By Jared Diamond
Why civilisations rose and fell
Subject
Themes
In July 1972, a New Guinean politician named Yali asked a deceptively simple question: why did Europeans develop so much cargo while New Guineans had so little? The answer spans 13,000 years of human history and rests on environmental differences between continents, not on innate differences between peoples.
In July 1972, a New Guinean politician named Yali asked a deceptively simple question: why did Europeans develop so much cargo while New Guineans had so little? The answer spans 13,000 years of human history and rests on environmental differences between continents, not on innate differences between…
Published in 1997, this work arrived at a moment when debates about the causes of global inequality were intensifying. The end of the Cold War had removed the ideological framework that had previously dominated discussions of why some nations were rich and others poor. Francis Fukuyama's declaration…
The distinction between proximate and ultimate causes forms the analytical backbone of the entire argument. Proximate causes are the immediate, visible factors that explain specific historical events: steel swords defeated stone clubs at Cajamarca; smallpox decimated the Aztecs; oceangoing ships…
The single most important factor determining which continents developed complex societies was the uneven global distribution of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication. This distribution was determined by biogeography, not by any human action or choice. It constituted a lottery in…
One of the most elegant and far-reaching arguments concerns the orientation of continental axes. Eurasia stretches predominantly east to west, the Americas and Africa predominantly north to south. This simple geometric fact had enormous consequences for the diffusion of crops, livestock, technology,…
The deadliest weapons in the European arsenal were not guns or steel swords but invisible microbes. Epidemic diseases including smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, and cholera killed far more people than all military campaigns combined. Throughout the Americas, an estimated…
Food production, the domestication of wild plants and animals, stands as the single most consequential development in human history. Every advantage that enabled some peoples to conquer others, from steel weapons to epidemic diseases to centralised political organisation, traces its origin back to…
Human evolution began in Africa roughly seven million years ago and remained confined there for most of its duration. Homo erectus spread to Java approximately 1.8 million years ago, and early Homo sapiens appeared around half a million years ago, but these early humans still possessed only crude…
On 16 November 1532, Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spanish soldiers captured the Inca emperor Atahuallpa at the highland town of Cajamarca, Peru. Atahuallpa commanded an army of 80,000, had recently won a civil war, and was the absolute ruler of the largest and most advanced state in the Americas. He…
Food production arose independently in only about five to nine areas worldwide, at vastly different times. The Fertile Crescent holds the earliest definite dates: around 8500 B.C. for plant domestication and 8000 B.C. for animals. China followed closely, while the eastern United States lagged by…
Wild almonds contain enough cyanide to kill a person, yet domesticated almonds are perfectly safe. The transformation happened because occasional mutant almond trees lack a single gene for producing the poison amygdalin. In the wild, birds eat all their nonbitter seeds, so these mutants die out. But…
Of the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals weighing over 100 pounds, only 14 were ever domesticated, and all of them before 2500 B.C. The Anna Karenina principle, borrowed from Tolstoy's observation that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, explains why: successful…
History's most lethal killers, including smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, plague, measles, and cholera, all evolved from diseases of domestic animals. Measles virus is most closely related to rinderpest, a cattle disease; the close relationship reflects 9,000 years of peasant farmers living and sleeping…
The Phaistos disk from Crete, dated to 1700 B.C., is the world's earliest known printed document. Its signs were stamped into soft clay using movable type rather than etched by hand. Yet this remarkable technology led nowhere: no other example of Cretan printing survives, and movable type was not…
A hike through the Australian desert to see Aboriginal rock paintings nearly ended in heat hallucination, providing a visceral reminder of why Aboriginal Australians remained hunter-gatherers. Australia's extreme aridity and poor soils made most of the continent unsuitable for farming. Aboriginal…
In a store in Jayapura, Indonesian New Guinea, four men representing different prehistoric waves of migration shared a comic but tense encounter. Wiwor, a New Guinea highlander with tightly coiled hair, Achmad, a Javan government officer with straight hair, Sauakari, a north coast lowlander with…
Africa contains not one but five genetically and linguistically distinct populations: blacks, whites, Pygmies, Khoisan (Bushmen and Hottentots), and the Asian-derived peoples of Madagascar. Most Americans equate native Africans with blacks, but this reflects only the most recent chapter of a much…
By Jared Diamond
Subject
Themes
In July 1972, a New Guinean politician named Yali asked a deceptively simple question: why did Europeans develop so much cargo while New Guineans had so little? The answer spans 13,000 years of human history and rests on environmental differences between continents, not on innate differences between peoples.