa.
While those ancestral Maori who first colonized the Chathams may have been farmers, Maori tropical crops could not grow in the Chathams’ cold climate, and the colonists had no alternative except to revert to being hunter-gatherers.
how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation
people of chiefly descent were divided into eight hierarchically ranked lineages. Members of those chiefly lineages did not intermarry with commoners but only with each other, sometimes even with siblings or half-siblings.
Pizarro captured Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the two leaders first set eyes on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while
extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom—enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet—was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.
diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus,
bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, by decimating many peoples on other continents. For
That’s because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers are obliged to devote much of their time to acquiring food. In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself,
Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest
Another supposed dichotomy that becomes blurred in reality is a distinction between food producers as active managers of their land and hunter-gatherers as mere collectors of the land’s wild produce. In reality, some hunter-gatherers intensively manage their land.
A gradual rise in population densities impelled people to obtain more food, by rewarding those who unconsciously took steps toward producing
Over 10,000 years ago, that unconscious selection for nonshattering wheat and barley stalks was apparently the first major human “improvement” in any plant.
could obtain higher yields by tilling and watering the soil and then sowing seeds. When that happened, seeds that immediately sprouted grew into plants whose seeds were harvested and planted in the next year. But many of the wild seeds did not immediately sprout, and they yielded no harvest.
That alone would kill the enthusiasm of any would-be acorn farmer who had defeated the squirrels and remained patient.
look out your window, the plant species that you see will tend to be trees and shrubs, most of whose body you cannot eat and which put much less of their energy into edible seeds. Of course, some forest trees in areas of wet climate do produce big edible seeds,
Annual plants therefore waste little energy on making inedible wood or fibrous stems, like the body of trees and bushes. But many of the big seeds, notably those of the annual cereals and pulses, are edible by humans.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential
the Ainu found it prudent to kill and eat the cubs at the age of one year. Keeping grizzly bears for longer would be suicidal
Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope—even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses—because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the
These other examples include the snail’s pace of crop exchange between Pakistan’s Indus Valley and South India,
The answer slowly emerged: he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps
THE THREE BASIC strategies underlying writing systems differ in the size of the speech unit denoted by one written sign: either a single basic sound, a whole syllable, or a whole word.
Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities.
Someone invents something and puts it to use. How do you, another would-be user, then design something similar for your own use, knowing that other people have already got their own model built and working? Such transmission of inventions
until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters.
The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and