Guns, Germs, and Steel

Diamond spent a lot of time in New Guinea studying bird evolution. There, he met a local politician named Yali, who asked him a question that became the genesis for Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yali wondered why European colonizers were able to subjugate New Guinea, which was still under colonial rule. Yali noted that the colonists brought with them a variety of ‘cargo,’ including metal weapons, medicines, and clothing, so he asked Diamond, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (14).

Diamond tells this story as a way of raising the question: if people such as the New Guineans are not lacking in intelligence, then why are they technologically primitive? For him, answering this question is a moral imperative—typically, the answer relies on assumptions about native intelligence, which lead to racist views. Diamond believes that these ideas are inaccurate and harmful, and he therefore seeks to dismantle them and offer an alternative explanation in this book.

Between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, Europe and Western Asia were populated by Neanderthals, who had slightly larger brains than ours, but whose stone tools were relatively crude. Neanderthals were not yet fully human.

50,000 years ago, our human ancestors came from East Africa, where we have found sites featuring standardized stone tools, preserved jewelry, and other artifacts associated with the skeletons of people termed Cro-Magnons. These artifacts include more advanced tools and weapons, and the remains of houses, clothes, and jewelry. The cave paintings, statues, and musical instruments these people left behind also indicate aesthetic progress.

What happened 100,000 and 50,000 to make this shift? Diamond argues that the perfection of the voice box was responsible, allowing the development of modern language, upon which the exercise of human creativity depends. Other scholars, meanwhile, have suggested that a change in brain organization occurred around that time and made modern language possible. The geographical site of this shift also remains uncertain. Did it take place primarily in one geographical area, whose inhabitants then spread to other parts of the world? Or did it take place simultaneously within different regions?

In any case, Cro-Magnons entered Europe around 40,000 years ago and somehow used their superior intellect and technology to kill or displace the Neanderthals. 

Diamond explores an example of a closed system of two cultures interacting that functions as a “natural experiment.” This event highlights a contrast between the simplest, egalitarian societies and those that had become more socially diverse.

Two peoples in Polynesia, the Maori and the Moriori, developed in substantially different ways before coming into conflict. The Maori and Moriori developed differently because of their different environments: New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, respectively. The Moriori hailed from New Zealand but colonized the Chathams and had to alter their lifestyle accordingly, developing into “a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization” (56). By contrast, the Maori who remained in New Zealand grew in number; they formed locally dense populations and engaged in continual warfare. They also developed various tools for the purposes of fighting, growing crops, and producing art.

Rather than living in a peaceful state of coexistence, the Moriori were killed and enslaved when the Maori arrived in the Chatham Islands in 1835. As they were ill-equipped and accustomed to solving conflict peacefully, they failed to establish the organized resistance that may have foiled their attackers. 

Diamond uses linguistics to explain that Africa is the origin for most of the world’s languages. For this, he relies on the work of renowned linguist Joseph Greenberg, who classified into five families Africa’s 1,500 languages.

Though People have typically been taught that Western civilization originated in the Near East and reached its zenith in Europe with the Romans and Greeks, Greenberg found that Semitic languages form only one branch of a much larger language family known as Afro-asiatic, the other branches of which are confined to Africa. This suggests that Afro-asiatic languages originated in Africa and only one branch spread to the Near East.