what is the thesis of diamond's article

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared diamond.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel , Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the differences between societies and societal development arise primarily from geographical causes. The book is framed as a response to a question that Diamond heard from Yali , a charismatic New Guinean politician. Yali wanted to know, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo … but we black people had little cargo of our own?”—in other words, why have European societies been so militarily, economically, and technologically successful in the last 500 years, while other societies have not approached such a level of achievement?

In Part One of the book, Diamond sketches out the course of recent human history, emphasizing the differences between civilizations. Beginning about half a million years ago, the first human beings emerged in Africa, and eventually migrated around the rest of the world in search of game and other sources of food. About 11,000 years ago, certain human beings developed agriculture—a major milestone in human history. By the 15th century A.D., enormous differences had arisen between civilizations. For example, when Francisco Pizarro led a Spanish expedition to the Inca Empire in the early 16th century, he was able to defeat the Incan Emperor, Atahuallpa , easily. Why did the Europeans colonize the New World, and not the other way around?

In Part Two, Diamond talks about the dawn of agriculture and explains why it arose in certain parts of the world, but not others. Using carbon-dating technology, archaeologists have determined that the first sites of agriculture were Mesopotamia (in the Middle East), followed by Mesoamerica and China. Agriculture arose in those areas for a few reasons. Most of the human beings on the planet at the time were hunter-gatherers, meaning that they hunted game and picked nuts and berries for their food. But in the parts of the world that first developed agriculture, game and fruit were becoming scarcer, motivating experimentation with new forms of food production. In Mesopotamia, ancient humans used trial and error to learn how to plant certain large seeds in the earth, resulting in crops that could be harvested and converted into highly nutritious foods. These early peoples also learned how to domesticate wild animals, breeding familiar modern animals like dogs, cows, and horses. Humans used their domesticated animals to assist with agricultural work, while also learning how to domesticate certain wild crops, breeding most of the world’s familiar modern crops.

Agriculture arose in Mesoamerica and China. Due to environmental qualities like soil fertility, availability of domesticable animals, and availability of edible crops, however, it took a longer time for agriculture to supplant hunter-gatherer culture in most other regions. Once agriculture had arisen around the world, it spread or diffused to neighboring regions. By and large, Diamond argues, it is easier for ideas, goods, and foods to spread from east to west than it is for them to spread north and south—this is because the Earth spins east-west, meaning that areas with the same latitude share a similar climate and environment. Archaeological data indicates that agricultural innovations diffused east and west far sooner than they diffused north and south.

In Part Three, Diamond shows how basic agricultural differences between early societies magnified over time, leading to vast differences between societies’ health, technology, and social structure. First, he shows that agricultural societies developed immunities to deadly diseases like smallpox. Constant proximity to domesticated animals, combined with increased population density, meant that new germs were constantly circulating in agricultural societies. As a result, these societies became resistant to many epidemics—those who couldn’t survive died off, while those with immunities survived and passed on their immunities to their offspring.

Another important development in the history of agricultural societies was the invention of written language. While it’s difficult to show exactly why writing emerged in certain agricultural societies but not others, it’s clear that the structure of agriculture society (which requires lots of record-keeping for crops) put a high premium on a writing system. Furthermore, east-west diffusion patterns ensured that, once one society developed language, it diffused, along with agriculture itself, to surrounding areas, particularly those with similar latitude.

The history of language acts as a case study for the history of technology in general. While it’s again difficult to explain why certain inventors develop certain inventions, the structure of agricultural societies favored the invention of new technologies. This is true for a number of reasons. Agricultural societies lead to the creation of leisure time, since crops can be stored for long periods—in their leisure time, citizens of early agricultural societies experimented with the resources and raw materials around them. Additionally, agricultural societies were denser than hunter-gatherer societies, increasing the velocity with which people exchanged ideas. As a result, agricultural societies developed more new technologies than hunter-gatherer societies, and passed on their innovations to neighboring agricultural societies.

Ancient agricultural societies tend to develop into large, complex states. While the earliest agricultural societies were “bands” and small tribes, these small tribes gradually merged into larger and larger societies, either through conquering or mutual agreement. As societies became larger and denser, they tended to develop centralized structures of power—in other words, a central leadership that commanded a set of subordinate leaders, who in turn commanded local groups of people. States ruled through a balance of kleptocracy—i.e., leaders ordering their subjects to give up a portion of their possessions—and religion or patriotic fervor. By the 16th century—not coincidentally, the time when Europe was beginning its conquest of the New World—the state had become the dominant mode of society.

In Part Four, Diamond looks at a series of case studies that support his theory. In the first, he demonstrates that the New Guineans developed agriculture, sophisticated technology, and political centralization while the neighboring aborigines of Australia did not, due to geographic distances and factors like the ones sketched out in Part Two. He also argues that China was able to become the world’s first large, centralized state for environmental reasons—the temperate climate and homogeneous geography enabled easy communication and political unification between the states of China. The New Guineans were more successful than their neighbors, the peoples of Java and Borneo, in staving off European colonization and massacre in the 18th and 19th centuries, largely because their agricultural practices made them resistant to malaria, preventing colonists from staying for too long on their island. In the New World, agriculture arose in certain regions, but did not diffuse to neighboring regions due to the presence of geographic barriers like deserts and mountains. Finally, Diamond studies the history of Africa and argues that the Bantu peoples of North Africa were more militarily successful than their sub-Saharan neighbors because they developed some limited forms of agriculture. In the sub-Saharan environment, however, peoples didn’t have any way of developing agriculture, so their societies never had the time or organization to develop complex technologies.

In conclusion, Diamond argues, the differences between different peoples and societies of the world are largely attributable to geographic differences between different regions of the world. In certain parts of the world, humans began pursuing agriculture because the fertile soil and temperate climate made agriculture a good use of time and resources. Agricultural societies then gained tremendous advantages over non-agricultural societies, because the increase in leisure time enabled people to develop technologies and centralized political structures, and the proximity to animals gave people immunities to deadly diseases. As a result, some societies were able to conquer others.

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Environmental and Geographic Determinism: Jared Diamond and His Ideas

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The relationship between man and his environment has been a persistent theme through several centuries of geographical work. This relationship has now developed into a major social issue, as the planet faces deepening environmental problems. To recognize geography’s contributions to current environmental problems, it is necessary to understand past and current theories on the complex interaction between humankind and the environment. Numerous studies have been carried out to clarify this relationship, but there has been no synthesis of these perspectives on the past and present.

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Geographies and Theories of Geography: An Introduction

Geography’s “World view”: The ontological issues of geography

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Hong, S. (2010). Environmental and Geographic Determinism: Jared Diamond and His Ideas. In: Wiarda, H.J. (eds) Grand Theories and Ideologies in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112612_9

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Jared Diamond’s Collapse traces the fates of societies to their treatment of the environment

I will always think of jared diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase "east-west axis of orientation" the most talked-about kind of orientation there was -- freshman, sexual, or otherwise. his 1997 pulitzer prize-winning book guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies began with a simple question -- "why did pizarro conquer the incas and not the other way around" -- and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. for most readers (and there were millions), guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. to broadly simplify, diamond's book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. it had the kind of paradigm-shifting impact that happens with a book only once every few years, and it turned diamond -- a professor of geography at ucla -- into something of a rock star..

Jared Diamond.

I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase “east-west axis of orientation” the most talked-about kind of orientation there was — freshman, sexual, or otherwise. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question — “Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?” — and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. For most readers (and there were millions), Guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. To broadly simplify, Diamond’s book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. It had the kind of paradigm-shifting impact that happens with a book only once every few years, and it turned Diamond — a professor of geography at UCLA — into something of a rock star.

If Guns venerated the role that geographic chance played in societal development, Diamond’s newest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , restores human agency to the picture. Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society’s response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society’s demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society’s response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can “ choose to fail.”

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Collapse by Jared Diamond, Viking Books, 592 pgs., 2005.

Diamond then identifies the 12 environmental problems that are portents of doom: destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation); reduction of wild foods; loss of biodiversity; erosion of soil; depletion of natural resources; pollution of freshwater; maximizing of natural photosynthetic resources; introduction by humans of toxins and alien species; artificially induced climate change; and, finally, overpopulation and its impact.

These issues, which dovetail neatly with the flashpoints of the modern environmental movement, will be familiar enough to readers of Grist . But while the factors that Diamond believes lead societies to collapse may be clear, his definitions of both “society” and “collapse” are less so. “Collapse” can refer to complete extinction (Pitcairn Island), population crash (Easter Island), resettlement (Vikings), civil war (Rwanda), anarchy (Somalia, Haiti), or even just the demise of a political ideology (the disintegration of the Soviet Union). His definition of “society” is equally vague; he variously uses it to refer to a settlement (e.g., various Viking communities), a nation (ranging from Rwanda and Haiti, two of the smaller countries in the world, to China, one of the largest), a state (Montana), and an island (Easter). Each individual example makes sense, but as analogues — to each other or to the situation in today’s globalized world — they often falter.

The best examples in Collapse are those that avoid this apples-and-oranges problem by comparing two societies at the same moment in time and in the same place, such as the chapters on the Greenland Norse and on Hispaniola. In the case of the Vikings, as one historian said, they came to Greenland, “it got cold, and then they died.” But somehow, Diamond rejoins, the Greenland Inuit came, stayed, and survived — right up until this day. The point? Cold or not, the Greenland Norse didn’t have to die. Diamond elucidates how they mistreated their environment (without even realizing it in some cases) and refused to adapt to its variations. The Vikings, Diamond notes in his customary casual style, had a “bad attitude” and thought the Inuit were “gross weirdos.” As a result, they didn’t adapt to the Greenland environment as the Inuit did, and, eventually, starved to death.

Although it’s the chapter on Greenland that has thus far won the most acclaim, Diamond’s treatment of contemporary Hispaniola might be more relevant to the complexities of today’s world. Two countries share the island — the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Their resources, climate, religion, and history as colonies are markedly similar. And yet, their current situations couldn’t be more divergent. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Only 1 percent of its land is covered in forest, compared to 28 percent in the D.R. While the D.R. is by no means rich, its economy continues to grow, its environment is protected, and it reaps the benefits of munificent relations with the international community. In Haiti, there are too many people, too few resources, too few jobs, and, at the moment, scarcely a government. Diamond argues that the proximate cause of collapse in a society like Haiti — a coup d’état or a flood resulting from a hurricane, for instance — is only a manifestation of the ultimate cause: the mismanagement of its environment and resources.

These days, many Haitians — and indeed much of the rest of the developing world — face a stark choice: protecting the environment or eating. If it weren’t for foreign aid, Haiti could never support its population. And while the D.R. is a magnificent success by comparison, it’s important not to underestimate the similar tension it faces between the forces of development and the fight for environmental preservation. The difference is that the D.R.’s leaders and citizen-activists had the foresight to protect their environment before it was beyond repair.

This is an essential issue in Collapse , because Diamond’s goal in historicizing our understanding of the relationship between a society’s development and its environment is to prove that the two impulses are not antithetical. Much as Guns, Germs, and Steel was crafted in part as a response to books like The Bell Curve , which had managed to repopularize theories of racial determinism, Collapse is partly a response to the dominant environmental discourse in the United States today, which holds that environmental concerns are secondary to economic and security concerns. Rather, Diamond argues, environmental concerns are at least equal in importance, and inextricably linked, to all other aspects of a society’s success. His examples imply that, when it comes to the environment, a stitch in time means more than saving nine — it’s the difference between keeping and losing your shirt.

Don’t Give Away the Ending …

Collapse is a long book, and because Diamond is a guileless writer, you understand right from the introduction why he thinks societies falter, and to a certain extent what he thinks we should do about it. If you take it as a given that Diamond will prove his thesis (and I’m certainly not suggesting that you should), you could read the introduction and the last few chapters and get the point. But then you’d miss out on what Jared Diamond does best: tell stories.

Like Guns , much of Collapse is propelled by a quasi-Socratic question-and-answer style. The questions are sometimes obvious (“How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?”), sometimes poignant (“What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” “Did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!'” Diamond wonders), sometimes charmingly pointy-headed (“Which year did he go there and in which month? Did he find any stored hay or cheese left?”). The larger ones establish the contours of the book, while the smaller ones fill in the details that render what could be a tedious tome delightful: the fact that 1816 had no summer due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, say, or that there are only 578 U.S. college students studying mining. But there are also the meatier details of Diamond’s profession: how to carbon date, how to read tree rings, and, in a hilarious example of mad science, how to date the middens of packrats. (Packrat middens, in case you don’t know, are urine balls that, even thousands of years after they’re excreted, still taste surprisingly sweet. Yes, taste.)

Diamond’s sense of humor and eye for detail breathe life into people, places, and subjects that are foreign to most readers. He’s always been good at this — he can take a community of Easter islanders who’ve been dead for hundreds of years and make them sound like your next-door neighbors. So when Diamond makes a case study of the people who actually are his next-door neighbors — the residents of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley — his analysis is particularly compelling.

When Diamond first visited Montana 50 years ago, it was one of the most prosperous and environmentally pristine states in the U.S. Today, it’s one of the poorest, with a grim environmental outlook. Global warming, leach mining, tourism, and libertarian values knock heads in a particularly violent way under the Big Sky. From dairy owners and politicians to mine workers and militia members to wealthy Californians who daytrip to Montana in their private jets, Diamond describes a community of such diverse and conflicting interests that miracles are more likely to solve its problems than any kind of compromise.

The trouble is, Montana’s problems have to be solved. Its glaciers are disappearing, many of its mines are polluting the land and water, and its old industries — farming, mining, and ranching — are bordering on extinction. But the old guard has one idea of what to do about it, the new billionaire landowners another, the farmers another, the miners another, the teachers another, and so on. Diamond has fewer hard and fast answers about what should be done in Montana — the place he knows best — than he does about any other case study.

Whether such profound clashes can be resolved, Diamond argues, comes down to that great buzzword of 2004: values. He suggests that the “bad attitude” label that he used for the Vikings could be applied to the libertarian streak in Montanans, the inability of U.S. citizens to learn from past events like, say, the 1973 fuel crisis, and, notably, the reluctance of environmentalists to engage the proponents of business development. “Perhaps the crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold onto, and which ones to discard and replace with new values,” Diamond writes. In many ways, the main point of Collapse is to get us to assess the environmental impact of our values — whatever they are — and do something about the ones that don’t work.

The examples Diamond cites where this has actually happened provide the grace notes to Collapse — moments when the book becomes less about failure and more about how a society might beat the odds and come out on top. For instance, Diamond devotes a large section of his conclusion to outlining examples of successful collaborations between corporations and environmentalists. If these examples sometimes seem rather rosy, that might be part of Diamond’s plan. “My motivation is the practical one of identifying what changes would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead,” he writes. To that end, he saves some of his sharpest tongue-lashing for average citizens, who could put more pressure on lawmakers, on corporations, and on themselves (mostly in the form of taxes) to clip the fuse of the environmental time bombs. In a world where public companies are legally required to maximize their profits, the burden is on citizens to make it unprofitable to ruin the environment — for an individual, a company, or a society as a whole.

For Diamond, there is no project more urgent facing the world today. Late in the book, he puts two maps of the world side by side. One map highlights today’s environmental trouble spots, the other highlights political trouble spots. The two maps are identical, and seem to provide striking visual proof of Diamond’s thesis: poor environmental management leads to violent conflict and the brink of collapse. Of course, it would be easy to fill a map with politically stable nations that are suffering from environmental troubles (China, the U.S., and Australia, to use some of Diamond’s own case studies from the book), and there are places of conflict where environmental troubles are not a significant issue — Kosovo and Northern Ireland come to mind. Diamond’s tendency to present his theories in overly neat packages like these makes Collapse occasionally feel like a game of Sim Society. You might reasonably find yourself thinking, “If I planted just enough forests and remembered to eat my fish and not let my sheep graze for too long, I could be as successful as the Inuit or the shoguns of Japan (barring Godzilla), and would never succumb to the fate of the Vikings or contemporary Rwanda.” Considering that Edward Gibbon spent over a thousand pages on the fall of Rome alone, it’s easy to see how Diamond’s 20-to-40 page thumbnails on societies’ declines can seem like caricatures.

It’s small soft spots like these maps that have led some critics to call Diamond a fearmonger. But Collapse is more warning than prophecy, and the sheer number of examples Diamond provides — dozens of versions of what might happen, because it already has — is what gives the book its admonitory power. Even if its disparate stories never perfectly meld into one convincing argument, the scope of the work is breathtaking. And if I read Diamond’s ambitions right, he’d rather Collapse be read as an imperfect call to action than a perfect work of airtight logic. Ultimately, the proof of Collapse ‘s value will not lie in the book itself, but in what people are inspired to do after reading it.

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Jared Diamond on the Root of Inequality and How the Mixed Blessings of “Civilization” Warped Our Relationship to Daily Risk

By maria popova.

By bridging the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, geopolitics, and social science, trailblazing scientist Jared Diamond (b. September 10, 1937) has done more than anyone since Margaret Mead to decondition the Eurocentric approach to history and debunk the biological fallacies on which the monster of racism feeds. His Pulitzer-winning 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ( public library ) is a foundational text illuminating the conditions that led to inequality in the modern world and combating the broken logic that perpetuates these toxic beliefs.

At the heart of Diamond’s work is the notion that in order to understand any one society, we must contextualize it in the larger ecosystem of humanity and therefore must understand all societies. Only by grasping the richness and diversity of the entire ecosystem can we begin to dismantle our assumptions about the value of others and realize that people from different groups fared differently in history not due to their innate abilities but due to a complex cluster of environmental and geopolitical forces.

Diamond writes:

We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial. […] Questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians? […] The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.

Diamond arrived at studying the interplay of these complex forces via an unlikely path. A self-described “fanatical bird-watcher” since the age of seven, he came to study biology, then nearly dropped out of his Ph.D. program in physiology to become a linguist. But he did complete his science degree and landed in Papua New Guinea as a passionate thirty-something biologist studying bird evolution. He spent the decades that followed doing fieldwork in evolutionary biology, which took him into a remarkably wide range of human societies. Out of that immersion sprang the centerpiece of Diamond’s work — an unflinching invitation to nuance in how we think about progress.

He confronts a common bias:

Don’t words such as “civilization,” and phrases such as “rise of civilization,” convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness? In fact, I do not assume that industrialized states are “better” than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents “progress,” or that it has led to an increase in human happiness. My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed.

With an eye to the social environment and educational opportunities that shape the intellectual destiny of human beings, Diamond argues that our notions of intelligence are not only gravely skewed by the Western perspective but just about inverted. The IQ tests on which technologically advanced societies like our own do better than technologically primitive societies like aboriginal cultures — results on which many racist claims are predicated — actually measure cultural learning rather than innate cognitive ability. He writes:

My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

In this excerpt from a talk at British science powerhouse The Royal Institution , animated by artist Andrew Khosravani , Diamond illustrates New Guineans’ intellectual superiority with one particularly striking example of their sounder judgment in everyday matters:

In Guns, Germs, and Steel , Diamond points to two factors that explain New Guineans’ superior intelligence: First, European cultures have spent thousands of years in areas so densely populated that infectious disease spread and became the major cause of death, while centralized government and law enforcement kept murder at a relatively low rate. In New Guinea, on the other hand, societies were too sparse for epidemics to evolve, making murder, accidents, and tribal warfare the primary causes of death. Smart people were more likely to escape murder and avoid accident, passing their intelligent genes forward.

The second factor Diamond considers strikes much closer to the present and points to perilous forces we still have a chance to avert:

Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental dis advantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up.

Writing in 1997, Diamond could not yet point to other developmentally detrimental Western technologies that now hijack our cognitive faculties by reducing the world’s complexity to clickbait and listicles. But the cultural forces he examines make sense of how we ended up here. A revelatory read in its entirety, Guns, Germs, and Steel is thus no less timely today, packed with insight into the microscopic and monumental forces that shape our daily lives. Complement it with a very different and equally important perspective on the unconscious biases that permeate our world .

— Published September 10, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/10/jared-diamond-guns-germs-and-steel-risk/ —

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Geography is not destiny: A quantitative test of Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis

Angela m chira, russell d gray, carlos a botero.

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Corresponding author . E-mail: [email protected]

Received 2023 May 25; Revised 2023 Dec 11; Accepted 2023 Dec 12; Collection date 2024.

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Keywords: Axis of orientation hypothesis, cultural evolution, cultural biogeography

Jared Diamond suggested that the unique East–West orientation of Eurasia facilitated the spread of cultural innovations and gave it substantial political, technological and military advantages over other continental regions. This controversial hypothesis assumes that innovations can spread more easily across similar habitats, and that environments tend to be more homogeneous at similar latitudes. The resulting prediction is that Eurasia is home to environmentally homogenous corridors that enable fast cultural transmission. Despite indirect evidence supporting Diamond's influential hypothesis, quantitative tests of its underlying assumptions are currently lacking. Here we address this critical gap by leveraging ecological, cultural and linguistic datasets at a global scale. Our analyses show that although societies that share similar ecologies are more likely to share cultural traits, the Eurasian continent is not significantly more ecologically homogeneous than other continental regions. Our findings highlight the perils of single factor explanations and remind us that even the most compelling ideas must be thoroughly tested to gain a solid understanding of the complex history of our species.

Social media summary: Environmental barriers may limit cultural spread but do not consistently favour Eurasia.

Introduction

In Guns, germs, and steel , Jared Diamond speculated that ecological biases in the spread of cultural innovations contributed to the different rates at which societies developed in different regions of our world (Diamond, 1997 , 2002 ). Specifically, he noted that while the predominant axis of orientation of Africa and the Americas is North–South, that of Eurasia is mainly East–West, suggesting greater homogeneity in day length, climate and/or available habitats within the Eurasian continent. Based on this observation, Diamond posited that geography could have facilitated the transmission and successful implementation of cultural innovations in Eurasia, particularly those related to the domestication of flora and fauna. Some telling examples support these ideas. For example, although agriculture spread rapidly within Southern Asia, Europe and the Indus Valley, it spread relatively slowly out of Mexican, Eastern North American, South American and African points of origin (Diamond, 1997 ; Stephens et al., 2019 ; Zohary et al., 2012 ). Other fundamental innovations followed a similar trend. Wheels and alphabetic writing, respectively, spread rapidly from South–West Asia to Eurasia and from the Fertile Crescent to Carthage and the Indian subcontinent but failed to spread from Mesoamerica to South America (Diamond, 1997 ). Importantly, the rapid spread of crucial innovations related to domestication in Eurasia was followed by the development of large, dense, sedentary, and stratified societies. Thus, in Diamond's own words, geography may have ‘turned the fortunes of history’ and shaped inter-continental differences in technological, political and military dominance (Diamond, 1997 ).

Diamond's biogeographic insights and remarkable scope have received much attention. His book, Guns, germs, and steel (Diamond, 1997 ) won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction ( https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jared-diamond ) and it was the base of a three-part National Geographic Special aired in 2005. However, his thesis has also been heavily criticised for being Eurocentric and for failing to recognise the importance of historical contingency and cultural factors (Blaut, 1999 ; York & Mancus, 2007 ). Further, in relation to the axis of orientation hypothesis, as this influential idea is now known, his critics have noted the inherent risks of downplaying exceptions when extrapolating from hand-picked examples of fast cultural transmission within similar environments (Blaut, 1999 ). The assumption that environmental conditions are significantly more homogeneous in Eurasia than in other regions of the world is also problematic. For example, the Himalayan plateau, the Arabian desert and the Mediterranean are physically connected areas within the Eurasian continental landmass that occur at similar latitudes but exhibit pronounced ecotones and elevational gradients in abiotic conditions. Another potential issue with Diamond's proposition is that although domesticated species undoubtedly show ecological limits, their potential for adaptation can be wide and can often be extended with the assistance of human modifications of the environment (Blaut, 1999 ; Fuller & Qin, 2009 ). Despite these critiques, Diamond's ideas have received some theoretical and empirical support. For example, Olsson and Hibbs ( 2005 ) build on Guns, germs, and steel to investigate the role of biogeographic conditions on the transition to sedentary agriculture and argue for a long-lasting influence of early ecological biases (such as size of continent and major continental axis, climate type and the number of plant and animal species suited for domestication). Further, historical and modern states are predominantly oriented East–West (Currie & Mace, 2009 ; Turchin et al., 2006 ), and linguistic diversity tends to be more pronounced across longitudinal than latitudinal gradients – i.e. culture probably diffuses more easily on an East–West than on a North–South axis (Güldemann & Hammarström, 2020 ; Laitin et al., 2012 ). Quantitative evidence supporting Diamond's idea and particularly its core assumptions is nevertheless scarce. Crucially, it remains to be established whether environmental barriers associated with latitude significantly hinder the spread of cultural traits and whether continental-scale differences in the strength of such environmental barriers actually follow Diamond's expectation, i.e. whether ecological facilitation of cultural spread is indeed higher in the Eurasian landmass.

Operationalising Diamond's hypothesis has proved difficult in part because it requires the integration of vast amounts of data from multiple sources that were not easily accessible in the past. Here we explicitly test the most critical ecological and geographic assumptions of Diamond's hypothesis through quantitative analyses that leverage a comprehensive set of now publicly available data on global differences in culture, languages, and ecology (Gray, 1999 ; Kirby et al., 2016 ; Murdock, 1967 ). We first use cultural and ecological data to identify the potential for environmental parameters to influence the ease of cultural transmission ( Figure 1a , Figure S1a). While Diamond primarily frames his arguments around cultural diffusion (i.e. the acquisition of innovations and knowledge from neighbouring societies, Edmonson, 1961 ), the spread of innovations with the movement of peoples (demic diffusion, Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza, 1971 ) was a fundamental part of the Neolithic transition (i.e. a period of time that is core to the axis of orientation hypothesis; Diamond & Bellwood, 2003 ; Fort, 2012 ). We quantify patterns of cultural spread by using cultural similarity between pairs of societies. By using this metric, our analyses essentially capture patterns that can result from both demic and cultural diffusion. Further, we focus on geographic and environmental barriers that include barriers related directly to human movement (such as travel costs), as well as environmental barriers that would hinder both cultural diffusion (spread and successful implementation of cultural innovations) and the migration and settlement of peoples. Specifically, we quantify pairwise dissimilarity in temperature, aridity, and topography between societies by measuring not only how different their sites of residence are, but also, how environmental parameters change along the paths that connect them. We then test whether the odds of sharing key cultural traits between societies are negatively affected by the magnitude of environmental dissimilarities, as proposed in Diamond's thesis. Finally, we quantify and contrast ecological barriers within corridors of cultural transmission in different continents. Given that the spread of agricultural innovations is such a pervasive example in Diamond's book, we compute and compare ecological barriers out of known centres of agricultural origin ( Figure 1b and Figure S1b). Based on Diamond's arguments, we expect to see consistently smaller ecological barriers in the potential pathways of agriculture transmission within Eurasia than in other regions of our world.

General workflow for testing the (a) ecological and (b) geographic premises of Diamond's hypothesis. A global principal component analysis (PCA) at 0.5 × 0.5° resolution is first used to derive variation in temperature harshness (TH) and aridity index (AI) around the world. These climatic variables are used to compute environmental barriers to cultural spread between pairs of societies. (a) Environmental and travel barriers, along with metrics of relatedness and cultural transmission from outside the pair (green box) are run through PCAs (one for each cultural trait) to extract five principal components (PCs, burgundy box). These PCs are then used as independent variables in 54 separate models predicting the odds of sharing key cultural practices between societies in pairs (one model for each cultural trait; blue box). (b) Environmental and travel costs associated with cultural spread out of the location of each society in an agricultural centre of origin are run through two separate PCAs to cover close- and long- range spatial scales (green to burgundy boxes). We then extract three close-range (cr) and four long-range (lr) PCs as estimates of environmental barriers and use them as response variables in seven separate models (i.e. a model for each PC; blue box). In all models, the independent factor is a categorical variable showing the membership of societies to various areas of agricultural origin.

Ecological hypothesis: ecology can influence the potential for cultural transmission

Quantifying cultural sharing.

We used the D-PLACE database (Gray, 1999 ; Kirby et al., 2016 ; Murdock, 1967 ) to collect data on the cultural makeup of 1094 mainland traditional societies (Figure S2), defined as groups of people at a focal location whose language and cultural traditions set them apart from neighbouring groups (Kirby et al., 2016 ). Out of the total 1291 societies represented in the Ethnographic Atlas dataset within D-PLACE, we excluded societies located on islands, based on the geographic positions of societies in Glottolog (Hammarström et al., 2019 ) and using the island polygons described in Weigelt et al. ( 2013 ) as reference for continental and island terrain. We considered 67 cultural traits related to subsistence, house construction, property rules, community organisation, marriage and kinship, politics, class, labour, and ritual practices (Data S1). For each cultural trait, we scored whether a pair of societies, our unit of analysis, exhibited the same or different trait values. For example, each society exhibits a dominant mode of subsistence (dependence predominantly on gathering, hunting, fishing, pastoralism or agriculture), and two societies are identified as sharing the dominant subsistence mode if they both rely predominantly on, for example, the gathering of wild plants and small land fauna relative to other subsistence modes. In practice, this means that a pair of societies shares a cultural trait if societies share the codes allocated for that trait in the D-PLACE database. For some traits, we modified the original D-PLACE coding to better reflect the question of interest. For example, we considered societies that rely on casual, extensive, intensive agriculture (or any combination of these) as sharing an agricultural mode of subsistence. Further, we did not consider societies in which a cultural trait of interest is absent, e.g. when looking at whether societies share the pattern for the largest matrilinear group, we excluded societies in which matrilinear groups are absent. We also did not consider societies with missing cultural data. Lastly, we excluded cultural traits with only two discrete code categories. Data S1 contains a list with all traits for which we scored cultural similarity (a total of 67) alongside their code values, number of categories, and a notes tab justifying the codes used. All the traits we used are discrete.

Quantifying environmental barriers to cultural transmission

We built pairs of societies by considering each society and its closest 100 neighbours based on geodesic distances. To determine geodesic distances, we rely on the coordinates of societies as they are listed in Glottolog (Hammarström et al., 2019 ). From the initial 100 pairs for each society, we select the pairs for which we have cultural data. We then evaluated whether the odds of sharing the same values for a given cultural trait are impacted by environmental parameters associated with latitude. Following Diamond's hypothesis, we focus on dissimilarities in environmental conditions at the locations of societies in pairs, as well as on the magnitude of ecological barriers that the use of a cultural trait may have encountered as it expanded its range. If Diamond's ecological premise is supported by the data, we expect that the odds of cultural similarity will be negatively impacted by high environmental dissimilarities between the home ranges of the societies in the pair, and by high environmental heterogeneity along the paths that connect them. We follow Diamond's original framework and primarily focus on ecological drivers of cultural transmission; we do, however, extend our analyses to include topographic factors, i.e. barriers associated with the movement of humans.

Environmental costs to cultural transmission between pairs of societies were estimated from data on 100+ year time series on local mean, variability and predictability of temperature and precipitation, as available in the EcoClimate database (Lima-Ribeiro et al., 2015 ). These climatic variables exhibit pronounced latitudinal gradients and are heavily featured in Diamond's ( 1997 ) book. Given that the patterns of geographic variation in these parameters are highly correlated, we reduced them to two composite variables through a global principal component analysis (PCA) at a 0.5 × 0.5° resolution (Botero et al., 2014a ; Table S1). Only land cells were included. The resulting components captured global gradients in the variation of ‘temperature harshness’ (PC1) and ‘aridity index’ (PC2). PC1 values reflect a continuum from cold, unpredictable and variable temperatures to warm, predictable and invariable conditions. PC2 values reflect a continuum from arid, unpredictable and variable precipitation to humid, predictable and invariable regimes (Figure S3).

Environmental dissimilarity between societies in pairs was estimated as the absolute difference in temperature harshness and aridity index, respectively, between the geographic positions of societies (Figure S4). We estimated environmental heterogeneity in the intervening space between societies in pairs using least-cost path algorithms. Specifically, starting from each society in a pair, we computed the path toward the other society that minimised aridity index differentials with the starting location (Alberti, 2019 ; van Etten, 2017 ; Figure 2 , see Figure S4 for details about the least-cost path algorithm). A high accumulated cost along this path indicates high dissimilarity in aridity regime from the starting location to the destination society. Similarly, longer paths indicate that longer, hence costlier, diffusion (and travel) routes are needed to achieve a minimal aridity regime difference between the starting and destination societies. For each society pair ‘AB’, we computed the paths of least resistance starting from the coordinates of A towards the coordinates of B and vice-versa. We used the mean accumulated cost values on the paths A to B and B to A, and the mean length of paths A to B and B to A as estimates of environmental heterogeneity in the intervening space between A and B (Figure S4). We then repeated this algorithm to estimate the path of minimal temperature harshness differences. Lastly, we measured the length and cost of least-cost topographic paths (as measured through changes in slope of the terrain), alongside geodesic distances as indicators of barriers to cultural similarity related to human travel costs (see Figure S4 for details). All analyses included geographic correction to account for the spatial distortion of latitude/longitude map projections in the WGS 84 coordinate system (van Etten, 2017 ).

Example of (a) topographic, (b) temperature, and (c) aridity least-cost paths between the locations of two societies (starting point is marked by a star). Dark colours on the cost maps indicate cells of high cost – i.e. high elevation (a) or high differences in temperature harshness (b) and aridity index (c) as compared with the starting point. Environmental heterogeneity along the least-cost path connecting two societies in a pair is estimated as the log value of accumulated cost and log value of path length.

Common ancestry and potential of indirect transmission from neighbouring cultural groups

Patterns of cultural similarity between societies are known to be shaped by common ancestry and horizontal diffusion (Mace & Holden, 2005 ; Mace & Jordan, 2011 ). We thus accounted for the possibility that societies in a pair share the same cultural trait values owing to shared ancestry by considering relatedness as a predictor in our models. Language phylogenies are commonly used to account for cultural similarity owing to shared ancestry (Evans et al., 2021 ). This is because languages are a good representation of the history of expansions and splits of cultural groups and thus reasonably estimate population history. We estimated relatedness using a recent Bayesian phylogeny of all extant languages (Bouckaert et al., 2022 , preprint). This super-tree incorporates information on established language classification within families, language location, historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for the deeper splits, as well as genetic and archaeological evidence about the colonisation of the world by humans. The Bayesian approach incorporates uncertainty about the relationships among languages in the form of a posterior distribution of possible trees. For the analyses in the main text, we used TreeAnnotator to build a maximum clade credibility tree, setting node heights to common ancestor (Drummond et al., 2012 ). We prune this tree for the societies in our dataset (Figure S5), and then compute our relatedness metric as the phylogenetic cophenetic distance (based on branch lengths) to the nearest common ancestor of the two societies in a pair9) (we used the R package {ape}, Paradis & Schilep, 2019 ). To test the robustness of our results to phylogenetic uncertainty, we also run the analyses using a randomly drawn sample of 50 trees from the posterior of alternative trees (Data S3).

Our analyses are focused on cultural similarity between pairs of societies. When two societies share the same cultural trait value, they could be doing so because of cultural transmission between them. Alternatively, cultural transmission could have happened between each of the two societies in a pair and other close-by neighbours. We note here that Diamond's thesis is not reliant on the assumption of direct transmission between pairs of societies. However, we believe that comparing society pairs facilitates a principled definition of cultural influences and enables a more straightforward interpretation of results, particularly when compared with difficult to define cultural ‘neighbours’. Thus, our models ask: do geographical and environmental barriers promote cultural similarity between pairs of societies above and beyond what is expected from shared ancestry or transmission from other close-by societies? In practice, for each society, we calculated the proportion of the five closest neighbours (based on geodesic distances) for which cultural data exist in the D-PLACE database that share the trait of its pair member (following Botero et al., 2014b ). If a high percentage of nearby neighbours of society ‘A’ express the trait of society ‘B’ (pair member of ‘A’), there is a high chance that ‘A’ has the same trait as ‘B’ not because of cultural transmission between ‘B’ and ‘A’, but because of cultural transmission from the close neighbours of ‘A’ to ‘A’. That is, ‘A’ got the trait value of ‘B’ because of transmission within its close neighbourhood (Figure S6). For each pair ‘AB’, we compute the potential for indirect transmission from other cultural groups for society ‘A’, then for ‘B’, and then average the two values. We assume that higher values of this predictor indicate that a society could have picked a shared cultural trait from its immediate neighbours rather than from the other society in the pair (Botero et al., 2014b ). This is a conservative assumption, as it equates a pattern of spatial clustering with the mechanism of horizontal diffusion, even though in reality we cannot know whether cultural transmission actually happened or not (Evans et al., 2021 ). As a sensitivity analysis, we also computed our metric of cultural transmission from other groups using each society's 10 closest neighbours, regardless of whether these neighbouring societies had data in the D-PLACE dataset (i.e. what proportion of the closest 10 neighbours of ‘A’ have the trait value of ‘B’?, and vice-versa). In this way, the selection of which societies to consider as the ‘close neighbourhood’ was not affected by sampling in the D-PLACE dataset. Pairs in which neighbourhood structure could not be estimated were discarded (if cultural data were available for at least three out of the 10 nearest neighbours for both societies in the pair, the pair was kept in the analyses).

Modelling cultural sharing as a function of environmental dissimilarities

We used logistic regressions to correlate the odds of societies sharing cultural traits with our initial 11 candidate drivers of cultural sharing: temperature and aridity dissimilarity, the length and accumulated cost along the least-cost path for human travel, the geodesic distance, the length and accumulated cost along the temperature and aridity least-cost paths, shared ancestry, and cultural transmission from other nearby societies ( Figure 1a , Figure S1a, the green ‘Raw variables’ box). To recapitulate, in our models, cultural sharing is a binary variable, with ‘1’ indicating the two societies are culturally similar (i.e. the pair shares the codes allocated for that trait in the D-PLACE database), and ‘0’ indicating the reverse. We set the error family as Bernoulli. However, most such models suffered from strong multicollinearity (variance inflation factors > 5; Zuur et al., 2010 ). Thus, we reduced the initial set of predictors to five composite variables via a varimax-rotated PCA ( Figure 1a and Figure S1a, the burgundy ‘Variables reduced by PCA’ box). The PCAs were run separately for each cultural trait because the potential for transmission from nearby neighbours is based on patterns that are specific to each trait (Table S2 shows how each raw variable connects to a component in each of these PCAs). For each trait, we used five composite variables as predictors for cultural sharing in mixed-effects models that included the identities of societies in pairs as random effects (modelled as random intercepts; Figure 1a and Figure S1a, blue box). Thus, we asked whether the odds of cultural sharing in pairs (i.e. whether or not societies in a pair share the same focal cultural trait value) were predicted by five candidate drivers: (i) temperature turnover (component capturing variation in temperature harshness heterogeneity at the location of societies in pairs and along the temperature-based least-cost paths); (ii) aridity turnover (capturing aridity index heterogeneity at the location of societies in pairs and along the aridity-based least-cost paths); (iii) costs to human movement (capturing topographic costs and climate-related path lengths); (iv) common ancestry; and (v) transmission from other close-by neighbours ( Figure 1a and Figure S1a, blue box). In our models, higher principal component values show higher environmental and travel barriers. Thus, if Diamond's ecological assumption is supported, we expect to see negative associations (negative estimated effects) between cultural similarity and temperature turnover, aridity turnover, and travel costs. We used the function glmer() to run the models in R (Bates et al., 2015 ). Spatially neighbouring data points could show similarity in predictors, response variables, and/or the relationship between the two (i.e. the assumption of independent residuals is breached). Models that suffer from spatial autocorrelation can show inflated Type I errors. We thus used Moran's I spatial autocorrelograms to determine whether model residuals showed spatial dependence. We used the midpoint between the locations of pair members as coordinate references in spatial autocorrelograms (Vilela & Villalobos, 2015 ). The autocorrelograms show that our models do not suffer from spatial dependence in the residuals (Figure S7).

In the main text, we focus on the results in which the potential for similarity owing to transmission from other close-by societies is computed using, for each society, its five closest neighbours with D-PLACE data. We excluded imbalanced models (the percentage of pairs that show cultural sharing was more than 90% or less than 10%), as well as models that did not converge, or had fewer than 50 datapoints. In total, this analysis included 54 cultural traits (listed in Table S4a). Significance levels were adjusted for false discovery rates to account for multiple independent comparisons (Benjamini & Yekutieli, 2001 ), using the function p.adjust() in R. Ninety per cent of models show areas under the curve (AUC) higher than 0.8 (the lowest AUC value was 0.73, and five models had AUC values between 0.7 and 0.8, Table S4a), as estimated by the function roc() in the R package {pROC} (Robin et al., 2011 ).

Geographic hypothesis: Eurasia's East-West orientation translated into weaker environmental barriers to cultural transmission

Quantifying the strength of environmental barriers within corridors of agriculture transmission.

To formally test the geographic premise that Eurasia's East–West orientation translated into weaker environmental barriers to cultural transmission, we use a critical test case and arguably the most prominent example in Diamond's ( 1977 ) book: the spread of agriculture. Specifically, the axis of orientation hypothesis predicts that the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural spread should be smaller along potential routes of transmission of agriculture in Eurasia than in other regions of the planet. We used the geographic ranges of 17 known areas of independent origin of domestication of plants and animals as standardised points of reference (Larson et al., 2014 ). Out of the 19 origin areas proposed in Larson et al. ( 2014 ) we excluded New Guinea and Japan, as we are focused here on cultural transmission among continental societies. Following Kavanagh et al. ( 2018 ), we considered the Northwestern and Northern Lowlands of South America as one area of domestication origin. We selected societies that are located within these areas based on their geographic positions in Glottolog (Hammarström et al., 2019 ). As in our prior analyses, we quantify the ecological costs to cultural transmission for pairs of societies. That is, we evaluated environmental barriers between societies located within the areas of independent agricultural origin and each of their closest 100 neighbours. To investigate the potential for long-range transmission, we paired societies within the agricultural points of origin with their closest 100 neighbours located at least 2500 km away (Figure S8 shows the location of societies in each area of agricultural origin, as well as the location of their closest 100 neighbours and closest 100 neighbours located at least 2500 km away). This long-range threshold was chosen in order to investigate the broad-scale cultural transmission examples mentioned in Diamond's thesis, such as from the Fertile Crescent to Southern and Central Europe or to North and East Africa, or from Mesoamerica to Southern North America and Equatorial South America; Figure S8). Therefore, we estimated environmental barriers at both small and large spatial scales within corridors of early agriculture transmission across the world.

For each pair of societies in these analyses we compute the dissimilarity in temperature harshness and aridity index at the locations of the two societies in a pair, accumulated cost and length of the paths of least environmental resistance, accumulated cost and length of the path minimising topographic costs and geodesic distance ( Figure 1b and Figure S1b, the green ‘Raw variables’ box). Then, for each focal society (i.e. a society in an agricultural point of origin), we average each of these metrics among its closest 100 neighbours (for short-distance analyses), and among its closes 100 neighbours located at least 2500 km away (for long-distance analyses). Thus, each starting location contributes a single data point in the short- and long-distance analyses, respectively (detailed in Figure S9).

Comparing continental differences in ecologically induced costs to agricultural spread

For each society in an agricultural point of origin we have thus quantified the potential costs to cultural transmission from the society's location to its neighbours: dissimilarity in temperature harshness and aridity regimes, cost accumulated along the temperature harshness and aridity index least-cost paths, the lengths of temperature harshness and aridity index least-cost paths, and costs related to human movement (based on elevation and geodesic distances; Figure 1b and Figure S1b, ‘Raw variables’ green box). As we have noted in our ecological test for Diamond's hypothesis, these metrics are highly correlated (Figure S10). We thus follow the same approach and reduce dimensionality in the data by running two separate varimax-rotated PCA analyses: one for close and one for long-range nodes, where a society located in a domestication origin area is the unit of analysis. The close-range PCA gave us three estimates of environmental barriers to cultural spread: (i) a component capturing variation in the topographic travel costs, geodesic distance and climate-related least-cost paths (close-range PC1, or crPC1); (ii) aridity turnover (crPC2); and (iii) temperature turnover (crPC3). As with the first set of analyses, ‘turnover’ here captures environmental dissimilarity at societies’ locations and the accumulated cost across the least-cost path. The long-range PCA gave us four estimates of environmental barriers: (i) temperature turnover (long-range PC1, or lrPC1); (ii) a component capturing the lengths of climate-related least-cost paths (lrPC2); (iii) aridity turnover (lrPC3); and (iv) a component capturing topographic travel costs and geodesic distance (lrPC4, Figure 1b and Figure S1b, the burgundy ‘Variables reduced by PCA’ box). Table S3 shows how each raw variable respectively associated with each close-range and long-range component. We used these principal components in separate linear models: we regressed each PC against a categorical variable with levels represented by 16 areas of domestication origin around the globe (we exclude South India from the analyses, as we only have coordinates for one society in this area of agricultural origin; Figure 1b and Figure S1b, the blue box). We thus ask: are there substantial differences in the mean of each environmental barrier metric (denoted by the values of each principal component) between the areas of agricultural origin? We ran variance-weighted linear models to account for heterogeneity in variance across the levels of the categorical variable. Moran's I tests revealed that models can suffer from spatial autocorrelation in the residuals (Figure S11). We hence accounted for the spatial dependence by using the function SpatialFiltering() in the R package {spatialreg} to select eigenvectors in a semi-parametric spatial filtering approach (Tiefelsdorf & Griffith, 2007 ). Eigenvectors were introduced as covariates in the models, and accordingly, Moran's I test on the new models showed few spatial dependencies (Figure S11). If Diamond's geographic premise is supported by the data, we expect to consistently see smaller means of environmental barriers (i.e. principal component values) within Eurasian corridors of agricultural spread compared with other regions of our world.

using reconstructed climatic conditions at 12, 8 and 4 kya

Because the exact timeline of the spread of agriculture is relatively unknown in many regions of the world, we repeated the analyses in this section using climate reconstructions from different time periods. We obtained values for the reconstructed annual mean and variation of temperature, as well as mean and coefficient of variation of precipitation conditions around the globe at 12, 8 and 4 kya (thousand years ago) from Kavanagh et al. ( 2018 ). We choose these timestamps to cover the entire timeframe in which agriculture presumably originated and spread in different regions of the planet (Diamond & Bellwood, 2003 ; Larson et al., 2014 ). For each of these time points, we (i) ran a global PCA at a 0.5 × 0.5° resolution, to obtain two axes that capture global variation in temperature harshness and aridity index and (ii) used the two environmental axes computed in (i) to estimate the following environmental barriers to cultural spread within the close- and long-range neighbouring societies located within areas of agricultural origin: dissimilarity in temperature and aridity conditions at the locations of societies, the accumulated cost and length of the least-cost path given a landscape of costs determined by temperature and aridity heterogeneity. The values for the geodesic distance and travel costs (determined by elevation) between societies were not recomputed, as they do not depend on reconstructed temperature harshness and aridity index values. We then repeated the analyses quantifying and comparing differences in the strength of environmental barriers between areas of agricultural origin in order to identify if – at any of the time points considered (12, 8 and 4kya) – Eurasian areas showed consistent ecological advantages over other areas of the world (Table S7). Thus, this section of our analyses broadly asks whether Eurasia exhibits ecological advantages for the transmission of culture either presently or in earlier time points that are relevant to the spread of agriculture.

Environmental differences hinder cultural sharing

We find that higher costs related to human movement, as well as temperature and aridity turnover show predominantly negative coefficients in our models ( Figure 3 ). That is, travel and environmental barriers to cultural transmission decrease the odds of cultural similarity between societies. Our results, however, also show variation in the strength of these effects among cultural traits and among cost metrics. Costs associated with human movement show higher magnitude coefficients in comparison to temperature and aridity turnover. Further, the negative effects of human movement costs seem consistent among trait categories, with the exceptions of traits related to labour (i.e. specialisation by sex for various activities, Figure 3a ). We see that temperature and aridity turnover show mostly significant negative coefficients for traits associated with subsistence, housing ecology, property and community organisation (for aridity turnover). Many traits related to kinship structure also show significant negative relationships with temperature and aridity turnover. Cultural similarity in terms of agriculture intensity does not show a significant negative association with aridity barriers, and major crop type also shows no negative association with temperature costs. Similarity in the predominant type of domestic animal a society uses and dominant subsistence economy shows significant negative associations with all our cost metrics. As expected, we found that trait sharing is generally more likely among close relatives and in situations where the potential for similarity owing to cultural transmission from other nearby neighbours is high (Table S4a). We also observe predominantly negative coefficients of costs associated with human movement and environmental turnover in our sensitivity analysis – i.e. when we account for the potential of cultural transmission between pairs of societies from other close-by societies using the 10 closest neighbours regardless of whether or not these had cultural data in D-PLACE (Figure S12, Table S4b). Further, running the analyses on a randomly drawn set of language posterior trees returned similar results to the main text analyses (that use a maximum clade credibility tree, Data S3). Thus, our results generally support Diamond's core assumption – i.e. that environmental similarities facilitate the transmission of cultural traits (Diamond, 1997 ). However, our findings also show a more nuanced picture in which the strength of travel and environmental barriers can vary among trait categories.

Estimated effects of principal components representing environmental and travel costs to cultural similarity. Each point denotes an independent model. The points’ values represent the estimated effect of the principal component associated with the environmental barriers listed on the y -axis label; arrows denote the size of standard errors. Models are binned into broad cultural trait categories (1–8) according to their corresponding response variables. If environmental dissimilarities are associated with a lowered potential for cultural similarity, we expect to see negative values for estimated effects. Non-significant relationships are depicted in grey, whereas significant effects are shown in red (positive) and blue (negative). The p -values are adjusted for false discovery rates.

Environmental barriers to cultural transmission are not weaker in Eurasia

Our analyses uncovered significant variation within continents in the magnitude of ecological barriers to cultural transmission ( Figure 4 and Figure S13), a finding that is consistent with the critique that Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis is potentially reductionist and overreaching (Blaut, 1999 ). More importantly, our results indicate that areas within Eurasia do not consistently rank lower than those in other continents across any cost type (in Figure 4 , Eurasian areas do not consistently exhibit lower environmental barriers to cultural transmission than those in other continents; Table S5). Our sensitivity analyses revealed that at none of the time points considered (12, 8 and 4 kya; Figure S14 and Tables S6 and S7) did Eurasia have any clear ecological advantages over other regions. Thus, we find no support for Diamond's claims during the timeframe in which most societies around the world transitioned into an agriculturalist mode of subsistence.

Mean and standard deviation of principal components representing environmental costs to cultural transmission in 16 known areas of domestication origin (1, South Tropical China; 2, Lower-Middle Yangtze; 3, Chinese loess plateau; 4, West Yunan and East Tibet; 5, Fertile Crescent; 6, Sava West India; 7, Ganges of East India; 8, West Africa; 9, West African Savannah; 10, Sudanic Savannah; 11, Ethiopian plateau; 12, Northern Lowlands of South America; 13, Central/Southern Andes; 14, Southwest Amazon; 15, Mesoamerica; 16, East North America). Each graph represents a separate model, where the response variable is a principal component capturing variation in the environmental barriers listed on the y -axis label. Colours highlight different major landmasses (see inset map). Panels show the comparison of environmental barriers at (a) close- and (b) long-range spatial scales. Inset matrices show pairwise Tukey's honest significant differences, with stronger blue hues depicting higher magnitudes of difference. Non-significant differences are shown in grey. Following Diamond's hypothesis, we expect smaller means for environmental costs to cultural transmission in Eurasian areas compared with other areas of the globe.

In this paper we have provided a data-driven approach to test the core ecological and geographic premises of the axis of orientation hypothesis, i.e. the idea that Eurasia's East–West axis of orientation enabled a faster spread of cultural innovations and contributed to the region's early development. Specifically, we have shown that environmental differences in temperature and aridity are associated with decreased odds of cultural similarity, supporting the premise that ecology can influence the potential for cultural transmission. Nevertheless, our results also uncover a complex picture, in which ecological influences on cultural similarity can vary between different cultural traits, showcasing the complexities of cultural transmission and the potential weakness of single-factor explanations. Further, our findings show that there is no convincing evidence that the geography of Eurasia imposed smaller ecological barriers to the early transmission of agriculture than those of other continents around the globe. Thus, while we found support for the role of ecology in shaping the transmission of culture, it does not appear that such a mechanism actively biased the spread of cultural innovations in the Eurasian continent, at least as it relates to the spread of early agriculture.

The underlying idea of the axis of orientation hypothesis is that fast cultural transmission may have facilitated the development of large, dense, sedentary and stratified societies. Our analyses help test this hypothesis by covering a wide variety of cultural traits, including some that directly relate to social development (e.g. dominant mode of subsistence, domestic animal and major crop type, agriculture intensity, settlement patterns, political complexity traits – jurisdictional hierarchy of local and beyond local community, political integration or class differentiation). We found that in general, costs of human travel had larger effects than those of aridity or temperature turnover, indicating that mobility is likely to affect cultural transmission more strongly than the environment. However, we note that these effects may not be solely attributed to mobility because our metrics of costs to human travel, particularly geographic distance, are likely to capture the effects of other unmeasured promoters of cultural similarity including the likelihood of direct contact between cultural groups. Given the clear links between environment and human subsistence or housing, it is not surprising that the transmission of these important cultural traits generally showed significant associations with geographical and ecological barriers. Similarly, it is not surprising that traits related to sexual segregation of labour, games and rituals were less consistently affected by environmental barriers because such traits tend to be more idiosyncratic and culturally driven. Importantly, in line with Diamond's thinking, we found evidence of some ecological biases in the transmission of domesticated animals and subsistence types, agriculture intensity, and major crop type. Nevertheless, we note that sharing the same major crop type was not significantly associated with temperature turnover, which is consistent with earlier critiques that domesticated plants can often adapt to new conditions, particularly if humans assist them by modifying their immediate surroundings (Blaut, 1999 ; Fuller & Qin, 2009 ).

We also note that while our findings generally support Diamond's expectation of environmental barriers to cultural transmission, the generality of this effect must be treated with care. For example, we note that our ability to detect significant effects could in some cases depend on coding schemes or on the active transmission of other cultural traits. Coding schemes for cultural traits are a particularly complex issue (Slingerland et al., 2020 ). Some traits are coded into finer categories than others (e.g. marital residence with kin has 12 different categories, whereas the characteristics of moralising high gods has only four). Additionally, the quality and quantity of sources, as well as the focal years of study, vary among societies and traits, meaning that different analyses may be subject to different levels of statistical noise. As for the possibility of correlated transmission of cultural traits, we note that although our study evaluated each trait independently, it is conceivable that some cultural traits are transmitted in packages, meaning that some of the effects we report could be driven by the active transmission of only a few key traits. For example, if traits related to plant and animal domestication tend to be adopted with other kinds of traits, then those other traits would exhibit environmental biases even if they do not have an actual bias by themselves (as Diamond himself argued).

Our second set of analyses compared the distribution of ecological barriers to cultural transmission between 16 important areas of the globe: centres of agricultural origin. While the first set of analyses tests a key ecological assumption in Diamond's theory (ecological biases in cultural spread), it is this second set of analyses that tackles (and casts doubt upon) Diamond's overarching message: Eurasia benefitted from a more homogenous environment along its major corridors of cultural transmission. One of his most prominent arguments in this regard was that agriculture spread very rapidly out of the Fertile Crescent. Contrary to that view, we found that this particular region can actually experience stronger environmental barriers within the corridors of agricultural spread than those observed in other centres of agricultural origin. This trend is particularly observable when considering aridity turnover at both close- and long-range, as well as close-range topographic costs. The likely reason for this discrepancy is that even though the Fertile Crescent has access to a larger area of contiguous landmass at similar latitudes than many of its peers (Diamond's main argument), it is nevertheless more ecologically atypical for its surroundings. Most notably, the Fertile Crescent is nourished by rivers but surrounded by large deserts, and these strong gradients in access to water are further compounded by nearby changes in prevailing winds and elevation (Figure S15). These findings remind us that dramatic changes in habitat and climate can occur even within small spatial scales. In contrast to the Fertile Crescent (and other Eurasian areas), South Tropical China, the Lower-Middle Yangtze and the Chinese plateau stand out as having low aridity related costs compared with most centres of agriculture origin. South Tropical China also shows low to mid-range temperature turnover values. Both aridity and temperature regimes would have been important for the spread of rice agriculture (d'Alpoim Guedes & Butler, 2014 ; Gutaker et al., 2020 ), although archaeological evidence shows that human-directed water management systems were developed early and were part of the success of rice as a crop in these regions (Fuller & Qin, 2009 ). Thus, humans were working towards hijacking the conditions that were set for their crops by the local environment, a finding that strengthens the need to consider cultural factors when understanding crop domestication. Our results show that close-range topographic travel costs are not trivial in South Tropical China, and the Lower-Middle Yangtze and the Chinese plateau show one of the highest barrier levels along this axis. Thus overall, we do not find a consensus of universal low environmental barriers to cultural spread in Eurasian areas, as hypothesised based on Eurasia's East–West dominant continental axis.

For the second set of analyses, the choice of which societies to include was not restricted to the Ethnographic Atlas, rather it was based only on the Glottolog (Hammarström et al., 2019 ), thus alleviating the Ethnographic Atlas sampling bias against large-scale cultural groups. Nonetheless, cultural range size can be positively linked with latitude (Gavin & Stepp, 2014 ), meaning that Eurasian societies could be biased towards larger group sizes in our sample. Using point coordinates to identify the close-range and long-range 100 neighbours for each society in an agricultural point of origin could also inflate cost metrics for wide-ranged societies. Together, these could result in biases for Eurasian societies towards high costs, particularly when metrics are based on geographic distances. However, the PCA applied on the raw cost variables isolates geographic distances from environmental turnover, which could alleviate some of the potential bias against large-scale temperate societies by allowing us to independently assess the effect of ecological barriers versus geographic distances between pairs of societies. We also emphasise that the uneven distribution of distances between societies located in various agricultural centres of origin and their neighbours is not a product of uneven sampling, but rather a product of true unevenness in the settlement and mobility patterns of people in different parts of the world (e.g. environmental constraints enable a higher density of distinct cultural groups close to the tropics and near mountain peaks; Gavin & Stepp, 2014 ). While our neighbourhoods may cover different radii, such differences probably reflect real differences in what is probably accessible to the people in different focal societies (societies in centres of agricultural origin). That is, our approach to investigating the potential for cultural transmission (loosely defined as inclusive of both the demic and non-demic transmission of cultural innovations) acknowledges that the typical distance covered by the out-group people that a society interacts with varies across the world due to constraints on human movement (e.g. topography) and human settlement patterns (e.g. natural resources).

The axis of orientation hypothesis is primarily framed around cultural diffusion. However, it is likely that the spread of culture is strongly tied to the movement of peoples and the expansion of populations as well. For example, the East–West spread of empires (Turchin et al., 2006 ), and the lower language turnover within latitudinal bands (Laitin et al., 2012 ) support the notion that cultural spread may depend, at least in part, on demic diffusion. Our finding that both the costs of human travel and ecological heterogeneity affect cultural similarity also support this idea.

It is important to note that the axis of orientation hypothesis is only one of several non-exclusive environmental hypotheses that Diamond himself proposed as potential explanations for the way in which history unfolded on different continental regions. Among these ideas, two of the least controversial relate to opportunity and cost. For example, Diamond noted that the Americas and Africa may have simply offered fewer domesticable species than Eurasia, highlighting the fact that Eurasians were able to domesticate 13 species of large animals whereas South Americans were able to domesticate only one (alpaca/llama). Diamond also viewed disease as another potentially important contributor to historical asymmetries. Specifically, he argued that environmental similarity could have favoured the rapid spread of parasites and driven a quicker homogenisation of zoonoses in the Eurasian continent. Thus, in his view, Eurasians may have more quickly become less susceptible to an extensive list of pathogens and may have therefore been able to subsequently progress at a faster rate than humans in other continental regions. In addition to these alternatives, we note that historical contingency and cultural factors can also potentially outsize the effect of environmental biases on human history. For example, the differential timing of human colonisation in different continents may have simply afforded South Americans less time to develop large, dense, sedentary and stratified societies in comparison to Eurasians.

In conclusion, here we leveraged a wealth of existing data on climate, geography and culture to quantitatively test an influential idea on the history of human development. By operationalising the axis of orientation hypothesis, we have shown that although Diamond's intuition that ecological similarity facilitates cultural transmission is probably correct, these ecological effects are unlikely to be as influential as Diamond intuited. Moreso, we found no support for his argument that key areas of Eurasia are more ecologically homogeneous than comparable sites in other regions of the world. Our findings point out that latitude, like genetics and ecology, is not destiny (Blaut, 1999 ). We echo earlier concerns about the perils of single factor explanations and suggest that chance, and perhaps factors that promoted colonial empires, need to be more seriously considered as potentially important drivers of human inequality.

Supporting information

Chira et al. supplementary material

Acknowledgements

We thank Kate Kirby, Simon Greenhill, Hannah Haynie, Bruno Vilela, Justin Baldwin, Vincent Fasanello and Joan García-Porta for valuable comments and discussion points.

Author contributions

AMC, CAB, RDG conceived the study. AMC, CAB designed the methodology. AMC analysed the data. AMC, CAB, RDG wrote the manuscript.

Financial support

The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science e.V. grant 001036-36458 (CAB) supported this work.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare none.

Data availability

The code for performing the analyses can be found in a public repository on GITHub ( https://github.com/angela-mc/AxisOrientationHypothesis ). Other data files have been uploaded on ZENODO: https://zenodo.org/records/10401227?token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjU3ZmFlN2RmLThiOGItNDkxZS04Y2NlLTczMzU3MDA4MDA3NSIsImRhdGEiOnt9LCJyYW5kb20iOiIxNzc2MzZlNmE5ZDMwM2VhODA5YTk3NjI0NzI3NDRlYSJ9.as8dxnbiqCSSmu7UolqGSNT9f7cSybRk6nDYtdNVQ5GwaUzdwIkj-gv8GWKpmUJExrlVnjuIeWBPTQP_jux3rg . Cultural data are available in the open-access D-PLACE database accessible at https://d-place.org .

Supplementary material

To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.34

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Home » Archaeology » How Jared Diamond Distorts History

How jared diamond distorts history.

Guns Germs and Steel

In 1997, ten years after calling agriculture The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race , Jared Diamond came out with Guns, Germs, and Steel . It’s become a landmark, best-seller book that would win the Pulitzer Prize and be filmed by National Geographic for PBS. Guns Germs and Steel is surely the most widely read book about agriculture anyone has ever written.

Jared Diamond’s ideas about human society and human nature continue to be enormously influential.

The key question is whether Jared Diamond’s work is broadly correct about human history or a distortion of that history. I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points, his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. Diamond claims that the differential success of the world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture, except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does not withstand scrutiny. I argue anthropologists should be critiquing Diamond’s ideas in Introduction to Anthropology courses. 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. Click To Tweet

Yali’s Question & Central Thesis

In Guns Germs and Steel , Jared Diamond purports to answer “Yali’s Question.” Diamond had met Yali in New Guinea in 1972. Yali asked: “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?” (1997:14). For Diamond, Yali’s question meant trying to explain why Europeans had become imperial powers, wealthy nations, whereas others had not.

Diamond’s answer was that it had nothing to do with any innate European superiority, neither intellectual nor genetic. Rather, it was all about agriculture, a geographical accident. For Jared Diamond, the differences in the agricultural complex that had arisen in the Middle East explained everything.

Agriculture had been in Eurasia longer, giving the people in that region more time to develop technologies. Eurasian agriculture also included most of the large domesticated animals, which provided a crucial symbiotic resource for agricultural production. Domesticated animals also introduced diseases, and Eurasians developed some immunity to those diseases. Finally, agriculture in Eurasia spread along the lines of latitude, making trade and interconnection quicker. In Africa and the Americas, the spread of agriculture along longitudinal lines is more difficult.

After once labeling agriculture the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race , the idea that European superiority was all based in early agriculture seems curious. However, it was not entirely incongruous. Diamond here did not intend to comment on internal social and sexual inequality, or the ravages of disease and despotism for those who had adopted agriculture. Those factors remained true. But when such societies encountered others, the Europeans had the advantage of disease immunity as well as a longer experience with agriculture and agricultural technologies.

A generous reading of Guns, Germs, and Steel could even be that ten years after his “Worst Mistake,” Diamond was now carefully considering the different forms of agriculture that had developed from diverse gathering and hunting societies .

But Guns Germs and Steel is not about nuance or particularity. It is a one-note riff. Whatever there is to be explained–guns, germs, or steel, as well as writing, military power, and European imperialism–everything is about early adoption of agriculture, the big domestic animals, and the longitudinal gradient facilitating trade and interaction. Diamond peppers the text with lots of cool stories and anecdotes, but it always goes back to the same factors.

Jared Diamond as Academic Porn

Halfway through teaching Guns Germs and Steel , I blurted out that it was academic porn. The costumes change, the props change, but in the end it’s the same repeated theme. I don’t think I am entirely crazy, even about the porn. After all, Diamond published two books in 1997. One was Guns Germs and Steel ; the other was Why Is Sex Fun? It’s as if Diamond was going for a bestseller and put two books in the stores. It seems surprising Guns Germs and Steel became the bestseller, while Why is Sex Fun? barely left the shelves. Who knew? (See Black Swan Anthropology for analysis of the role of luck and serendipity in the fame of Jared Diamond. The follow-up post on Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History – Geography, States, Empires details my reasons for calling Diamond’s work “academic porn.” Guns Germs and Steel retarded our understanding of human history and Yali’s Question, or “Why Europe?”)

Diamond may be a good counter-argument against some of the more noxious forms of racist superiority and Eurocentrism. He has helped to bring these ideas to a wider public, who may not have otherwise considered large domestic animals and longitudinal trade gradients. But Guns Germs and Steel is actually “disguised as an attack on racial determinism” (Wilcox, Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian , 2010:122). Diamond’s modest re-telling of traditional domination histories is factually wrong and blatantly misleading.

Diamond’s account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history. “For Diamond, guns and steel were just technologies that happened to fall into the hands of one’s collective ancestors. And, just to make things fair, they only marginally benefited Westerners over their Indigenous foes in the New World because the real conquest was accomplished by other forces floating free in the cosmic lottery–submicroscopic pathogens” (Wilcox 2010:123).

What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean you should use them for colonial and imperial purposes. Or promote the idea of handing out smallpox-infested blankets from sick wards. One of the supposed values of Western civilization is to care for the sick, not to deliberately spread disease. “Pizarro had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so” (Errington and Gewertz, Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History , 2010:340).

Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue European imperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon. As a result, accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel supplant real historical accounts like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History . “Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents” (Wolf 1982:18).

Conquest & Native Allies

Diamond’s account seriously underplays the alliances with native groups that enabled European forces to conquer and rule. After some initial victories, which Diamond lavishly describes, thousands of natives joined the tiny European garrisons. Native armies were indispensable for Hernán Cortés to subdue the Aztec Empire and for Francisco Pizarro to topple the Inka. As David Cahill points out in Advanced Andeans and Backward Europeans (2010) there could be no empire without these collaborations and the pre-existing mechanisms these empires had established:

The arrival of the Spanish interlopers suddenly made independence from imperial rule a practical possibility. Accordingly, it was not a small band of gallant conquistadors who conquered the Incas and Aztecs, but an alliance consisting of a core of militarily trained Spaniards together with breakaway, populous states that sought independence from tyrannical overlords. . . . Diamond overlooks entirely not only the crucial support from non-Incan native allies, but also the overwhelming degree to which any government, Andean or Spanish, depended on a functioning tier of local, regional, and interregional ruling cadres. (Cahill 2010:215,224)

Charles Mann makes a similar point in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus . Matthew Restall expresses the point even more forcibly in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003). As Restall notes, people made decisions to form alliances and compromises. They were not necessarily bad decisions. Some native peoples were able to live their lives in relative peace and autonomy, even after the events of the conquest. Some even gained from the conquest. And the conquest was hardly completed in one fell swoop (for a fuller account, see Myths of the Spanish Conquest – Indigenous Allies & Politics of Empire )

From Guns Germs & Steel to Collapse

The Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel has almost no role for human agency–the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate. But in 2005 Jared Diamond debuts another book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . Suddenly choice and agency are back!

In an article questioning Diamond’s treatment of Haiti, Drexel Woodson provides a generous reading of Diamond’s shifting emphasis:

Although Guns, Germs, and Steel received accolades from the media and nonspecialists, Diamond seemed uncomfortable with the book’s simplistic environmental determinism. In Collapse he attempted to rectify the excesses of determinism by investigating agency–how and why a society’s leaders and followers make choices that have positive or negative environmental and socioeconomic consequences. (Woodson, “Failed” States, Societal “Collapse,” and Ecological “Disaster”: A Haitian Lesson on Grand Theory , 2010:271)

However, I do not see any evidence for Diamond being uncomfortable with the determinism he previously embraced. On the contrary, Diamond claimed Guns, Germs, and Steel was not environmental determinism.

I also do not see Collapse as investigating agency. For most cases, Collapse depicts how people “choose” to fail. So when Europeans “succeed” at colonialism, that was not their doing, nor their fault. When other societies falter, that was a choice to fail. “Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an anthropologist . . . as a ‘one-two punch.’ The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise” ( A Question of Blame When Societies Fall , Johnson 2007). Or, “note the subtle shift (or less charitably the contradiction) between the ‘accident’ of conquest in Guns and the ‘choice’ of success or failure among Diamond’s Anasazi in Collapse ” (Wilcox 2010:124; see also the 2012 On Haiti, Diamond Hasn’t Done His Homework for a very specific and powerful rebuttal).

Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz elaborate in their article “Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History.” As they do in their book, Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History , Errington and Gewertz assert a fundamental misunderstanding. Diamond did not really understand Yali’s Question, the starting premise for Guns, Germs, and Steel . Yali’s question was not actually about getting more stuff. Yali wanted to be recognized as fully human, to be treated with dignity and respect: “Yali and many other Papua New Guineans became preoccupied with the reluctance, if not refusal, of many whites to recognize their full humanness–to make blacks and whites equal players in the same history” (2010:335).

Take the Gloves Off

Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers. Introductory anthropology textbooks often borrow Diamond’s ideas, as if Diamond needs further popularizing. Even critical works like Questioning Collapse often treat Diamond with kid-gloves, since the authors support Diamond’s stance on issues of climate change.

It’s time to stop giving Diamond a platform in Introduction to Anthropology . Take the gloves off. The film version of Guns, Germs, and Steel , as recorded by National Geographic, basically revives the progressivist line about domestication. In the film account, people create plants and animals “ever more useful to humans.” Now that we’ve gone from Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race back to the progressivist line, Diamond’s usefulness is past expired. Instead, let’s consider the full range of complexities regarding domestication, agriculture, and the consequences of human agency.

Previous: 2.4 – Many Origins of Agriculture Table of Contents: Archaeology

Experts widely agree that our modern lifestyles are dependent upon today’s fossil fuel–based economy, which has both driven the growth of our industrial society and triggered a serious threat to our climate. Many who benefit personally from the continued burning of oil and coal—from oil giants to car-engine manufacturers—are resisting attempts to shift to an economy based on renewable resources.

• For more on Jared Diamond check the Diamond Tag . Also watch my interview on Diamond with Cosmoetica (posted July 2017).

Notes on Guns Germs and Steel

I draw heavily on the essays in Questioning Collapse for these observations and have found good material in this volume. However, as I discuss in my blog-post Anthro-Flop-ology , the book has serious shortcomings as a popular critique. See also the review by Alex Golub on Savage Minds .

The authors of Questioning Collapse defended themselves against Jared Diamond’s review of their work in Nature :

We emphasize that Questioning Collapse presents ample archaeological and historical data that contextualize how societies moved through periods of crisis. The goal of our book is to provide students and lay persons alike with an understanding of historical processes that is based upon up-to-date research. Questioning Collapse is more than a critical evaluation of Diamond’s scholarship: it is about how we understand change in the past, how we grapple with the legacy of colonialism and with inequalities in the present, and how we can move forward productively and resiliently into the future. — From the Editors of Questioning Collapse: Requesting Full Disclosure and Correction of Factual Errors , 2010

To cite: Antrosio, Jason, 2011. “Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: Against History.” Living Anthropologically website, https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/. First posted 7 July 2011. Last updated 30 July 2023.

Living Anthropologically means documenting history, interconnection, and power during a time of global transformation. We need to care for others as we attempt to build a world together. This blog is a personal project of Jason Antrosio, author of Fast, Easy, and In Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy . For updates, subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow on Twitter .

Living Anthropologically is part of the Amazon Associates program and earns a commission from qualifying purchases, including ads and Amazon text links. There are also Google ads and Google Analytics which may use cookies and possibly other tracking information. See the Privacy Policy .

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What is the job of philosophy? Is it to make human beings better? Sundar Sarukkai poses the question

This is the fifth in a series by sundar sarukkai, to be included in his forthcoming book ‘another story of philosophy’..

People are often confused about the multiplicity of philosophical views and schools. Why do so many philosophers talk tangentially to each other? Why is it that Ambedkar and Gandhi are not taught as philosophers? Or those working on the ground who mobilise the poor and fight for dignity in society? Is philosophy defined by a style of writing? Is philosophy only about providing arguments and forms of thinking?

We can begin with a simple proposition that might lead us to understand this multiplicity of philosophies: The way we understand the notion of the “human” influences the way we understand the world. To understand the different streams of philosophy is to first take note of the different views of “being human” across cultures and societies.

What is human? Should we understand the human by isolating its essential qualities, those qualities that make it human? The human body cannot be used to differentiate humans from animals. Many animals and humans share similar bodily structures and functions. So if we believe that there is some value to the human that is more than an animal, then we have to isolate those qualities that humans have but animals don’t. These qualities become the defining mark of being human. The number of narratives in Western thought that define a human in opposition to something or the other (such as animals, machines, AI etc.) is a striking illustration of this larger project of defining what is special to a human. One of the famous distinctions is Aristotle’s claim that humans are rational animals. Rationality becomes a defining mark of being human in comparison to animals. Although this view is often repeated, it is highly problematic since there are other philosophical traditions that offer a completely different picture about the relationship between humans and animals, as we will see below.

The ideas of human and human nature have been deeply discussed in many traditions of philosophy. I will summarise a few of them here not as information bits but as an incentive to make us reflect on our own perceptions of being human. So the first act of philosophising that you can do is to ask yourself what your conception of the human is, and then reflect on why you hold these views. Continuing this exercise will eventually lead you to some of the dominant categories of philosophy depending on your starting point. I will illustrate this with some examples below, but that one moment of reflection, as you read, is necessary. What really is the idea of the human?

All of us, whether we have studied philosophy or not, have opinions and views on human nature. Most of our actions are dictated by these views. The way we treat people, talk to others, support or oppose somebody, decide on what our children should do – these are all dependent on strongly held positions on what it is to be a human being. These may not be articulated specifically as “being human” but through ideas such as what it is to be an individual, to be a member of family, of society, what we should do, and how we should act.

Before I begin with the philosophers, let us look at some common conceptions of what it is to be human. Today, we are often told that it is human nature to be selfish, to take care of our own interests. It is the nature of men to be violent and women to be nurturing. Violence as an intrinsic nature of man has often been used to justify not only violence within society but also the unending wars. Economics as a discipline is foundationally dependent on this selfish, transactional mode of being human. Stereotypes about women, men and children are derived from their assumed “nature”. Stereotypes based on religion are prevalent across the globe today, and the language used in these contexts is primarily in terms of “their nature”. The colonial discourse was replete with descriptions of Asians and Africans as inferior to the white European males, in terms of intelligence and various other attributes such as the capacity for reason and creativity.

Philosophers have their own views on what human nature is. For most of them, this is a fundamental preoccupation as well as a starting point for their own reflections. They too produce their views on human nature in the way others do, but they go a step further. They try to make sense of why they hold those views, and explore their consequences. Through this act, they produce the concepts that are central to philosophy.

However, the great failure of modern philosophy, after producing so much thought on what it is to be human, is its inability to transform these insights into the making of a more humane world. Paradoxically, this domain has produced enormously complex books on ethical thinking, yet that always seems applicable to “others” rather than themselves. Would it be an exaggeration to say that the major source of violence in the last century has its epicentre in the “Western civilisation”? Not just in terms of the two world wars, but in catalysing countless conflicts across the globe for political and economic benefits? How do we square this with the immense production of many dominant philosophies in parallel during this time?

It is almost as if the aim of analysing the world and making sense of it was more for the purpose of “understanding” humans and human nature. Knowledge about objects, such as knowledge about the table in front of me, has value of various kinds, including utilitarian value. I can do something with that knowledge. But what is knowledge about human nature for? What kind of knowledge is it? In the case of humans, is it enough to say something about what we are rather than change who we are? The failed task of modern philosophy is the failure to produce better human beings instead of producing monumental texts on the idea of humans. Some prominent modern philosophers whose work was deeply concerned with the philosophical study of human nature were nevertheless blind to their own regressive views towards women, people of colour, and those belonging to oppressed classes and castes. Basically, an attitude of disrespect towards others who were not like themselves.

While the modern world has transformed scientific knowledge into awe-inspiring technologies that have changed every person’s everyday life, why have humans at the same time become more violent, more hateful, more greedy, more selfish?

Some philosophers might respond by saying that producing better human beings is not the task of philosophy. For example, they may say that even though they work in the field of ethics, it is not necessary that they should be more ethical than others who do not work in that field. Producing knowledge in academic philosophy has become decoupled from the moral pressures of living a life in a philosophical manner.

This was not always the case, either within Europe or in most non-western traditions. Many of the latter still tend to connect practice and thought in more intimate ways than the academic practice of philosophy has been able to. One can look at examples such as Ambedkar, Gandhi or Fanon to understand how the practice of thought can be deeply influential, and thus in a sense more “authentic” to that thought. Feminist philosophers who look at philosophy as a resource to change behaviour, both at the individual and social level, are also powerful examples.

This relation between thought and action is particularly true of the study of human nature. While there may be some aspects of philosophy, say certain themes in epistemology or metaphysics, that may not be amenable to such an easy connection, the discourse of human nature has an inherent moral dimension to it. In describing what humans are and what makes them behave in certain ways, philosophers have to bear a certain responsibility. It is that which differentiates their views from lay beliefs in human nature. Equally significant is the question of whether knowledge as a category should be the dominant mode for “understanding” humans, and if so, what the nature of that knowledge should be.

We can begin with some simple, selective summaries of the description of human nature articulated by philosophers over the ages. The Buddhist tradition is a good starting point since the hypothesis behind the idea of human influences their critical philosophical positions. Buddha’s powerful insight was that desire is a defining mark of the human and is a cause of suffering. The goal of humans then is to escape this suffering. The Samkhya tradition too sees the goal of philosophy as removing the suffering of humans. The primary text of Samkhya, the Samkhyakārika , begins with the verse that identifies three-fold suffering and the means of eradicating them in order to finally achieve happiness. It goes on to state that the known ways of alleviating suffering are not enough, and that it is only the path of philosophy that can succeed in this task. In both these cases, the human condition is defined by suffering and the task of human life is to liberate oneself from it.

The Upanashidic traditions from which later Vedantic schools arise, point to the dichotomy between the individual self and the universal self. The implication is that humans are part of a larger universal reality, and the aim of humans should be to become part of the universal. Thus, the aim is a form of liberation from the empirical self to the universal self. The task of philosophy is to discover the vocabulary and arguments to uphold this view. Here, the notion of death is not the essential core of being human (as it will be in other approaches, such as in Heidegger, that we will consider later). It is only one manifestation of the constant cycle of lives that humans are in. Even though this is something that is common to the Buddhist and Upanishadic views, the philosophical vocabulary needed to justify their views can be quite different. The Buddhists refute the existence of a stable entity called the self, and this becomes a method to deny the independent existence of many commonly accepted terms taken to be real, such as space, time or the soul. Nagarjuna’s Mūlamādhyamakakārika is an excellent illustration of this process of reasoning.

As mentioned above, there is a sustained attempt to distinguish humans and animals through categories such as reason, rationality, or even creativity. In the Indian case, such a distinction is not so easily found, as the capacity for reason (and “knowledge”) is available for both humans and animals. Rebirth complicates this relationship to a much more intimate degree since humans could always be reborn as an animal. Powerful narratives of morality in the Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu texts have been presented as stories in the voices of animals, such as in the Jataka tales and the Panchatantra .

However, there is a particular kind of difference that captures the uniqueness of being human: the nature of the human self and all that it can accomplish. A concept like self helps philosophers to make sense of human experiences and has many explanatory virtues such as explaining the unity of the senses, bridging the past and present, imagination of the future, and so on. The self is not a passive agent and is the source of morality. It is also important to note that for the larger corpus of Hindu philosophy (a confusing term but one that is often used), pure knowledge for its own sake is rejected. Descriptions of humans often are coterminous with the goals of humans, notably, the four goals corresponding to wealth, desire/pleasure, right living, and finally liberation. One way to understand this is to say that the fundamental nature of humans is their propensity to move towards actions that are finally liberating.

It is worthwhile to note that these views on what it is to be human ultimately stress not on essential qualities that characterise humans but on the set of actions that really define who they are. It is the doing that distinguishes humans. In a contemporary version of this view, we can consider Marx’s argument that the essential human quality is to be found in the act of labour. Humans are defined by what we do rather than what we are. Interestingly, such a view is one that is present in early discussions on caste before it gets consolidated into hereditary qualities. The movement of Existentialism as a philosophical doctrine is very much in this spirit of defining the human through how they act and not through prior given essences. In Karnataka, a practice of philosophy within the “subaltern” oral tradition is primarily through songs (Tattvapadas) that capture the importance of labour and action. The form of philosophy here is different; instead of texts it is performed through songs. Similar expressions of philosophy occur quite commonly through ‘folk’ theatre in the southern coastal region.

In the modern Indian context, two of the most important philosophical ideas are ahimsa (non-violence) and maitri (fraternity). Gandhi’s emphasis on non-violence is well known. It is reasonable to argue that, for Gandhi, non-violence is intrinsic to human nature and it is violence that has been taught and imposed by the external world. Similarly, when Ambedkar draws upon Buddha’s notion of maitri (which Ambedkar refers to as fraternity), it is not merely in a normative sense but in an essential sense of discovering this propensity within ourselves. These views too are about defining humans in terms of action and not in terms of static qualities. In the remaining part of this section, we will explore how the idea of the human in other cultures like the Chinese, as well as in modern Western philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt influences the structure of their philosophies.

Other articles in this series

Sundar Sarukkai on how philosophy can be a living tradition in our lives today

‘Do we perceive the world or do we think it?’ Sundar Sarukkai on thinking in philosophy

‘Philosophy is an act of illuminating the invisible’: Sundar Sarukkai on human perception

What is the original impulse to a philosopher’s questions? It is ‘doubt’, contends Sundar Sarukkai

Another Story of Philosophy will be published by Westland Books. Sundar Sarukkai’s recent books include Philosophy for Children , The Social Life of Democracy , and the novel Following a Prayer . For more details, see the author’s website .

• Sundar Sarukkai

‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ Review: Feathers Returns in What Could Have Been a Perfectly Charming Short

Although less ambitious than 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,' Aardman's latest feature gives fans what they want: a stone-cold stop-motion penguin and more puns than you can count.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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A scoundrel from Wallace and Gromit ’s past resurfaces in “Vengeance Most Fowl,” causing fresh trouble for the eccentric English inventor and his underappreciated canine. As the spiffy sequel’s play-on-word title implies, the culprit is none other than Feathers McGraw, that diamond-thieving master of disguise last seen in 1993’s Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers,” who seizes on another of Wallace’s inventions to engineer his escape from the local zoo in the stop-motion duo’s second feature in as many decades.

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In each case, the lesson is the same: Wallace relies on Gromit far more than he realizes. For all Wallace’s tinkering, devices meant to streamline his life wouldn’t be much use without Gromit pulling the levers at just the right moment. And so it is with Norbot, a voice-activated, AI-driven garden gnome whom Wallace introduces with the intention of assisting Gromit around the garden. Straight out of the box, the gadget overhauls the landscaping and all but amputates Gromit’s paws.

As performed by Reece Shearsmith, this Nifty Odd-Jobbing Robot makes a cute, “cutting-hedge” addition to the Aardman universe. He isn’t the first gnome to appear there — kitschy kin have made cameos as lawn ornaments in “A Close Shave” and “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” — but he’s the first to factor so prominently. With his rosy cheeks and dementedly happy grin, Norbot immediately rubs Gromit wrong. The poor dog is right to be suspicious, since it’s clear that this latest creation is more powerful than Wallace knows — and can be easily hacked by a certain jailbird, who still wants that blue diamond.

As anyone familiar with “The Wrong Trousers” can tell you, Feathers ranks among the most amusing antagonists in animation history, owing to the sheer simplicity of his penguin design. He was essentially a black-and-white bowling pin with beady eyes and flippers, who could disguise himself as a chicken by sticking a red rubber glove on his head. Feathers made for a patently absurd — but still effective — antagonist, since you could read all kinds of menace into his stare (aided by the appropriate strings on the soundtrack).

One of Park’s signatures has been his affection for classic film genres, which tips toward Ealing territory with its off-kilter comedy. Though Feathers began as a Hitchcockian villain all those years ago, in this incarnation, he evokes a criminal mastermind like Hannibal Lecter, who was no less intimidating behind bars. Even minimalist gestures look humorously malicious, whether that involves shaving with a popsicle stick or stroking a white seal pup. Frankly, it’s a shame we don’t see more of Feathers early on. Instead, our attention is focused on Norbot, whom the sinister penguin reprograms to “evil mode” from the clink.

It’s a strange coincidence that Aardman should introduce an AI helper the year DreamWorks released “The Wild Robot,” which packs an emotional dimension this film lacks. At Feathers’ instruction, Norbot builds an army of gnome clones, but their existence doesn’t threaten the bond between Wallace and Gromit so much as it does Wallace’s other passion: inventing. Those are very different stakes, as police inspector Mackintosh (Peter Kay, returning from “Were-Rabbit”) and rookie Mukherjee (Lauren Patel) confiscate all of Wallace’s gear.

“ Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” will release in select U.S. theaters on Dec. 18 before streaming on Netflix starting Jan. 3, 2005. BBC plans a U.K. release in time for Christmas.

Reviewed at Netflix Icon screening room, Los Angeles, Oct. 23, 2024. MPA Rating: PG. Running time: 97 MIN.

• Crew: Directors:

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