Chapter 6 - TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM

This chapter describes how people on earth turned from hunters and gatherers to food producers like farmers. It starts with questions like why food production took place here abut not there and why at that time but not earlier. Then before answering the question, the author first explains some common misconceptions. The first one is that the turning from gathering and hunting to farming was an invention or discovery. In fact, it was a much slower procedure like evolution. The first person who adopt food didn’t do that consciously because that person had no idea about what farming would be and the consequence of farming. The transition was more like a by-product during decision making, in which people decide what to do everyday that would benefit them the most. The second misconception is that there was a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. The authors demonstrates this idea using the example of nomads of New Guinea’s Lake Plains, who planted bananas and the went off as hunter-gatherers, and then came back again to check out their crops. The third dichotomy is that food producers are active managers of their land and hunter-gatherers are collectors of the land’s wild produce. The author explains this point using counterexamples like Aboriginal Australians and New Guinea people. 

Then the author tries to answer the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter by analyzing the transition from hunting or gathering to farming, step by step. Firstly he describes the process of people’s decision making on how to spend their time and effort. He mentions that human and animal foragers prefer the choice which yields the higher payoff with the least effort. Then he talks about the risk of starving, which was avoided at all cost by rational beings. Finally he concludes that the differences between people’s decision making actually resulted from lots of elements including considerations of prestige, cultural preferences, and even relative values they attach to different lifestyles. 

Later on the author makes it clear that food production and hunting-gathering were actually alternative strategies. The author comes up with another question on what factors contributed to the shift from hunting-gathering to farming. He lists five main factors.

1. Decline in the availability of wild food, which is self- explanatory as the less food available in the wild, the more likely people would start food production.
2. The depletion of wild game tended to make hunting-gathering less rewarding.
3. Cumulative development of technologies on which food production would eventually depend — like those or collecting, precessing, and storing wild food. As people were more capable of strong food, they would produce more when possible and put them in storage for future use to avoid possible starvation.
4. Two-way link between the rise in human population density and the rise in food production. 
5. The much denser populations of food producers  enabled them to displace or kill hunter-gatherers by their sheer numbers. This explains the geographic boundaries between hunter-gatherers and farmers. 

To conclude, according to all these reasons/factors, more and more hunter-gatherers were replaced by food producers, because the hunter-gatherers were either eliminated by food producers, or they became food producers themselves. 

Works Cited

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Print.

Chapter 5 -

Chapter 4 - Farmer Power- the roots of guns, germs, and steel.

This chapter gives answers to the rhetorical questions posed at the end of Chapter 3.

"But we are still left with the fundamental question why all those immediate advantages came to lie more with Europe than with the New World. Why weren't the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which European lacked resistance, to develop oceangoing ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history? Those are no longer the questions of proximate causation that this chapter has been discussing, but questions of ultimate causation that will take the next two parts of this book."


The chapter is the first of 7 chapters that make the second part of the book, "The Rise and Spread of Food Production." It can be the most important chapter of the second part of the book!

The chapter starts with a story of two men in southwestern Montana from different backgrounds. The first, Fred Hirschy, is an immigrant from Switzerland, who moved to Montana as a teenager in 1890. He became very successful and was one of the first people to develop farms in the area. The second man, Levi was a member of the Blackfoot Indian tribe who worked for Fred. One Sunday morning, Levi walked into the home drunk and cursing after a Saturday night binge. Among his curses, one stood out: “Damn you, Fred Hirschy, and damn that ship that brought you from Switzerland!” It is the typical perspective the Indians have towards their conquerors in the American West. Levi’s tribe of hunters and famous warriors had been robbed of its lands by the immigrant white farmers. This chapter focuses on how the farmers were able to win out over the famous warriors.
Main theme: This chapter traces the main connections through which food production led to all the advantages that enabled Fred Hirschy's people to dispossess Levi's (86).

1.    Availability of more consumable calories.
The population of the European farmers who domesticated the few edible species of plants and animals grew tremendously compared to the hunters and warriors. Most wild plant species and animals were useless as food to the hunters because they were either indigestible, poisonous, of low nutritional value, tedious to prepare, difficult to gather, or dangerous to hunt for the case of some wild animals. The human societies possessing domestic animals benefitted in four distinct ways: the livestock were a source of meat, milk, and fertilizer and by pulling plows. This is one direct way in which plant and animal domestication led to denser human populations by yielding more food than did the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This meant that the population densities of the farming societies increased tremendously compared to that of the nomadic hunter-gatherers.

2.    The consequences of a sedentary lifestyle enforced by food production.
Diamond mentions this as one indirect cause for the success of the Europeans (farmers) in conquering the hunters [farmer power]. The hunters frequently moved  in search of wild foods, but farmers remained near their fields and orchards. This contributed to even denser human population among the farmers by permitting a shortened birth interval. Nomadic hunter-gatherers had to space their children about four years because the mothers cannot afford to the mothers cannot afford to bear the next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe. On the other hand, sedentary people can bear as many children as they can feed. They are not constrained by problems of carrying young children on treks. That higher birthrate together with their ability to feed more people per acre lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers.

Another consequence of the sedentary lifestyle that worked in favor of the farmers was the ability to store food surpluses. While nomadic hunter-gatherers may occasionally bag more food than they can consume in a few days, it’s still of little use to them because they cannot store/protect it. It would be pointless to store the food if one didn’t remain nearby to guard the stored food. The nomadic hunter-gatherers didn’t, therefore, have bureaucrats and kings who relied on stored food since they didn’t produce it themselves. On the other hand, moderate sized agricultural societies were able to organize themselves into chiefdoms and kingdoms because the political elite are able to gain control of food produced by others, assert the right taxation, and still engage in full-time political activities. They are the ones who mobilized their communities to conquer others.

3.    Crops and livestock provided very valuable materials which the nomadic hunter-gatherers lacked.
Crops and livestock yield fibers for making clothing, blankets, nets, and ropes. Big domestic mammals were also used as a means for transport until the development of railroads in the 19th century. Eurasia’s horses were used during wars of conquest by the farming communities. The horses, for instance, enabled foreign people, the Hyksos, to conquer then horseless Egypt and establish themselves as the temporary pharaohs. These are only a few of the benefits the farmers got due to plant and animal domestication.

4.The role of germs.
Germs that evolved in human societies with domestic animals also had a role to play in wars of conquest. Infectious disease like smallpox, measles, and flu arose as specialized germs of humans, derived by mutation of small germs that infected the domesticated animals. The farmers were the first to be affected by the newly evolved germs, but they evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases. When these farmers who were partly immune came into contact with nomadic hunter-gatherers who had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted which killed up to 99 percent of the hunters and gatherers. Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals played a significant role in the European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific Islanders.

The availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia and later on other continents.

This chapter covers all the major links between food production and conquest (the only chapter in Part 2 that draws the direct connection between food production and conquest) that are discussed in the chapters that follow.


In summary, the second part of Guns, Germs, and Steel is organized this way:

Chapter 4:  The roots of guns, germs, and steel.
Chapter 5: Geographic differences in the onset of food production.
Chapter 6: Causes of the spread of food production.
Chapter 7: The unconcious development of ancient crops.
Chapter 8: Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?
Chapter 9: Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?
Chapter 10: Why did food production spread at different rates in different continents?

Chapter 3 - Collision at Cajamarca

Collision at Cajamarca Summary- Chapter 3

            Chapter three begins with background on the biggest population shift of modern times that happens to be the colonization of the New World by the Europeans and the disappearance of Native Americans. The collisions between the new advancement between the Old world and the new world happened in 1492 when Christopher Columbus found the Caribbean Islands where all the Native Americans had been living.  The most memorable and dramatic moment was on November 16, 1532 in a town called Cajamarca when the first encounter with the Inca emperor Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro unfolded. Pizarro led a Spanish army of 168 soldiers and those soldiers were going against an army of 80,000 soldiers led by Atahualpa. Pizarro was 1000 miles to the north in Panama and new nothing about the time reinforcements or the local inhabitants. Although the odds were against Pizarro and his soldiers, he was able to win this battle that opened a broad window onto world history.

            The next part of the chapter discusses a couple of factors that influenced the Spaniards to triumph over the Incas. The Spaniards were amazed over the Atahualpa where the Indians lived however they refused to show any fear or turn back from fighting against them. Along with this Pizarro did not want his men to fear anymore so instead of telling them that they were going to fight against 80,000 he lied and said there was only 40,000 to boost their confidence. However, when the Spaniards were asked to come out and fight, the Indians were immediately in shock when they heard the “booming of the guns, the blowing of the trumpets, and the rattles on the horses that threw the Indians crowding the square” (72). This was a major surprise for the Indians and something they had never seen or imagined before. The Indians weak weapons stood very little chance against the Spaniards steel armor, guns and weapons. Pizarro was immediately able to capture Atahualpa. The Indians responded in panic and tried to flee from the site and runaway to the plain outside.

            Pizarro told the leaders of the Indians to not be offended or ashamed for being defeated because he mentions how he had defeated many more powerful lords than him. The biggest pay off they asked for was a room full of gold and right after he received that he executed Atahualpa. The big question throughout the chapter is “Why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa? The main component of Pizarro’s success in winning this battle was the military advantages such as steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns and horses. Around the 1700s swords were replaced with guns that ultimately favored the Europeans rather than the Native Americans. Another tremendous advantage was having horses to help kill the Indians. The Spaniards were able to easily outride the Indians and could ride down and kill the Indians on foot.

            Another question the chapter proposes is “How did Atahuallpa come to be at Cajamarca? Diamond responds saying that they have arrived because they won many decisive battles in a civil war that ended up leaving the Native Americans divided. This was another advantage that led to the victory of Pizarro and his soldiers during the battle between them. Pizarro immediately was aware of those divisions and exploited them. The reason for the civil war was that there was an epidemic of small pox spreading and if this epidemic did not take place, the “Spaniards would have faced a united empire” (77). The disease that was introduced by the Europeans spread throughout different tribes that killed many Native Americans. All in all, Pizarro’s capture of Atahuallpa displays the many different factors that led to Europeans colonizing the New World rather than the Native Americans winning over Europe. The main factors of victory were military technology such as guns, germs and steel, horses, infectious diseases, technology and the political organization in Europe.

Reflection

            Overall, I felt that they chapter was very straightforward and was easily interpreted. Throughout the chapter he proposes many questions such as “Why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa?” “How did Atahuallpa come to be at Cajamarca?” “How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca?” “Why did Atahuallpa walk into the trap?” After each question Diamond proposes, he immediately follows with a very descriptive response that answers the question that has been asked. This is a very effective way in organizing each section of the chapter because it allows the readers to easily follow the context and dig deeper to find the meaning behind it. At the very end of the chapter, Diamond gives a brief overview of what he discussed previously in the chapter. This is another effective technique that Diamond uses in organizing the chapter because throughout the chapter I was sometimes lost through the description and it was a good way to remind me the main points.  The chapter begins with giving examples of the Old world compared to the New world and addresses what happens in between. It gives enough background information for the reader to understand what lead up to the battle between the Spaniards and the Native Americans. Also at the very beginning, Diamond announces the outcome of the battle and a little information on what led to the Spaniards victory. The remainder of the chapter talks about how the Spaniards ended up winning. I thought this chapter was very well organized and very easy to follow what was going on. 

Chapter 2 -

A Natural Experiment of History Summary- Morgan W.

In this chapter Jared Diamond focuses on what is called the “natural Experiment” which he defines as the societal growth of different groups expanded over many generations in different environments based on the same ancestry. Thus because this experiment cannot be carried out on human societies, it can only be observed on humans by looking for something similar that occurred to humans in the past. Diamond states that in order to infer that a test will prove that difference will occur on a global scale, we must first prove that it will provide results on a local scale; And so, diamond focuses in on the Polynesian islands, a demographically diverse area, introducing with it two societies, the simplistic hunter-gatherer tribe Moriori, and the technologically advanced, agricultural based people the Maori.

 The Moriori, a peaceful society, were originally settlers of the Maori clan from New Zeeland that colonized an island in the Chatham archipelago then were forgotten by the Maori clan only to centuries later be rediscovered by a New Zeeland seal hunter. The Moriori people were sporadically invaded in the winter of 1835 by the Maori clan, the invaders 500 strong armed with guns, clubs, and axes slaughtered over the following days hundreds of the surrendering Moriori people, cooking and feasting on their bodies, enslaving the rest, and killing them too off as it suited their whim, all in accordance with their custom. This tragedy of the Moriori people, diamond states, “resembles many other such tragedies in both the modern and the ancient world”(Diamond pg54).

Diamond goes on to justify why the Maori were far superior to the Moriori despite only being separated for a few centuries. Before the Moriori broke off from the Maori people, they were on level ground; the Moriori had descended from the Maori who then descended from the Polynesian farmers who settled New Zeeland decades earlier. So, diamond raises the question, why did both groups then evolve in different directions; the Maori evolving into a more technologically and politically advanced society based on intensive farming, whereas the Moriori reverted back to a simplistic hunter-gatherer tribe practicing politics as a community.

These differences, according to the natural experiment would have to be a result of different environments, zooming out to all of Polynesia we see that the thousands of islands scattered out across the pacific differ very greatly in “area, isolation, elevation, climate, productivity, and geological and biological resources (Figure 2.1). For most of human history those islands lay far beyond the reach of watercraft” (Diamond pg55). Almost all these islands were colonized by decedents of

“seafaring people [originating]from the Bismarck Archipelago north of New Guinea finally [who finally]succeeded in reaching some of those islands. Over the following centuries their descendants colonized virtually every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific.”(Diamond pg55).

Within that medium sized natural experiment the fate of the Moriori forms and even smaller test easy to trace to differences between the islands. While both groups originated from tropical fruit farmer, the Moriori had to revert back to hunter gatherers because of the cold climate, because hunting and gathering cannot support a surplus of food for redistribution and storage. They could not support politicians, bureaucrats, or even specialists who did not hunt for their own, it is because of this  and their small size of about 2,000 people that they needed not a centralized government to settle laws and disputes. With no nearby island the people had to learn to get along and they did this by renouncing war, but this left them vulnerable to the Maori.

figure 2.1

The Maori people on the other hand were intensive farmers from New Zeeland, because of their intensive farming and large island space they were able to achieve a large supporting population up to approximately 100,000 people including specialists, bureaucrats, part-time soldiers, therefore requiring  some kind of centralized government but they could not agree on what. New Zeeland was long home to ferocious local wars between populations, developing stronger tools and weapons in order to survive as well as elaborate forts and ceremonial structures. All leading to their eventual success over the Moriori.

Polynesia as a whole was very diverse in environment and people from egalitarian hunter-gathers to the many hierarchical ranked linages with a separation in social classes.

“Contributing to these differences among Polynesian societies were at least six sets of environmental variables among Polynesian islands: island climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation.”(Diamond pg58).

The climate in Polynesia varies from warm tropical to cold sub Antarctic. Lying well within the Tropic of Cancer has mountains high enough to support alpine habitats and receive occasional snowfalls. Rainfall varies from the highest recorded on Earth to only one-tenth as much on islands so dry that they are marginal for agriculture.

While talking about geological types of islands Diamond says,

“Island geological types include coral atolls, raised limestone, volcanic islands, pieces of continents, and mixtures of those types. At one extreme… they consist entirely of limestone without other stones, have only very thin soil, and lack permanent fresh water. At the opposite extreme, the largest Polynesian island, New Zealand, is an old, geologically diverse, continental fragment, … [offers] a range of mineral resources,… Most other large Polynesian islands are volcanoes that rose from the sea,… while lacking New Zealand's geological richness, the oceanic volcanic islands at least are an improvement over atolls… in [which] they offer diverse types of volcanic stones, some of which are highly suitable for making stone tools.”(Diamond pg58).

Later he also explains how volcanic island differ among themselves too  in height, weathering, soil levels, and even in stream occurrences or persistence.

When discussing Marine resources he states that “most Polynesian islands are surrounded by shallow water and reefs, and many also encompass lagoons. Those environments teem with fish and shellfish. However, the rocky coasts”(Diamond pg59),and drop offs of some islands make marine resources obsolete or at least less productive .­­­­­­

Area being another factor contributes both to population growth and political division, the more the room available and resources available the larger the populous can expand. However the larger the area depending on terrain also seeds for division, like happened on New Zeeland  with a very high population but also many warring factions within the land mass itself, was cause for great bloodshed but also some astonishing advancements in weapons, agriculture and politics.

The last environmental variable  being isolation some of the islands were so ” small and so remote from other islands that, once they were initially colonized, the societies thus founded developed in total isolation from the rest of the world.” however, ”most other Polynesian islands were in more or less regular contact with other islands. In particular, the Tongan Archipelago lies close enough to the Fijian, Samoan, and Wallis Archipelagoes to have permitted regular voyaging between archipelagoes and eventually to permit Tongans to undertake the conquest of Fiji” (Diamond pg59).

Food Production however was one of largest factors that influenced Polynesian societies. Polynesian subsistence depended on a variety of fishing, gathering wild plants and marine shellfish, hunting terrestrial birds, and food production. “Most Polynesian islands originally supported big flightless birds that had evolved in the absence of predators,… however most of them were soon exterminated on all islands, because they were easy to hunt down”(Diamond pg60). Ancestral Polynesians brought with them three domesticated animal types the dog the pig and the chicken, but made no attempt of domesticating any indigenous type. Most islands retained all three, but some did not relying back on agriculture, however agriculture was not avail able to all islands because of either infertile/lack of soil or climate, settlers of these islands only brought with them tropical plants that would not grow in the latitudes. Some eventually practiced dry-land cropping and slash and burn agriculture to stimulate growth in these areas. Other island were blessed with rich soils but did not have large Permanente streams for irrigation thus resorting to dry-land agricultures. Hawaii was unique using mass labor in aquaculture for fish population.

As a result of all this environmental variation, human densities (population per square mile) varied greatly over Polynesia, even on some islands exceeded the current population density of Holland. Relevant area in a society was not the area of the island itself but of that political unit, in which most cases varied from a part of an island to that of an entire archipelago. Most islands eluded unification due to factors like isolation and terrain, for example “people in neighboring steep-sided valleys of the Marquesas communicated with each other mainly by sea; each valley formed an independent political entity of a few thousand inhabitants, and most individual large Marquesan islands remained divided into many such entities”(Diamond pg62).

“A political unit's population size interacted with its population density to influence Polynesian technology and economic, social, and political organization. In general, the larger the size and the higher the density, the more complex and specialized were the technology and organization… At high population densities only a portion of the people came to be farmers, but they were mobilized to devote themselves to intensive food production, thereby yielding surpluses to feed nonproducers. The nonproducers … included chiefs, priests, bureaucrats, and warriors. The biggest political units could assemble large labor forces to construct irrigation systems and fishponds that intensified food production even further. These developments were especially apparent on Tonga, Samoa, and the Societies, all of which were fertile, densely populated, and moderately large” (diamond 62).

Population density effected economies, social complexity/cast systems, political organization/equality all the same way the high the population density the more complex the society, with lower densities being the simplest.

By the time Europeans came in the 18^th century many close knitted archipelagos and islands unified themselves, most were not as grand as the Tongan empire expanded across many archipelagos within 500 miles of its center but generally they unified themselves in trade or politics.

“Polynesian island societies differed greatly in their economic specialization, social complexity, political organization, and material products, related to differences in population size and density, related in turn to differences in island area, fragmentation, and isolation and in opportunities for subsistence and for intensifying food production”(Diamond pg65).

-Diamond, Jared. Guns Germs and Steel :THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Print

Chapter two is fundamental in my opinion for the development of the book, it infers that the type of culture that develops is dependent upon the resources that are available during their early years specifically advancements in food production/preservation. I believe that the availability of food will persist as a main factor of development throughout the book leading to more complex topics like the conquest of nations.

            This chapter was well written and over all made a clear argument with plenty of examples, I personally admire the way that Diamond led from one example clearly into the next explaining each one’s relation individually to the topic leaving no room for confusion. He tied all his examples into the theme of the chapter which was the effects that environment has on a population, and cut everything else out. His use of imagery and related historical fact was very persuasive in describing how environment aspects effected early advancements of society.

            What I noticed is that like  Gladwell he is trying to define what causes success, but also like Gladwell is Diamond’s writing style for this chapter, open with story, introduce phenomenon, throw in an excessive amount of fact, then quickly wrap the chapter up and  introduce the next; Diamond almost steals the whole chapter formatting of Gladwell or vica versa. Unlike Gladwell, Diamond clearly elaborates on each topic and specifically relates each example to that topic, whereas Gladwell had a more broad way of introducing examples with the same results and loosely tying them to the theme of the chapter. Another thing that caught my eye was that diamond did not have to bring up a counter argument in fact if he did include one I believe that it would have only hurt the strength of his chapter. It was strange to see such a one-sided approach but in the end it was very effective and efficient approach for his argument.

Chapter two was all about logos, relating every surrounding condition to an aspect of society, for example two things that seem abstractly different like food production and whether a society has bureaucrats diamond was able to demonstrate step by step the cause and effect on how they were related. This chapter was the most powerful display of logos that I have ever seen in an argument. Diamond set out in this chapter to persuade the reader into seeing the facts, and that is exactly what he did with cold hard indisputable facts. After reading this chapter I feel I have a better sense for the saying “we are a product of our environment” and though it might not shape us directly as individuals it does shape us as a community. However, Diamond did do something that made me uneasy about his work,  he never once in this chapter or in the chapter previous mention where he got the information or where we can find the facts that he based his work on. It is not really a major thing because he does say in the intro that he has been doing research on this topic for a while, but me personally, I’d like to know where the facts are coming from.

The chapter only needed to refer to logos because ethos was already displayed when Diamond listed his credentials in the introduction chapter and pathos was not appropriate for the purpose of the chapter. However, that is not to say that ethos or pathos could not have strengthened the chapter; for example ethos could have been present in the form citing the location that he was pulling the information from, and pathos could have been used to answer why someone should care for reading the chapter. As one can see the chapter does well to stand on its own but the presence of either could have been strengthened the argument further.

Hello everyone, 

This blog has been created for you to write a chapter summary of one chapter from the book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Each student will read one chapter, in depth, and write the equivalent of two pages to summarize the details and events of each chapter. You may include images, charts and graphs that represent the information.

Following the summary, I invite you to write one page saying what YOU think. You may write what your interpretation is, what you thought of the chapter, any insights or revelations, you may even analyze it rhetorically. It is up to you.