Guns, Germs and Steel.

I found this book a revelation. The question posed at the beginning of the work was put to the author by a native of Papua New Guinea, where the author was doing field-work. Simply put, the thinking man in Papua wanted to know how come the Europeans (and "the West" in general), have all the (supposedly) good things... the cars, the TVs, the full bellies, cool clothes, the flush toilets etc.... and the Papuans have to import all these items from the other side of the world. How did that come about?

Jared Diamond proceeds to investigate the roots of the historical events that gave rise to this situation.

Firstly, there is a discussion about food production. It is pretty much agreed that civilization started in the area of the Middle East (around modern-day Iraq) known as the fertile crescent.

The people who lived there found that there were certain crops which were good to eat.

As a result, agriculture started.... not as a deliberate act, but as a consequence of people collecting the biggest and best fruits or grains. The descendants of those bigger and better plants very likely sprouted on top of latrine areas.....never mind the aesthetics; it was a process of selection which lead to "cultivars" appearing.

There is also a discussion about hunter/gatherer cultures versus sedentary, agricultural ones. Hunter/gatherers must travel to pursue their quarry, and to avoid over-exploiting one small area of land. They must limit their possessions to the things that can be carried. This in turn means that the number of dependent infants must be limited too. So those societies take longer to grow numerically.

However, settled farmers can produce more children....they are not limited to the number of infants that a mother can carry, and because they are settled, they can produce food more efficiently which in turn serves to nourish the growing group.

Then we come to consider the domesticated animals......the people of the fertile crescent area were fortunate in finding suitable animals to domesticate. Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, horses, various oxen, buffalo, yaks etc were all exploited by early man, not just for meat, milk and leather, but to haul the plough, and manure the fields.

(And "suitable" refers not just to their size and usefulness, but also their disposition. For example zebra appear to be very like horses.... but they are not inclined to co-operate with humans, and will bite and kick to an extent that no-one would want to keep a lot of them. There are similar deterrents to keeping giraffe, rhino etc)

This luxury of plenty, both with regard to plant foods and animals, is not repeated else-where. So the Americas simply did not have the variety of plants that lend themselves to agriculture, or the animals that are suitable for husbandry....consider the civilizations of Meso-America...Maya and Aztec, for example, which sprang up after the successful domestication of corn....virtually no large meat animals were available. Apart from a few deer, and little dogs, the biggest menu item was the turkey.

Diamond speculates too, that some of extinctions of pre-history in the New World, may have been due to the arrival of humans.... in other words, due to over-hunting.

But the critical thing is the "germs" mentioned in the title. Most of the diseases which could cause epidemics among humans, were associated with certain livestock.. Eg: cow pox metamorphosed into small pox. As a result, most Europeans in the sixteenth century, if they had not died of small pox, had a certain amount of resistance to it.

Not so in the Americas where it is thought that well over 90% of the population was wiped out by disease within a few years of the arrival of the whites.

This review can only mention a few of the stimulating ideas contained in this book, ideas about inventions, scripts and writing, social organization, and a whole range of obscure but fascinating historical and anthropological information from every continent on the planet... plus the effects of geography on land masses.

Importantly, the conclusion is not that any one race is "brighter", or "more inventive" than another..... (or conversely that any ethnic group is "naturally conservative" or even "lazy"). No, Diamond says that all that mattered was "real estate".

It is clear that Diamond is an academic, but the depth of his erudition in a wide range of disciplines is very impressive, and yet he can write in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader.....and be entertaining too.

There are many highly original ideas embedded in the text, some of which may be controversial, (for example "How Africa became black", and "How China become Chinese."), but at the end, one stands out above the others, it is a cogently argued plea for History, in the future, to be regarded as a Science subject.

I think this is an important book. It has given me an insight into how those weird facts of history came about.... how did Hernan Cortes with his band of a few hundred, bring down the Aztec empire?

How could almost the same thing happen to Pizarro in Peru with the Inca Empire?..... the answers to these and many more interesting questions are to be found in the pages of this excellent and thoughtful work of non-fiction.

It is to be hoped that the guy from Papua New Guinea has received his copy.