Ethnobiology

  (out of 5 stars)

Over the course of reading numerous non-fiction books in the past years, I've seen Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel referenced numerous times, and I finally got around to reading this Pulizter Prize winning text over the weekend. Having caught an television episode adapted from the book, I had some idea what to expect, but was overwhelmingly pleased to finally tear into the thesis in full. The scope and subject matter make Guns one of those fascinating multi-subject (and multi-cultural) books which I could not put down.

Diamond uses this book to explore his anti-racist thesis that societies which came to dominate, conquer, and otherwise outpace other societies were the lucky recipients of geography and not simply smarter, craftier, or more powerful by the result of their own genetic advantages. Throughout the book, Diamond looks at just why some civilizations, namely those in the Eurasian supercontinent, tended to acquire technologies and advantages faster and were more apt to use them than the cultures in the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere.

It all turns out to be a case of the luck of geography, says Diamond. The east-west axis of Eurasia, combined with population densities, an abundance of prime domestication candidates for both crops and animals, as well as the diffusion of technology all favored the civilizations which grew out of the Fertile Crescent. Numerous disadvantages are explained for Africa (the Sahara barrier, lack of prime domesticatable animals, etc), the Americas (bottleneck of north-south axis, isolated societies, nearly no surviving domesticatable animals, etc), and Australia (large areas of poor farm land, few domesticatable animals, isolation from Eurasia, etc). Diamond argues that the Eurasian peoples were not really better in any way, they just happened to live in areas capable of obtaining and utilizing numerous advantages not available in other locations, and this, he argues, is the primary set of factors leading, for example, to the conquest of the Americas.

Diamond's germ theory of conquest is outstanding and very deeply discussed throughout. The fact that Eurasian cultures had many choice domesticatable animals (including pigs, sheep, cows and horses) allowed them to interact with various animal-vector germs and, over many thousands of years, develop strong resistence to those illnesses. Other locations, such as the Americas, had very few such animals (really just the llama), and had no opportunity to survive early contact with those germs before Europeans showed up bearing the dangerous microbes.

There are strong discussions and examples of the spread of humans throughout Oceania and Southeast Asia. Diamond uses various island experiences to highlight how small differences in geography and natural resources can lead to astounding differences in the advantages any of those island cultures can achieve. His thoughts on these situations are profoundly interesting and offered numerous fruits for the curious mind to consider.

From food production to germ resistence, and technological advantages to the unconscious drive to build larger and stronger states, Diamond leaves no stone unturned in examining why some few cultures came to dominate global society. It is no wonder why this book captured the Pulitzer. It is thorough, insightful, engagingly complex, and an outstanding treatment of 13,000+ years of human history of society, movements, and developments. Very highly recommended to anyone with a thirst for history, anthropology, civilization studies, exploration, or sociology. Five stars.