Modern history has been shaped by conquest. The conquest of the world by Europeans. Don't be afraid, you dog!
The Conquistadors led the way. A few hundred men who came to the New World and decimated the native population. The secret of their success?
Guns, germs and steel. Ever since, people of European origin have dominated the globe. With the same combination of military power, lethal microbes, and advanced technology.
But how did they develop these advantages in the first place? Why did the world ever become so unequal? These are questions that Professor Jared Diamond has spent more than 30 years trying to answer.
One of the most original thinkers of our age, Diamond has traveled the world looking for clues. He set himself a daunting task, to peel back the layers of the past and explore the very roots of power in the modern world. Whatever I work on for the rest of my life, I can never work on questions as fascinating as the questions of...
guns, germs, and steel, because they're the biggest questions of human history. What separates the haves from the have-nots? How have guns, germs, and steel shaped the history of the world? Jared Diamond's quest to uncover the roots of inequality began in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea.
Oh, we look up. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Diamond is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles.
He's a biologist by training, a specialist in human physiology. But his real passion has always been the study of birds. I love watching birds in this place. I began watching birds when I was seven years old in the United States. Then it was just a matter of identifying them.
I came here when I was 26 years old to New Guinea, and it was love at first sight. Look, look, look, look, look, look. Diamond has been making regular trips to New Guinea ever since.
Why squirty, squirty? And is now a leading expert on the bird life of the island. Morning, Wantalk.
But in the course of his fieldwork, he's become just as curious about the people of New Guinea. You go find the fish. Plenty fish you got?
That's old number two bush pal cry going, ah, ah, ah. Over the years I've gotten to know and like thousands of New Guineans. The name belong again you talk? Yanai.
Yanai. Yanai. I've learned several of their languages and much of what I know about birds I picked up from them.
You guys are hard work. There have been people living in New Guinea for at least 40,000 years. Much longer than on the continents of North and South America. Oh, look them, look them, look them.
Look them, one, two, three, four, five, six, Pella. They're among the most culturally diverse and adaptable people in the world. So why are they so much poorer than modern Americans? The question was put to Diamond bluntly by a man called Yali, whom he met on a beach more than 30 years ago. Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?
Yali's question really threw me. It seemed so simple and obvious and I thought it must have a simple and obvious answer. But when he asked me, I had no idea what that answer was. Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?
New Guineans use the word cargo to describe the material goods first brought to their country by Westerners. Cargo was regarded by many as evidence of the white man's power. It was treated with an almost religious reverence. For their part, Western colonials typically believed that power was determined by race. They saw themselves as genetically superior to the native population.
To them, it was only natural that they should have so much cargo, and New Guineans so little. To me, any explanation based on race is absurd. I know too many really smart New Guineans to believe there's anything genetically inferior about them. It's their ingenuity and their quickness to learn that have always impressed me. They can go empty handed into some of the most difficult environments on earth, knock up a shelter in a few hours and survive.
Let me try and dispel a step. Dispel a ropey strong and up and up and up. I wouldn't know where to start. In this environment, I'd be helpless without them. So why didn't these ingenious people invent metal tools, or build great cities, or develop any of the other trappings of modern civilization?
The world that I'm from is so different. The modern US is the richest most powerful state on earth. It's crammed with more cargo than most New Guineans could ever imagine.
But why? That's what Yali wanted to know. How did our worlds ever become so different?
Diamond realized that Yali's question was far bigger and more complex than it first appeared. Really about the roots of inequality. A question as old as human history itself.
Why since ancient times have some societies progressed faster than others? What allowed the Egyptians to build great pyramids? While most of the world was still scratching out a living, how did the Greeks ever develop such an advanced civilization?
Or the Romans? All great civilizations have had some things in common. Advanced technology, large populations, and a well-organized workforce. If I could understand how those things came into existence, then I'd understand why some people march faster than others during the course of history. Diamond set out to explore the division of the world into haves and have-nots.
It was a massive challenge that few scholars would have dared take on. He was a scientist, not a historian. How could he possibly solve the great puzzles of human history? To understand where inequality came from, Diamond needed to identify a time before inequality, when people across the world were living more or less the same way.
He had to turn back the clock thousands of years, back before the first civilizations, back into prehistory. 13,000 years ago, the ravages of the last ice age were over. The world was becoming warmer and wetter.
One area where humans were thriving was the Middle East. 13,000 years ago, the Middle East was far less arid than today, with more forests, trees, and plants. People here lived like people everywhere at this time, as hunter-gatherers in small, mobile groups. They were frequently on the move, making shelters wherever they could find animals to hunt or plants to gather.
They'd live in these shelters for weeks or months at a time, as long as they could keep feeding themselves. But as seasons changed and animals migrated, they'd move on to the next valley or ridge looking for new sources of food. One of the few places on earth where it's still possible to find people hunting and gathering is the rainforest of Papua New Guinea. Instead of just reading about this lifestyle in archaeological books, I've been lucky enough to witness it firsthand, to see for myself how we all lived 13,000 years ago, and how we found food.
To catch an animal requires skill, stealth, and encyclopedic knowledge about hundreds of animal species. You have to be pretty smart to be a hunter. 13,000 years ago, people in the Middle East hunted in the same way, tracking down whatever game they could find.
But the fundamental problem with hunting is that it's never been a productive way to find enough food. It takes time to track each animal. And with a bow and arrow, There's no certainty of how the hunt will end.
One of something. You know can laugh. Let me try again. Okay, pull him.
Okay. One time more. Yes. You pull him strong. Me pull him strong?
Yeah. You pull him strong, I'm going to go more yeti. I'm going to break his head. No problem, you're not strong.
You're not strong. I'm not strong. So you pull him strong. I pull him strong. I'm going to fight for Deva.
Deva is going to finish. You're number one, I'm number two. I'm going to try.
Because hunting is so unpredictable, traditional societies have usually relied more on gathering. In this part of Papua New Guinea, the gathering is done by women. An important source of food here is wild sago.
By stripping a sago tree, they can get to the pulp at the center, which can be turned into a dough and then cooked. Although it's physically harder work, gathering is generally a more productive way of finding food than hunting. But it still doesn't provide enough calories to support a large population. This jungle around us, you might think it's a cornucopia, but it isn't. Most of these trees in the jungle don't yield, don't give us anything edible.
There are just a few sago trees, and the rest of these trees don't yield anything that we could eat. And then sago itself, it's got limitations. One tree yields only maybe about 70 pounds of sago.
It takes them three or four days to process that tree. So it's a lot of work really for a lot of grain. deal of food.
Plus the sago starch is low on protein and also the sago can't be stored for a long time. And that's why hunter-gatherer populations are so sparse. If you want to feed a lot of people you've got to find a different food supply, you've got to find a really productive environment and it's not going to be a sago swamp. In the Middle East, there were very different plants to gather. Growing wild between the trees were two cereal grasses, barley and wheat.
Far more plentiful and nutritious than sago. These simple grasses would have a profound impact, setting humanity on the course towards modern civilization. But it would take a catastrophic change in the climate before this would happen. Twelve and a half thousand years ago, the world's climate became highly volatile. The long-term thaw that had brought about the end of the last ice age suddenly went into reverse.
Global temperatures dropped and ice age conditions returned. The world became colder and drier. The Middle East suffered an environmental collapse. Animal herds died off. So did many trees and plants.
The drought lasted for more than a thousand years. People were forced to travel farther and look much harder to find any source of food. But despite the conditions, they would somehow survive and even prosper. Here in the Middle East, a new way of life would come into being, one that would change the face of the earth.
Ian Kite is a Canadian archaeologist who specializes in the Stone Age history of the Middle East. His work is focused on a site in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea, a place known as Draw. Kite is a co-director of the dig and works with an international team of archaeologists. They've uncovered the remains of ancient dwellings that were clearly more sophisticated than any hunter-gatherer shelters. They believe this was a small village, one of the earliest permanent villages anywhere in the world.
People were starting to put down roots. What we would have had was this village of, I don't know, 40, 50 people living in the same place. We would have had a series of oval huts that would have been partially cut into the ground.
And these would have been very much the first time people settled down and lived in communities in a really extensive way. When they radiocarbon dated the site, they discovered that the village first emerged 11,500 years ago, at the same time as the end of the drought in the Middle East. But how was it possible to feed an entire village if times were so hard? After four years of digging at Draa, the archaeologists believe they have an answer.
It lies in this unique structure. What you can see here is the outline of a mud wall coming all the way down. Around here, and inside we have a series of upright stones that have been chipped in such a way where you can see a notch on them. And there would have been a series of beams over top of that with a floor across it.
And basically you would have had a dry, humidity-controlled environment where they could take grain, they could take any plants, they could dry them out, put them in here, protect them from insects, protect them from moisture, protect them from water percolating through. What that ends up being, from our perspective, is probably the world's first granary in some form, a place where they're able to store food in a particular location on a year-round basis. The team at DRA believes the granary was an oval-shaped mud wall building at the center of the village, a place where grain could be stored collectively. And the grains that were being stored were primarily wheat and barley.
While other plants were no longer available, these cereal grasses were hardy enough to survive and durable enough to be stored for years. But if this was a time of scarcity, how was there enough grain to fill a granary? The answer suggests a radical shift in human behavior.
At some point during the drought in the Middle East, people started growing their own food. Unable to maintain a mobile way of life, they would have stayed close to any source of water they could find and planted new fields of wheat and barley around them. Rather than just following food sources around different locations, for the first time what people start to do is that they bring these resources back to them. Not just as harvested food, but they're bringing them as seeds.
And they're growing them next to their village. And that's the first time, really this is the first time we see this anywhere in the world. The Stone Age people of the Middle East were becoming farmers. The first farmers in the world. Without realizing it, these new farmers were changing the very nature of the crops around them.
With every round of planting and harvesting, they'd favor ears of wheat and barley whose seeds were the biggest, tastiest, or easiest to harvest. Traits that were useless to the plant in the wild thrived under human cultivation. They interrupted the cycle.
They interrupted the normal environmental cycle and started to select these individual plants and basically rewarding those that were going to be most profitable to them. And so, even though it was accidental, once that whole process started, people are starting to control nature. The way crops are changed by human interference is known as domestication. Today it happens in research labs, with scientists selecting genes and breeding crops to be ever more useful to humans. It's a very precise, deliberate process, but not so different from what the first farmers were doing unconsciously thousands of years ago in the Middle East.
Transition to farming was clearly a decisive turning point in human history. People who remained hunter-gatherers couldn't produce anywhere near as much food as farmers, and also couldn't produce much food that could be stored. They were always going to be at a chronic disadvantage. Now I needed to know where else in the ancient world people had become farmers.
could establish links between the spread of farming and the spread of civilization, I'd be well on my way to answering Yali's question. There are only a few parts of the ancient world that developed farming independently. Not long after the Middle East came China, where people grew another high-yield cereal grass, rice. Pockets of farming also emerged in the Americas, based on corn, squash, and beans.
Later in Africa, people farmed sorghum, millet, and yams. And in most places where farming emerged, a relatively large advanced civilization followed. But there was an exception to the rule, an area where farming didn't bring the same benefits. The highlands of New Guinea. For 50 years after Westerners colonized New Guinea, they thought the highland valleys in the interior were uninhabited.
In fact, they were the most densely populated part of the island, with one of the oldest systems of farming in the world. Archaeologists now believe that people have been farming here for almost 10,000 years. Almost as long as the people of the Middle East.
It's amazing to think that these people, Yali's people, were some of the earliest farmers in the world. But if they were farmers, why weren't they propelled down the same path? path towards civilization as the people of the Middle East or China or Central America. Why didn't they end up producing their own cargo? New Guinea farmers themselves were surely no less talented than farmers anywhere else in the world.
So what was the difference? Highland agriculture was based on crops like these taro roots, which are very different from cereal crops. Taro is much more work.
You've got to plant it one by one, unlike wheat where you throw your hand and spread the seed. And these New Guinea crops can't be stored for years the way wheat can. They rot quickly, they have to be eaten in a short time.
They're also low in protein compared to wheat, so these farmers of the New Guinea Highlands suffered from protein deficiency. There's not much protein to be gotten from New Guinea's other crops either. People here farm local varieties of bananas. But although bananas are rich in sugar and starch, like taro they are low in protein.
In fact, people in the highlands have so little protein that sometimes they eat giant spiders to supplement their diet. I'd reached a moment of realization. Farming was clearly crucial to the story of human inequality.
But just as important was the type of farming. People around the world who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers. Ultimately it came down to geographic luck. It's an audacious idea that the inequalities of the world were born from the crops we eat.
According to Jared Diamond, Americans have had an advantage over New Guineans because for centuries they've grown crops that are more nutritious and productive. Crops like wheat, which provides about a fifth of all the calories they eat. The wealth of modern America could never have been sustained by taro and bananas. But Diamond's idea seems almost too simple. Could plants alone really have the power to shape the course of human history?
Or was there something else at play? Another reason for the division of the world into haves and have-nots. By 9,000 years ago, the first settlements in the Middle East were giving way to much larger villages.
People were only able to live on this scale by becoming more productive farmers. They were surrounded by fields of domesticated wheat and barley. But by now they also had another steady source of food.
What we see happening about 9,000 years ago is a remarkable transformation in the way that humans are interacting with animals. We begin to see a process of animal domestication, by which we mean humans were controlling where they were moving, they were controlling their feeding, and they were controlling their breeding. Instead of having to go out to hunt, you have a dependable meat supply on the hoof year round around your site, rather than being subject to seasonal variations and wild game.
As well as meat, animals could be used for their milk, providing an ongoing source of protein. Their hair and skins could be used to make clothes for extra warmth. Over time, domestic animals became an integral part of the new agricultural way of life. We know that the communities which first started to have domestic animals already had cereal crops, so they were cultivators. And the combination of these particular animals and the plants becomes an extremely attractive package, in that they're complementary.
After the harvest period, animals could be turned out on the stubble and they can actually eat the remains of the cereal crop harvest. In their turn, animal dung can be used to provide sort of a fertilizer for the cereal crops as well. So the whole package is seen to be mutually beneficial both for the animals and the plants and of course for the humans. Goats and sheep were the first animals to be domesticated in the ancient world and were eventually followed by the other big farm animals of today.
All of them were used at first for their meat, but they all proved useful in other ways, especially with the invention of the plow. Before the Industrial Revolution, beasts of burden were the most powerful machines on the planet. A horse or an ox harnessed to a plow could transform the productivity of the land, allowing farmers to grow more food and feed more people.
In New Guinea and many other parts of the world, people never used plows because they never had the animals to pull them. The only big domestic animal in the world New Guinea was the pig and wasn't even native. It came in from Asia a few thousand years ago. While Europe and Asia had not only pigs but also cows, sheep, goats, horses, buffalo, camels, and so on. Now pigs do give you meat but pigs don't give you the other products that you get from those European nation animals.
Pigs don't give you milk or wool or leather or hides. Most important of all, pigs can't be used for muscle power. Pigs don't pull clasps, or pull cards. The only muscle power in New Guinea was human muscle power. Even today there are no beasts of burden in New Guinea and almost all of the farm work is still done by hand.
But if farm animals were so useful, why didn't New Guineans domesticate any of their own? I decided to add up all the animals in the world that have ever been domesticated. And I was amazed by what I found. There are nearly two million known species of wild animals, but the vast majority have never been farmed.
Most insects and rodents are of no practical use to humans and not worth the effort of farming. Some birds, fish, and reptiles have been domesticated, but most are simply impractical to farm. So are most carnivores.
Not because they're dangerous, but because you'd have to grow other animals just to feed them. The best animals to farm are large, plant-eating mammals. And over the years, humans have probably tried to domesticate all of them, usually without success.
Despite repeated efforts, Africans have never domesticated the elephant. In South Asia, some elephants are used as work animals, but they're not farmed for the purpose. Instead, each elephant is caught in the wild and then tamed and trained. It doesn't make economic sense to farm an animal that takes some 15 years to mature and reach an age where it can start reproducing.
Animals which make suitable candidates for domestication can start giving birth in their first or second years. They will have one or maybe two offspring a year, so their productivity is actually high. Behaviorally, they need to be social animals, meaning that the males and the females and the young all live together as a group, and they also have an internal social hierarchy, which means that if humans can control the leader, then they will also gain control over the whole herd, the whole flock. There's another crucial requirement for a domestic animal.
It needs to get along with humans. Some animals don't have the temperament to live on a farm. A zebra could be an ideal domestic animal, potentially as useful as a horse.
But evolving in the midst of Africa's great predators, zebras have become flighty, nervous creatures. They have a vicious streak that humans have been unable to tame. That may be why zebras have never been harnessed to a plow or ridden into battle. counted up 148 different species of wild plant-eating terrestrial mammals that weigh over 100 pounds.
But of those 148, the number that have ever been successfully farmed for any length of time is just 14. Goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, Bactrian camels, Arabian camels, water buffalo, llamas, reindeer, yaks, mythans, and bally cattle. Just 14 large domestic animals in 10,000 years of domestication. Where did the ancestors of these animals come from?
None was from New Guinea or Australia. or sub-Saharan Africa, or the whole continent of North America. South America had the ancestor of just one large domestic animal, the llama. The other thirteen were all from Asia, North Africa, and Europe. And of these, the big four livestock animals, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, were native to the Middle East.
The very same area that was home to some of the best crops in the world was also home to some of the best animals. Little wonder that this area became known as the Fertile Crescent. The people of the Fertile Crescent were geographically blessed with access to some of the best crops and farm animals.
in the ancient world. It gave them a huge head start. What had begun with the sowing of wheat and the penning of goats was leading towards the first human civilization.
The archaeological site of Gwer in southern Jordan is 9,000 years old. But it has all the hallmarks of a town. A few hundred people lived here in rows of houses that were a wonder of technology.
Every time I come here, I'm amazed by what those people were doing. Some of the houses have a kind of air conditioning. This window here is to control the air coming from the street inside the house. And the houses, the walls and the floors of the houses from the inside at least, were covered with plaster.
So people were moving to the concept of homes. It's not a place just to sleep. It is a proper home. And people started to decorate the houses from the inside. And people were starting to invest in their homes.
Because if we are talking about plaster, it is time consuming, it's effort consuming. It's very expensive to have a plastered house. As villages grew bigger, there were more people to work on the land. More people could produce more food more efficiently.
Enough to support specialists within the community. Freed from the burden of farming, some people were able to develop new skills and new technologies. Making plaster from limestone was a major technological breakthrough. The stones had to be heated for days at a time, at a temperature of a thousand degrees. It may seem insignificant today, but understanding how to work with fire was the first step towards forging steel, a technology that would transform the world.
At contrast, places like New Guinea never developed advanced technology. Even today, some people in the Highlands are working in ways that have barely changed for centuries. When I first came to New Guinea in the 1960s, People were still using stone tools like this axe in parts of the island. And before European arrival, people were using stone tools everywhere in New Guinea. So why didn't New Guinea develop metal tools by itself?
And eventually I realized that to have metalworking specialists who can figure out how to smelt copper and iron requires that the rest of the people in the society who are farmers be able to generate enough food surpluses to feed them. But New Guinea agriculture was not. productive enough to generate those food surpluses.
And the result was no specialists, no metal workers, no metal tools. The way of life in New Guinea was perfectly viable. It had survived intact for thousands of years.
But according to Diamond, people didn't advance technologically because they spent too much time and energy feeding themselves. And then Westerners arrived and used their technology to colonize the country. Yet for all its advantages, The Fertile Crescent is not the powerhouse of the modern world.
Nor is it the breadbasket it once was. How did it lose its head start? Within a thousand years of their emergence, most of the new villages of the Fertile Crescent were abandoned. Ironically, the region had a fundamental weakness. Despite having some of the most nutritious crops on the planet, its climate was too dry and its ecology too fragile to support continuous intensive farming.
People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is when you face the end. I mean, you are facing the war. You will end with landscape like that, I mean with few trees, with no grass and with less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of over exploiting the environment.
Unable to farm their land, entire communities were forced to move on. The advantages they'd accrued from centuries of domestication might have been lost. But again, geography was on their side. The fertile crescent is in the middle of a huge landmass, Eurasia. There were plenty of places for farming to spread.
And crucially, many of those places were to the east and west of the Fertile Crescent at roughly the same line of latitude. Why is that so important? Because any two points of the globe that share the same latitude automatically share the same length of day, and they often share a similar climate and vegetation.
Crops or animals domesticated in the Fertile Crescent were able to prosper at other places along the east-west axis of Eurasia. Wheat and barley, sheep and goats, cows and pigs, all spread from the Fertile Crescent, east towards India and west towards North Africa and Europe. Wherever they went, they transformed human societies.
Once the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent reached Egypt, they caused an explosion of civilization. Suddenly, there was enough food to feed the pharaohs and generals, the engineers and scribes, and the armies of people required to build the pyramids. The same is true of European civilization. From ancient times until the Renaissance, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent fed the artists, inventors, and soldiers of Europe.
In the 16th century, the same crops and animals were taken by Europeans to the New World. At the time there was not a single cow or ear of wheat in all the Americas. Now there are a hundred million cattle in the U.S. alone.
And Americans consume 20 million tons of wheat a year. Modern industrialized America would be unthinkable without the spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent. There are some who think Jared Diamond's argument is too neat and easy. Can the distribution of wealth and power really be reduced to cattle and wheat?
What about culture, politics, and religion? Surely they've been just as important. Diamond's been criticized for being too deterministic, for ignoring the part people have played in shaping their own destiny.
My years in New Guinea have convinced me that people around the world are fundamentally similar. Wherever you go, you can find people who are smart, resourceful, and dynamic. No society has a monopoly on those traits. Of course, there are huge cultural differences.
But they're mainly the result of inequality, they're not its root cause. Ultimately, what's far more important is the hand that people have been dealt, the raw materials they've had at their disposal. New Guineans acquired pigs from Eurasia, but not cows or sheep or goats or horses or wheat or barley. They didn't develop in the same way as Europeans and Americans, because they didn't have the same raw materials.
I'm not saying that those divisions of the world are set in stone and can't be changed. It's quite the opposite. The towns of Papua New Guinea are becoming bigger and more developed, populated by modern New Guineans trying to catch up with the rest of the world. Unfortunately for them, there's still a big gap to overcome.
Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? Yali caught me by surprise 30 years ago. I had no idea what to say to him then, but now I think I know the answer. Yali, it wasn't for lack of ingenuity that your people didn't end up with modern technology.
They had the ingenuity to master... these difficult New Guinea environments. Instead, the whole answer to your question was geography. If your people had enjoyed the same geographic advantages as my people, your people would have been the ones to invent helicopters.
Jared Diamond set out to explore the division of the world into haves and have-nots. He's convinced the blueprint for that division lies within the land itself. To be continued...
But can his way of seeing the world really shed light on the turning points of human history? Can it explain how a few hundred Europeans conquered the new world and began an age of domination? The age of guns, germs.