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Still thinking
Apr. 13th, 2006 01:31 pm...about the Jared Diamond book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." (Not that I've finished it, or even come close yet.)
At the end of chapter 3, Diamond asks, "Why weren't the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which Europeans lacked resistance, to develop ocean-going ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history?"
The title of the next chapter is Farmer Power, and it's more than part of the answer to the question he posed. Nothing new there; it's well understood that having free time leads directly to innovation and advancement, and that's not why I'm reading this book. (If anyone reading this doesn't understand why that is so, buzz me and I'll try to explain.) What intrigues me in his question is the part about not having horses (or large beasts to use in plowing, hauling, and warring)--and why this makes a difference.
Diamond uses as his example the effect on the continent of Australia/New Zealand, at that time a single mass, of the arrival of humans from Eurasia. Most, if not all, continents evolved a certain number of megafauna, really large mammals of various sorts who all could have been domesticated and turned into that continent's version of the horse. He points out that the continents that no longer had megafauna at the advent of homo sapiens are the continents that fell behind in the rush to ultimate power in modern times. And where did the megafauna go?
We ate them.
Interesting, isn't it? That a continent's first arriving humans, bearing very crude weapons, should effect a change that still echoes to this day. Why were there no horses or other beasts of burden in North America when the Spaniards first started to colonize? The Eurasians who later became the Native Americans killed and ate them. As a result, they did not have those large beasts to develop improved methods of agriculture, or to haul great burdens around, or to add mobility to their efforts to war on one another...and so when Atahuallpa met up with Pizarro, it was the severely outnumbered Spaniards, with better weapons and horses and bearing germs that went to quick work on the native Incas, who conquered.
More to come on this subject later, as I process it.
At the end of chapter 3, Diamond asks, "Why weren't the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which Europeans lacked resistance, to develop ocean-going ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history?"
The title of the next chapter is Farmer Power, and it's more than part of the answer to the question he posed. Nothing new there; it's well understood that having free time leads directly to innovation and advancement, and that's not why I'm reading this book. (If anyone reading this doesn't understand why that is so, buzz me and I'll try to explain.) What intrigues me in his question is the part about not having horses (or large beasts to use in plowing, hauling, and warring)--and why this makes a difference.
Diamond uses as his example the effect on the continent of Australia/New Zealand, at that time a single mass, of the arrival of humans from Eurasia. Most, if not all, continents evolved a certain number of megafauna, really large mammals of various sorts who all could have been domesticated and turned into that continent's version of the horse. He points out that the continents that no longer had megafauna at the advent of homo sapiens are the continents that fell behind in the rush to ultimate power in modern times. And where did the megafauna go?
We ate them.
Interesting, isn't it? That a continent's first arriving humans, bearing very crude weapons, should effect a change that still echoes to this day. Why were there no horses or other beasts of burden in North America when the Spaniards first started to colonize? The Eurasians who later became the Native Americans killed and ate them. As a result, they did not have those large beasts to develop improved methods of agriculture, or to haul great burdens around, or to add mobility to their efforts to war on one another...and so when Atahuallpa met up with Pizarro, it was the severely outnumbered Spaniards, with better weapons and horses and bearing germs that went to quick work on the native Incas, who conquered.
More to come on this subject later, as I process it.
