MythBuster

My last blog entry might have been well written (the jury is still out on this) but it doesn’t really have a lot of myself in it.  It’s long on exposition, and there’s very little personal reaction in it.  The subtitle of the blog, I might remind myself, is “my response to what I’m reading”.  Apparently, I had little response to the pages I read that week.  The blog entry is more of a synopsis of what Diamond already wrote, but there’s not much of me in it.


Since I started reading the Guns, Germs, and Steel, I keep thinking of a guy I know.  As will become clear, I have ambivalent feelings toward the guy, for a host of reasons.  (Perhaps a more accurate explanation of the relationship would be that I do not have ambivalent feelings toward him at all, but actively dislike him, for a host of reasons.)

One of his favorite themes was the thoughtless greed inherent in Western Culture.  He proudly cherishes a mythologized image of Native American nobility, and is constantly holding up this image against American culture, and finding, unsurprisingly, that American culture falls far short of his idealized image.  This image of the nobility of the Native American is ridiculously stereotypical, artificial, and contrived, and reminds me of the anti-littering television ad from several decades ago, in which a Native American quietly weeps at trash blowing by his feet.  Key elements of this image are that Native Americans consider all of nature as brothers, view the hunting of animals as a religious experience, use the entire carcass from any animal killed, and only hunt what is absolutely needed.

However, Diamond tells a different story.  Diamond presents an image of human nature and culture being more constant over time and space, and argues that no society can hold itself up as possessing greater intellect or spiritual gifts than any other society.  Throughout the book, whether he is addressing the first arrival of humans on a continent, the development of agriculture, or the domestication of animals, he has mentioned a startling fact.  It appears that large mammal species were nearly exterminated from the Americas shortly after the arrival humans on the continents. As humans evolved in Africa and Eurasia, they slowly became more and more efficient hunters.  The large mammals that lived on those continents had the advantage of evolving along with us, and managed to develop a fear of humans as we became more proficient hunters.  By the time humans arrived in Australia and the Americas late in our evolutionary history, our hunting skills were highly developed.  The number of large mammal extinctions in Australia and the Americas is quite high shortly after the arrival of humans on each of those continents, where the native fauna had not developed a fear of humans.

So much for the image of Native Americans possessing a spiritual approach to living with the environment.  If that environmental sensitivity is not just a beautiful mythology, it only developed after large mammals across North and South America were hunted to extinction.

The Fertile Crescent Had Lots of Grass

The motivating question in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is clearly articulated in the prologue.  It was asked of Diamond by a native of New Guinea decades ago, and has been asked in one form or another by people for centuries.  “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”  Put in a more general form, the question is phrased elsewhere in the book as, “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?”

That question, and the dozens of questions that spring from it, are frequently answered with an undercurrent of implicit racism.  We explain Eurasia’s primacy in developing agriculture, domesticating animals, and eventually creating societies that allowed for the invention of advanced technologies in terms of the people who lived there.  People who would normally blanch at the suggestion that they harbor racist assumptions fall back on what amounts to racist explanations when considering the difference in the states of civilizations in Europe and the New World at the time of Columbus.

Explanations that rely on presumed racial differences to explain the Eurasian development of plant and animal domestication hide a much more prosaic reality.  Human nature and capability is fairly universal, and something other than racial differences explains the reason that agriculture developed in Fertile Crescent before it spread to or developed in the rest of the world.

In order for agriculture to develop, the raw materials, in the form of wild grasses or grains suitable for domestication, are required.  Botanists have studied wild grass distributions, and find that the Fertile Crescent has an enormous advantage in terms of the number of promising wild species which are native to the area.  When gathering wild seeds, early hunter gatherers would naturally favor grasses with the largest seeds.  Botanists have identified 56 prize wild grass species with especially large seeds, and find that 32 of these wild grass species are native to the Fertile Crescent, or to nearby parts of western Eurasia.  Compared to other areas where agriculture developed independently, no other region offered early man nearly as many promising species for plant domestication.  Mesoamerica, the region that has the second highest number of promising wild grains, has only 5 wild species ideal for domestication.  Not coincidentally, agriculture developed in Mesoamerica 5,000 years after it did so in the Fertile Crescent.

One reason that agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent before anywhere else in the world has less to do with racial differences, and more to do with the available wild grass species that flourished in the area.  The domestication of those wild grains would support a higher population density that would allow for the development of such technological advances as writing and the wheel. The concentration in the Fertile Crescent of the biological building blocks necessary for the development of agriculture is a better explanation for the different rates that human societies developed than looking to Providence or racial differences for that explanation.