Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond

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Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm

Converting from hunter-gatherer to food producer takes time and depends on factors such as the decrease in availability of wild game, prestige, and cultural attitudes, the availability of domestic wild plants and animals, technologies, population pressures from growth, etc. The first famers though, weren’t exactly better off than hunter-gatherers. They worked long hours, they were smaller, less well-nourished, they were capable of getting more diseases, and died younger. Some hunter-gatherers stayed with their roots but occasionally traded with farmers. Most hunter-gatherers, farmers, and herders despised one another. Overtime, hunting-gathering became less rewarding and there was an increase in availability of domesticated plants, which made plant domestication more rewarding. Food production increased the population and produced more food so it was more favored. Hunter-gatherers eventually either was displaced by neighboring food producers or became them. Only in areas unable to support food production remained hunter-gatherers. Even then they eventually settled into civilization. I just don’t understand why both farmers and hunter-gatherers can’t live in harmony, but I guess that’s just not how history works!

Chapter 7: How to Make an Almond

To my surprise, wild almonds are poisonous—the farmers had to select mutated almonds that lacked amygdalin—and you could die after eating a few dozen. Food producers used genetic engineering to make wild crops useful to humans. The plants that are selected are based on the seed transportation and natural selection. They can travel by wind, water or animal and are selected by larger size, more flesh, and better taste. The farmers knew when the almonds weren’t poisonous based on their bitterness. The almonds that suddenly weren’t bitter anymore were used and domesticated. Agricultural scientists were inspired to make seedless fruit after they came across the seedless banana, which reversed the evolved function of wild fruit. Another looked for quality was how the plant reproduced. It was easier to maintain self-fertilized plants (plums, peaches, apples, apricots, cherries) and they were also chosen based on seed dispersal mechanisms, germination inhabitation, and natural variations. What shocked me was when I found out that the poison in the almond was used in the Nazi’s gas chambers! In general, plant domestication was an important source of many foods.

Chapter 8: Apple or Indians

A controversy lied on the cause of lacking food production—was it problems with the local people, or problems with locally available wild plants? First, the Fertile Crescent was thought to be the earliest center of food production with its Mediterranean climate, which favored a large number of larger-seeded annuals, hermaphroditic self-pollinators, and a high percentage of plants suitable for domestication, multiple usable wild domestic mammals, and the early domestication of eight founder crops. On the other hand, Mesoamerica, New Guinea, and the Eastern United States were limited in their choices of plants and animals. The arrival of appropriate founder species such as the sweet potato accelerates food production where suitable plants lacked previously. Of 200,000 wild plants, only 200 have been domesticated and 12 species form 80% of world food capacity: wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybean, potato, manioc, sweet potato, sugar cane, sugar beet, and banana. For the apple, it requires difficult technique and grafting, so it could have never been domesticated in North America by the Indians. Whether it was the people or the wild plants, it depended on people’s readiness to accept better crops and livestock, or the constraints by locally available plants.

Chapter 9: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle

Animal domestication is associated with the Anna Karenina Principle, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, as in successfully domesticated animal species, like the happy families of Anna Karenina, are all alike in that all requirements—not just some—must be satisfied. 2500BC was when all large animals that could be domesticated were. Successful domesticates were almost exclusively Eurasian which is understandable because of its diverse habitats with many seemly conditions. The requirements for domestication are omnivore or herbivore—the dog is an exception, rapid growth (elephant’s growth is to slow), breed well in captivity (cheetahs need their privacy), suitable disposition (grizzly bears and zebras cannot be tamed), tendency to panic, and social structure. Some species have never been domesticated but tamed, such as the zebra and peccaries. Through domestication, some species have had changes from their previous wild ancestors. Examples would be smaller in size, smaller brains, less developed sense organs, etc. What I found pretty interesting was that people kept some of their domesticated animals as pets, like we do today.

Chapter 10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes

Axis orientations affected the rate of crop and livestock spread, possibly writing, inventions, and the daily lifestyle. The diffusion of food production was enabled in Eurasia because of being in the East-West axis offered similar climate, geographic, and disease conditions to travelers with no challenging barriers. On the other hand, the diffusion in mostly North-South axis in the Americas, Africa, New Guinea and Australia was slowed by differentiation in climate, deserts, and diseases, infertile lands, etc. The New World suffered greater than Eurasia. Diffusion rates varied from 0.7 miles per year out of southwest Asia to 0.3 miles per year in the eastern United States. The lack of adaptation of domesticates to the new environments was the key reason of slow diffusion in the New World. Inventions have an indirect link with the latitudes. Starting with the availability of materials due to the location, some couldn’t even start inventing since the lack of supplies. It’s kind of unfair that certain areas were unable to consist of creative needs.

Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock

Food production leads to the proximate causes of germs, literacy, technology and central government. Livestock and crops were a primary cause of germs and disease. The animals and pets owned transmitted diseases to their owners: smallpox from cows, flu from pigs and ducks, tuberculosis from cattle, bubonic plague, measles, AIDS from monkeys, the list goes on. Diseases were the biggest killer of people