IP Blog

Location was most obviously the key factor as to whether or not a society in prehistory was able to obtain food production.  Jared Diamond clearly points this out in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  He analyzes why many societies had to rely on outside sources for their “founder package” and what effect this had on their development.  Why was location important?  Well, unlike the common belief that some humans are simply superior to others, “axis orientations affected the rate of spread of crops and livestock, and possibly also of writing, wheels, and other inventions” (176).  When examined this theory makes much sense.  The axis orientation, or simply put the direction in which most of the continent is laid, changed factors such as climate and typography variations in the continent.  The difference between how fast crops and inventions spread in places with a largely north-south axis and in places with an east-west axis is immense (178).

Diamond divides the continents into four main pieces: the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and Australia/New Guinea.  In this chapter of his book, however, Australia/New Guinea doesn’t really come into play.  Therefore, we are left with three landmasses, two of which have north-south axes (the Americas and Africa) and one of which has an east-west axis (Eurasia).  The difference in progression of the societies occurs mainly here.  Eurasia was able to acquire the Fertile Crescent’s “founder package”.  This consisted of several domesticated crops and a few domesticated animals.  This package quickly spread through the continent because the climate and growing seasons were similar, as well as diseases.  Because the crops had already adapted to these factors once they had to make only a few small alterations to be able to survive in the slightly different locations throughout Eurasia (185).  In the Americas and Africa, this ease of increased food production was made more difficult and slower because the crops and animals had to change to fit the various climates, which sometimes was impossible, causing societies to need to start over again.  The evidence of “frequent multiple domestications in the Americas, might thus provide more subtle evidence that crops spread more easily out of Southwest Asia than in the Americas” (179).

Because Eurasia had a head start on food production, they gained a head start to becoming “civilized”.  The acquirement of these domesticates allowed Eurasia to develop several sedimentary, stratified societies as opposed to their previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  These states, if large enough, would have had a centralized government with laws and organization.  Eventually, the large sedentary societies (states) would become many of the countries initially in place in Europe and Asia.  The larger societies created by domesticated food production helped to create writing as a way of recording what was stored where, law and punishment, and other critical information to a society.  The spread of wheels and other inventions may have been affected because many were devised as ways to make aspects of food production easier (190).  Diamond states the blunt truth and shows that he thinks history may have had a different outcome if the tables were turned by saying, “Around those axes turned the fortunes of history” (191).

Related Links:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/10/3715.pdf
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm
http://imperium.lenin.ru/~kaledin/tmp/agricltr.txt
http://www.edge.org/discourse/diamond_evolution.html