The species domesticated in the Andes never reached central Mexico, nor visa-versa, because they were useless in the intervening tropics of Central America.
In order to perform this task [the historian] must equip himself with such a 'law' or 'laws.'
Although Mexican corn eventually was cultivated in eastern North America, it took millennia to spread to there, because of the two regions' different climates and the arid stretches separating them.It is not terribly difficult to imagine that an advantage in food production can result, over time, in a technological advantage as well. Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether it is even feasible to formulate "laws of history," a question that we will address below, I contend that the effort to discover the historical past is worthwhile in its own right, even if there is another discipline that Lacking an understanding of what real historical research consists of, Diamond winds up doing "scissors and paste" history.
Diamond argues that there are things we can learn from small-scale societies like those found in Papua New Guinea. Contributions are tax-deductible to the full extent the law allows. Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images As a logical consequence, in order to improve the lives of those who have been dealt a poor hand by those forces, it seems necessary to counteract them with another vast, impersonal force, namely, the State.
248). Jared relates how Billy's killers and his family come together peaceably through ritualized New Guinean conflict-resolution methods.
Of the fourteen mammals over 100 pounds that humans have domesticated, every one of the "major five" (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses) is Eurasian in origin.
They can't conjure themselves into existence out of thin air once a sufficiently dense human population emerges.
Diamond thinks a big problem was that the rich and powerful were so into keeping up with the Joneses — “flogging” the land (that’s over-farming to you and me) to compete with other chiefs for who could bring in the most crops and support the biggest posse of loyal retainers — to do anything to stop the madness.
Diamond's Thesis.
410). No, Diamond argues, they come from the only place they plausibly could—they are mutations of microbes that evolved to survive amidst dense populations of other mammal species, specifically, among the herd animals, a number of which humans domesticated and came to live with in close quarters.
Only around 5,400 years ago did the first state emerge, with its dense population, labor specialization and power hierarchy.
In fact, the bulk of Diamond's book relates historical events meant to demonstrate the soundness and explanatory scope of his claim.In order to make his thesis plausible, Diamond must show that there were crucially important geographical differences between the homelands of those societies that wound up as conquerors and those that turned out to be the vanquished. The inscription on a statue may have been re-inscribed at the behest of a ruler jealous of his illustrious predecessor's accomplishments. 212).Diamond does not comprehend the nature of historical inquiry, rendering his attempt to replace what he has failed to understand with his own brand of "scientific history" badly misguided. And why did Europeans carry germs so deadly to American Indians that many Indian nations were wiped out in advance of any direct contact with Europeans (through disease transmission from Indian tribes that did have direct contact with colonists), rather than the Europeans falling in droves to diseases they contracted from Indians?To answer the first of the above questions, Diamond begins by noting that the pace of technological development in a society depends heavily on its ability to create a food surplus. Given what we have examined so far, Diamond's work suggests the following, quite sensible ideas:Advances in technology depend heavily on a food surplus, and, therefore, on agriculture;The degree to which agriculture could be practiced in any location, before the advent of world-wide commerce, depended heavily on what species were locally available for domestication or could be acquired from neighboring cultures sharing a similar climate;Agriculture and the domestication of herd animals are also prerequisites for the emergence of epidemic diseases among humans; andTherefore, agricultural, herding societies will carry deadlier germs than will hunter-gatherers or people that farm only plants.But Diamond is not satisfied with merely having discovered certain factors that frequently have been influential in humanity's past. The historian is always presented with a collection of initially ambiguous and often, on their face, mutually contradictory pieces of evidence, on the basis of which he attempts to determine what the facts really were. Later, independent studies did not confirm Dvorak's outlandish claims.
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