I have been attracted to various books that talk about Human history lately. I think it started with Sapiens but in 2020/21 I have read a lot of similar books. Recently I read another book that was really fascinating, called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I found this book because it was criticized a lot in another book I read last year called Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu.

Why did Europeans colonize south America?

The book essentially starts with a simple question: why did European (Caucasian) civilization become the dominant force in human history? Why was it that Europeans colonized India, parts of Africa and of course, Americas – why was it not the other way round? Why did Native american civilizations not conquer europe instead? The question is fairly deep because it may form the basis of a lot of racist beliefs our civilization has come to hold. Were the European humans superior in some way that led to them subjugating other barbarian civilizations.

The answer maybe in history, long ago

Many a times when we try to answer these questions, the cause is just kicked back a few hundred years. What made Europeans colonize south america? Better weapons. But why did europeans have better weapons? That might take you back a few hundred years and so on. To really get a proper answer, the author goes back to earliest recorded human history to ask – when and why did humans diverge so much? To answer that you have to go back to 13,000 BC or so.

Geography, Luck, Farming, Animals

It turns out that a part of Eurasia called Fertile crescent near modern day middle east happened to have the widest variety of wild plant species that could be domesticated. In addition it had quite a few of the wild species that were eventually domesticated. Why? I guess luck or weather but nothing to do with humans and their ingenuity. The concentration of candidate species for domestication allowed farming and animal domestication to arise here. The east-west spread of Eurasia with no major difficult geographic barriers allowed the farming to spread out slow across the area. Since wild species and their tamed successors were tied to the weather patterns for maturity, it was easier for these species to spread in Eurasia than across the north-south oriented americas and africa.

Surplus and civilizations

With farming spreading along with domesticated animals, for the first time there was surplus food. With the advent of sedentary lifestyle and surplus, it allowed population growth and specialization. This allowed us to have warriors and blacksmiths, as the farming surplus could provide for them. This allowed society to grow into bigger and more complex structures, thus speeding up social complexity and technological change to also accumulate. This eventually led to better weapons and better metalwork – steel across Eurasian civilization.

Animals and Germs

Since a lot of germs we carried came from the animals we lived with, Eurasian society over time became adapted and resistant to a lot of these germs like smallpox. This happened because a lot more animal species were domesticated and this happened earlier in Eurasia. So when first Europeans arrived in a lot of places, their germs wiped out the native population who had never been exposed to similar animal species (and thus, similar germs).

Not perfect, but very interesting

The book essentially answers the question posed earlier with the following explanation. The area called fertile crescent happened to have most suitable candidates for wild food and animal species thus having a higher chance of developing animal domestication and farming. Once developed, the east-west axis allowed faster spread of these new innovations. As farming and animals became default, it allowed for small communities to grow in population allowing for more specialization, better technology, and more complex social organizations. This is why Europeans became the dominant civilization.

The book of course goes into a lot more details and answers a lot of what-ifs, but the answer is fairly simple and I do tend to find it very logical. Perhaps it does not explain all possible challenges and also does not dive into the details of differentiation of societies within Europe etc, but it is interesting for me to know that random geographic, weather and evolutionary factors eventually led to such different human societies. The butterfly effect, but at 10s of thousands of years’ time scale!