This chapter is an
introduction/leading chapter of chapter 6-10. At the beginning of this chapter,
Diamond pointed out that one question to answer in Guns, Germs, and Steel is that why food production did not
successfully developed in some areas that seemed to be ecologically suitable for
agriculture and herding until modern times. There are many other questions to
answer when looking into the question above carefully. For example, in some
places of the world, people developed food production independently, but why
the time it appeared vary greatly? In some other places, original plants and
animals were imported. Why didn’t people there develop their own food
production even if the places were actually geographically suitable? Also, for
the places that imported plants and animals at first, the dates of importation
varied a lot. Why did that happen? In Diamond’s opinion, the answers to these
questions partly explained the inequality between peoples with power in food
production and those without it. In Diamond’s own words, “All these questions
involve developments that determined which peoples became history’s have-nots,
and which became its haves.” (Guns, Germs,
and Steel, P94)
In the following
paragraphs, Diamond provided the methodology to find the answers. He pointed
out that the most equivocal way to figure out the origins of food production is
to identify the plant and animal remains at archaeological sites. The general way
to date food production is radiocarbon dating of carbon containing materials. The
principle of this method is explained by Diamond as followed. “This method is
based on the slow decay of radioactive carbon 14…Carbon 14 is continually being generated in the
atmosphere by cosmic ray…Hence the age of material from an archaeological site
can be calculated from the material’s carbon 14/ carbon 12 ratio.” (Guns, Germs, and Steel, P95)
However, this method is
not perfect. Diamond mentioned two problems of it. The first one is that the amount
of carbon required in radiocarbon dating is much more than that in small seeds
or bones. Therefore, scientists often had to refer to charcoal from fires,
which are considered associated with the food remains. The other problem is that
the carbon 14/carbon 12 ratio is not rigidly constant. Therefore, the result
includes inevitable systematic errors.
After knowing the method
of dating remains, Diamond introduced the method to decide where the food was
actually domesticated. In Diamond’s words, the first way is to “examine a map
of the geographic distribution of the crop’s or animal’s wild ancestor, and to
reason that domestication must have taken place in the area where the wild
ancestor occurs.” (Guns, Germs, and Steel, P97) second way is to “plot on a
map the dates of the domesticated form’s first appearance at each locality.” (Guns, Germs, and Steel, P97) Through these methods, people found out that same plants
and animals were often domesticated independently in different places.
Then Diamond began to talk about when, where and how food production developed differently in different parts of the world. He approached the most complex cases from two simple extremes. One is the places where food production was arised absolutely independently. The opposite extreme is the places where food production totally began with imported plants and animals. Diamond provided many detailed evidence, which included the situation of most parts of the globe.
So far Diamond had
provided the methodology and background information needed in figuring out the
answers to the questions mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. To close
the chapter, Diamond claimed that the details of the answers would be discussed
in chapter 6-10.
Works Cited
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies. New York
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