Simply saying that Africa didn't have domesticable animals isn't good enough because, certainly, they could have imported them along with other technology from Europe.
The continental axis hypothesis is his answer to this. He says crops (and later animals) could be more easily moved east to west rather than north to south because the climate will change less. In his mind, this explains why Africans didn't adopt European advancements in agriculture and animal domestication.
You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.
Sub-Saharan Africa is not some wasteland that couldn't support these animals and crops. And this is obvious when you consider that colonial empires brought their crops to Africa without the need to fundamentally change them for the climate. Colonial holdings in Africa often produced a good chunk of the grain for their empires as a whole.
Axis theories aside, Diamond is just factually wrong about the origins and timelines of domestication. Many of the crops and animals that supposedly helped Europe dominate the world were widely present in Africa centuries before European invasions.
Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.
This is covered well in Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and Steel https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707701
You could fill a book disproving his theories, but I'll point out one last thing: trying to explain European conquest through the lens of continents is super weird. Africa, let alone any other 'continent,' is a vast and diverse place. The idea of continents in and of itself makes less and less sense the more we learn about geography. You could as reasonably draw continental boundaries in dozens of other ways that would make more sense than the ones Diamond presents in his books.
There are boats (in Denmark no less) that are 10000 years old. Drawing of trade boats in Egypt are 6000 years old. I'd be surprised if travel and trade by boat wasn't common at the earliest stages of agricultural civilization.
Surely Eurasia is around twice than that? You don't need a distorted map to see that the distance between Portugal and Japan is far greater than the distance between Senegal and Somalia.
Africa and Eur-Asia measure almost identically North to South
And there's not much room for useful exchange of crops or livestock between Indians engaged in tropical farming and Sami engaged in reindeer pastoralism on the tundra.
In Africa there were all sorts of parasites and microbes that played havoc with attempts to grow European animals outside these lucky spots.
The Americas were too isolated and recent; Africa was too connected and old.
> You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.
Why is that a refutation? Diamond says that Eurasia's east-west axis is much longer than Africa's east-west axis. You're responding that Africa's east-west axis is almost as long as Africa's north-south axis. So what?
(Your following paragraphs make sense as refutations of Diamond, but I don't see how that one does.)
I hear this myth quite often, but apart from it not being a good hypothesis, it simply isn’t true, like at all.
But all that is to the side, that I really really hate the question of European domination. I honestly wished the people would stop asking that question, and instead focus on the damage and horrors Europe inflicted on the world with their colonial mania.
And to be clear, if you refuse to even contemplate questions like these, you just cede ground to people who will gleefully answer them for you with answers such as "because they are white, duh".
Now to be clear, I’m not accusing Jared Diamond of being a white supremacist (he obviously isn’t), just that this particular book smells of being and outdated and misdirected view of history which happens to cater to euro-centrists (probably unintentionally). And this is a bit ironic given how he is often put in the same camp as Howard Zinn, the history legend him self.
(To be clear, I don't hold high opinion of Diamond's work, either.)
> The fact that Europeans curb-stomped every other civilization on the globe
This is not a historical fact. And supposing it to be true is a prototypical example of euro-centrism. Yes Europe did engage in a brutal colonial campaign, causing horrors on a scale previously unheard of. But so did the Mongol empire, the Japanese imperial army, the Huns, Alexander the Great, etc.
Yes Europe colonized on a larger scale then before (but did so over a longer time period), but they didn’t colonize the entire world. There were other colonial ambitions which coexisted with Europe’s. For example, the Imperial Japan even won colonial wars against a European power, with colonial holdings (and border disputes) persisting to this day.
The question of how Europe did this, attributes something unique to Europe, and ignores the times when non-european powers were equally criminal. And you can see how this line of argument starts to break down by reading other posts in this thread. When you try to find what this is that makes Europe unique (Diamond argues environmental conditions) it most likely turns out either not be unique or otherwise completely irrelevant.
Euro-centrism has fallen out of favor among historians. We don’t study history anymore by presupposing there is something special about Europe.
All those other examples that you have listed are precisely why the question arises in the first place. E.g. Mongol Empire was a comparable project in intent, and wildly successful at the time (I hail from one of the places that were colonized by it). It also predated the European project. So, why aren't we living in a Mongol-dominated world today? Why did I have to learn English and not Mongol as my second language? Why did I have to emigrate to US and not to Mongolia to get paid more?
You seem to be responding from the assumption that I'm trying to push some kind of "white Europeans are superior" agenda, but this perspective is fundamentally wrong starting with the basic premise that the ability to dominate other cultures is a mark of superiority. I don't believe that it is; quite the opposite. But that doesn't negate the question of why Europeans are so much more successful at dominating than any of their competitors.
I’m sorry that I did that. That wasn’t my intention.
I actually hail from a country which was colonized by a European country for centuries (albeit a fellow European country) but the cultural dominance of the Americans and the British (who didn’t colonize the country; but did occupy it for a brief period) are much greater than that of the the colonizers (they still make us learn Danish is school though).
So, yeah, I guess I see your point there.
I’m actually not gonna raise a counterpoint here, because I haven’t read the book and whatever I say is doomed to be misinformed. I still believe his work and the question is euro-centric though (and many critics seem to agree with me on that).
> Colonial holdings in Africa often produced a good chunk of the grain for their empires as a whole.
Only Egypt, nowhere else.
> Africa, which was in constant contact with Europe
does the parent believe this was the case for Sub-Saharan Africa, BC?
from the parent:
>Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs >had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian >Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through >trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the >Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.
>This is covered well in Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and >Steel https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707701
Unless my search is broken, I found no mention of Romans, Turks, or Arabs in the article the parent referenced. Also the initial contact dates the parent mentions seem to be too late for the argument being made.
from the parent:
>You could fill a book disproving his theories,
How about we start with a comment doing the same first? Let's try to strive for a little modesty, um, CSMastermind.
Sort of, but it wasn’t exactly direct and straightforward, the Sahara was close to impassable and following the Atlantic coast was infeasible until the ~1500. And there were pretty complex civilizations in Ethiopia, Mali etc. in later periods when trade/travel become more feasible.
You also have the climate in sub-Saharan Africa which is generally not very hospitable and there are far enough to the South didn’t really have much contact with Eurasia at all.
> Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.
I confused. I assumed that you were talking about much earlier periods, are you saying that there weren’t complex civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa during those times? And yes while the Romans could get past the Sahara (like the Carthaginians allegedly were able to reach the Souther hemisphere or even sail around Africa) it was hard, expensive and rarely worth the effort so there was very little direct contact.
There were horses, at least, not tremendously different morphologically from Asian species, but which (most likely) had not inherited an instinctual fear of humans.
My point is, I guess, it’s hard to know and counterfactuals with hypothetical species are probably not definitive.
- Africa, Australia: continuous habitation; no suitable creatures.
- Europe, Asia: continuous habitation; suitable creatures.
- South America: recent habitation; no suitable creatures (discounting cameloids).
- North America: recent habitation; ???.
It's a tantalizing, permanent un-known that just invites speculation! Nothing wrong with indulging imagination a bit, so long as we recognize that's what we're doing.
For one who has relatively little interest in reading such a book, the claim seems quite outlandish. For instance Africa has everything from monkeys to elephants, and most have been tamed. Even the common exception of zebras isn't really an exception. One can find countless examples of them being tamed to varying degrees [1], but there seems to be no large scale and competent multi-generational effort to achieve that at scale. Taming in many species is a process that happens over many decades to centuries. And when you look at other places like Russia, everything from foxes to bears have been tamed.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2014/09/20/349856240/my-little-zebra-it-...
So I think we're now getting back to the point. The idea that this all had a meaningful, let alone critical, impact on the overall evolution and competence of civilizations just seems quite irrational without some sort of major missing link that nobody seems to be able to provide.
FWIW I don't know if I buy this particular argument from Diamond myself in a sense that all those animals aren't possible to domesticate in principle. What is undeniable, though, is that horses and oxen are very efficient as beasts of burden. Which means that a single farmer can produce more surplus food to feed people doing other things (like say going to foreign lands to conquer them). And militarily, horses give you cavalry, of course, but perhaps even more importantly, they make military logistics that much more effective - and for pre-modern armies the logistics is often what defines their limits.
And food, in general, is not particularly difficult to produce at scale. During the voyage his crew would have eaten nothing more than what the Aztecs would have had available - salted meats, dried carbs, and light alcohol. His primary advantage came from technology - metal working, gunpowder, weapons development, and so on. And all of these technologies were fully available to everybody in most of every part of the world, yet they failed to discover them. And that's ultimately what decided the winners and the losers in history.
So it seems to me that his argument must be boil down to horses causally lead to gunpowder and metal works. And one can try to argue such, but it's quite clearly contradicted not only by the obviously rather tenuous logic there, but also by the endless examples of civilizations which had one yet not the other, in both directions.
With respect to food in general, it's not that it's difficult to produce at scale. But your ability to produce food is inherently limited by three factors - the land, the people to work that land, and the tech those people use. Now, pretty much any agricultural society can produce enough food to feed all the people who produce the food (and all other basic necessities besides). Everything past that point is surplus, which can then be spend to feed people who are not producing food. Which is first and foremost the rulers and the priests - and thus you start getting social stratification - but then also artisans (who make tools) and soldiers (who go and conquer more land to farm and subjugate more people to farm it). And, at some point, a portion of those elites - who have enough calories and enough leisure time to waste on "frivolous" activities not having to do with immediate survival - uses that time to do research that eventually translates to better tools. Furthermore, if their society is in a constant state of war with neighbors - as was the case in Europe for most of its history - those tools are likely to be better weapons specifically.
Horses are clearly not the single definitive factor here, but I don't see why it couldn't be a significant one. This whole setup I just described is clearly a positive feedback loop, so even relatively minor factors introduced early can compound massively over time. And if horses meant that a single European farmer could produce, say, as much food as two Incan farmers, that's a lot more resources that can be spent on waging war and on figuring out how to do it more efficiently.
I should note that the above is not a rehash of Diamond, but rather my own thoughts on this matter. Speaking for myself, I think that it's really the non-stop warfare in Europe, where no single entity managed to unify the entire continent and make it stick for long enough, that was the defining factor in pushing Europe ahead in military science specifically (and other things more or less incidental to that). And then its relatively small size meant that much of this aggressive potential was directed outside of the continent - as military tech progresses, wars of conquest against peer-level neighboring states become less and less lucrative, because you have to spend considerably more resources to conquer the same amount of land and population. Much easier to take all that tech you already have and go curb-stomp some civilization that doesn't have it yet.
I also have to add that many of the advances we're talking about are not things that require any sort of special preconditions. I can setup a furnace capable of creating and forming steel in my backyard out of clay, straw, wood, and perhaps some leather if I really want to go all out and add a billows. Similarly I can even make gunpowder in my backyard - straw, wood/charcoal, sulfur, urine, and you're good to go! One curious and experimental individual is all it takes to reshape a people.
At least if they're willing to be reshaped. There's a lot of weird things in history. For instance the Zulu were a warlike people, yet their traditional shield was made of cowhide! And it was "real" - not just ceremonial/ornamental. Obviously they were aware of the possibility of making one out of thin wood, which might be a bit heavier yet orders of magnitude more protective - yet they chose not to. Similarly they preferred to fight near naked, as opposed to wearing cowhides - which again, I think it goes without saying they were aware of the possibility of.
Even simple things like fortifications seem to largely have not been a thing in much of the world in spite of never-ending wars. Simple wooden defenses, moats, etc are utterly trivial to construct, and that sets you almost immediately down the technological path towards the massive spiraling castles that would end up dotting the European landscape. But most of these other cultures simply failed to create such things.
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EDIT: You know, thinking about this some more - I can even see this weirdness in our own cultures today. For instance everybody knows that fertility rates are plummeting to the point that most Western societies stand a large risk of simply dying off. Yet most people simply shrug. It may be that the first 'grand reshaping' of Earth was technology, but the second may simply be fertility. And an anthropologist looking back find himself struggling to answer why it was that people simply didn't adapt when the answer was right in front of them. And living through this, perhaps there is no answer - certainly no neat and tidy one.
[1] - https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-01... (short and highly readable)
They don't actually have to. The reason why that is the case is because agricultural societies very quickly stratify - which happens because it is very profitable to be on the top in such society, since there's so much more surplus wealth produced by people under you that you can forcibly take away. Hunter-gatherer societies only see that at the richest end of their scale (again, the Salish were a good example of that), and even then the stratification is fairly meager by agriculturalist standards.
And so the farmers end up working more, because forcing them to work more means more surplus to take from them. But without that - i.e. if the farmer only has to feed themselves and their family - they do in fact have more leisure time than a hunter-gatherer would, simply because it takes less time to farm the same amount of calories.
> I also have to add that many of the advances we're talking about are not things that require any sort of special preconditions. I can setup a furnace capable of creating and forming steel in my backyard out of clay, straw, wood, and perhaps some leather if I really want to go all out and add a billows. Similarly I can even make gunpowder in my backyard - straw, wood/charcoal, sulfur, urine, and you're good to go!
If you already know how (and why) to make either, absolutely. But technological development itself is highly path-dependent. A person who is not familiar with the concept of smelting is not going to set up a furnace with billows out of the blue, because, well, why would they bother doing something as complicated as that with no good reason?
> For instance the Zulu were a warlike people, yet their traditional shield was made of cowhide! And it was "real" - not just ceremonial/ornamental. Obviously they were aware of the possibility of making one out of thin wood, which might be a bit heavier yet orders of magnitude more protective - yet they chose not to. Similarly they preferred to fight near naked, as opposed to wearing cowhides - which again, I think it goes without saying they were aware of the possibility of.
Yes, and many Polynesians similarly eschewed the bow for warfare despite knowing of them and even using them for sports.
But this seems to be an unstable arrangement that is easily upset. For example, Maori were also in the same boat wrt bows. But after Europeans came to New Zealand and Maori chiefs saw just how powerful guns are, a few decided that, whatever the custom is, they need to acquire some for themselves. And so they did, leading to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars, in which many traditionalist iwi were nearly wiped out, and most of them also adopted firearms out of necessity. And note that this wasn't the case of Europeans pushing the guns onto the natives - no, Hongi Hika actually organized a mission to UK to see for himself how those warlike British people live, and to obtain the same arms (he exchanged the gifts received in UK for muskets and gunpowder in Australia on his way back).
And those who refuse to change - or change in the way that makes them intentionally less competitive in warfare - end up like the Moriori...
> Even simple things like fortifications seem to largely have not been a thing in much of the world in spite of never-ending wars. Simple wooden defenses, moats, etc are utterly trivial to construct, and that sets you almost immediately down the technological path towards the massive spiraling castles that would end up dotting the European landscape. But most of these other cultures simply failed to create such things.
Did they, though? Looking at Maori again, during their earlier, more peaceful period (when their population size was small enough that living off the land could easily sustain everyone with no need to fight for resources), they didn't have fortifications. But once that was no longer the case and their culture became dominated by war, their villages very quickly turned into fortified pā.
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On the invention aspect, it seems that metal working is a pretty logical and natural path for an experimental mind. Like when you were a child and first got to play with firecrackers, didn't you do all the typical things? Place one in a bottle and see what happens. Place one under a bucket and see what happens. Bury one and see what happens. And so on. Similarly when playing with fire.
And when people early people were experimenting with fire they no doubt realized that fire has an ability to do very different things, at different heats, to different substances. Heat wood and make charcoal, heat food and its flavor and texture changes, heat dried grass or straw and it's effectively disintegrated. Heat metals and...? All you need to imagine is that perhaps you might need a hotter fire, which is far from difficult when many metals start to change color and consistency even at relatively low heats. And the knowledge that fires fed 'air' grow hotter is something that is also trivial to discover. Things like billows and ever more sophisticated setups follow relatively naturally.
Jared Diamond's argument is that for an animal to be domesticated it needs to have a very specific collection of traits—tameability and ability to breed in captivity being two important ones—and that there weren't any sufficiently good candidates for domestication in the Americas, Africa, or Australia (besides the llama in South America, which they did domesticate).
With which part of this argument do you disagree? What candidates would you propose for domestication in non-Eurasian continents?
Also, if they are basically useless now, most groups won't even realize there's a point to starting to tame them.
There are also large wild populations.
And it does seem rather obvious on its face that animals exhibiting certain kinds of social behavior, for example, would more readily adapt to a symbiotic relationship with humans than others.
Also why the focus on animals, some of the very best crops we have today (e.g. the potato) were originally bread in the Americas for thousands of years before contact.
So it would probably help if somebody compellingly laid out his hypothesis, at least as it relates to animals, while making some reasonable effort to account for the countless self evident arguments against it.
But I have a deeper problem with Diamond’s book, and the main reason I will probably never read this book, is the fact that I believe he is asking the wrong question. The question of European colonization should not be about capability, but of consequence.
Brutal armies have in the past from all over the world been able to siege, occupy, colonize and genocide vast areas with nothing superior but their brutality. The Mongol army for examlple might have had a superior breed of horses, but what they had above else was complete disregard of the human lives of their victims. Same with the Huns, or the Japanese imperial army, and yes, colonial Europe.
Guns Germs and Steel (the explanation, not the book) sound to me like a post hoc analysis, an overfit if you will, to fit history neatly between the lines, and tie it together with a nice bow. Asking the question, „but how could Europe do this?“ is an extremely colonialist thing to do, a euro-centric world view. If Jared Diamond wanted to do history, he wouldn’t ask this question. He would ask: „what were the consequences of actual people victims of these crimes?“ Yes this is ideology, but I would argue that Diamond is also full of an awful world view which doesn’t fit in historic analysis of this century.
Also, North America had buffalo. I fail to see anything inherent in the North American buffalo which would prevent it from being bred to plow a field the same way that the Water Buffalo in Asia was bred.
Most likely the agricultural practices and warfare was different in the Americas which never drove the people living there to breed their animals for the same trades as in Europe and Asia.