intercontinental differences in human societies. We shall see why Aboriginal Australians remained hunter-gatherers, even while most peoples of neighboring New Guinea became food producers.
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel
Chapters 16 and 17 integrate
developments in Australia and New Guinea into the perspective of the whole region encompassing the East Asian mainland and Pacific islands. The rise of food production in China spawned several great prehistoric movements of human populations, or of cultural traits, or of both. One of those movements, within China itself, created the political and cultural phenomenon of China as we know it today. Another resulted in a replacement, throughout almost the whole of tropical Southeast Asia, of indigenous hunter-gatherers by farmers of ultimately South Chinese origin. Still another, the Austronesian expansion, similarly replaced the indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Philippines and Indonesia and spread out to the most remote islands of Polynesia, but Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel was unable to colonize Australia and most of New Guinea. To the student of world history, all those collisions among East Asian and Pacific peoples are doubly important: they formed the countries where one-third of the modern world's population lives, and in which economic power is increasingly becoming concentrated; and they furnish especially clear models for understanding the histories of peoples elsewhere in the world.
Chapter 18 returns to the problem
introduced in Chapter 3, the collision between European and Native American peoples. A summary of the last 13,000 years of New World and western Eurasian history makes clear how Europe's conquest of the Americas was merely the culmination of two long and mostly separate historical Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel trajectories. The differences between those trajectories were stamped by continental differences in domesticable plants and animals, germs, times of settlement, orientation of continental axes, and ecological barriers.
Finally, the history of sub-Saharan Africa (Chapter 19) offers striking similarities as well as contrasts with New World history. The same factors that molded Europeans' encounters with Africans molded their encounters with Native Americans as well.
But Africa also differed from the Americas in all these factors. As a result, European conquest did not create widespread or lasting European settlement of sub-Saharan Africa, except in the far south. Of more lasting significance was a large-scale population shift within Africa itself, the Bantu Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel expansion. It proves to have been triggered by many of the same causes that played themselves out at Cajamarca, in East Asia, on Pacific islands, and in Australia and New Guinea.
I harbor no illusions that these chapters have succeeded in explaining the histories of all the continents for the past 13,000 years.
Obviously, that would be impossible to accomplish in a single book even if we did understand all the answers, which we don't.
At best, this book identifies several constellations of environmental factors that I believe provide a large part of the answer to Yali's question. Recognition of those factors emphasizes the unexplained residue, whose understanding will be a task for the future.
The Epilogue, entitled "The Future of Human History as a Science," lays out some Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel pieces of the residue, including the problem of the differences between different parts of Eurasia, the role of cultural factors unrelated to environment, and the role of individuals.
Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges.
Hence the
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel
Chapters 16 and 17 integrate
developments in Australia and New Guinea into the perspective of the whole region encompassing the East Asian mainland and Pacific islands. The rise of food production in China spawned several great prehistoric movements of human populations, or of cultural traits, or of both. One of those movements, within China itself, created the political and cultural phenomenon of China as we know it today. Another resulted in a replacement, throughout almost the whole of tropical Southeast Asia, of indigenous hunter-gatherers by farmers of ultimately South Chinese origin. Still another, the Austronesian expansion, similarly replaced the indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Philippines and Indonesia and spread out to the most remote islands of Polynesia, but Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel was unable to colonize Australia and most of New Guinea. To the student of world history, all those collisions among East Asian and Pacific peoples are doubly important: they formed the countries where one-third of the modern world's population lives, and in which economic power is increasingly becoming concentrated; and they furnish especially clear models for understanding the histories of peoples elsewhere in the world.
Chapter 18 returns to the problem
introduced in Chapter 3, the collision between European and Native American peoples. A summary of the last 13,000 years of New World and western Eurasian history makes clear how Europe's conquest of the Americas was merely the culmination of two long and mostly separate historical Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel trajectories. The differences between those trajectories were stamped by continental differences in domesticable plants and animals, germs, times of settlement, orientation of continental axes, and ecological barriers.
Finally, the history of sub-Saharan Africa (Chapter 19) offers striking similarities as well as contrasts with New World history. The same factors that molded Europeans' encounters with Africans molded their encounters with Native Americans as well.
But Africa also differed from the Americas in all these factors. As a result, European conquest did not create widespread or lasting European settlement of sub-Saharan Africa, except in the far south. Of more lasting significance was a large-scale population shift within Africa itself, the Bantu Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel expansion. It proves to have been triggered by many of the same causes that played themselves out at Cajamarca, in East Asia, on Pacific islands, and in Australia and New Guinea.
I harbor no illusions that these chapters have succeeded in explaining the histories of all the continents for the past 13,000 years.
Obviously, that would be impossible to accomplish in a single book even if we did understand all the answers, which we don't.
At best, this book identifies several constellations of environmental factors that I believe provide a large part of the answer to Yali's question. Recognition of those factors emphasizes the unexplained residue, whose understanding will be a task for the future.
The Epilogue, entitled "The Future of Human History as a Science," lays out some Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel pieces of the residue, including the problem of the differences between different parts of Eurasia, the role of cultural factors unrelated to environment, and the role of individuals.
Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges.
Hence the
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