Editor’s note: This is an article from the September 1997 issue of UCLA Magazine.
In July 1972 I was walking along a beach on the tropical island of New Guinea, where as a biologist I study bird evolution. I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali, who was touring the district then. By chance, Yali and I were walking in the same direction on that day, and he overtook me. We walked together for an hour, talking the whole time.
Yali radiated charisma and energy. His eyes flashed in a mesmerizing way. He talked confidently about himself, but he also asked lots of probing questions and listened intently. Our conversation began with a subject then on every New Guinean’s mind — the rapid pace of political developments. Papua New Guinea, as Yali’s nation is now called, was at the time still administered by Australia as a mandate of the United Nations, but independence was in the air. Yali explained to me his role in getting local people to prepare for self-government.
After a while, Yali turned the conversation and began to quiz me. He had never been outside New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable. First, he wanted to know about my work on New Guinea birds (including how much I got paid for it). I explained to him how different groups of birds had colonized New Guinea over the course of millions of years. He then asked how the ancestors of his own people had reached New Guinea over the last tens of thousands of years, and how white Europeans had colonized New Guinea within the last 200 years.
The conversation remained friendly, even though the tension between the two societies that Yali and I represented was familiar to both of us. Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still “living in the Stone Age.” That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousands of years ago, and they dwelt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority. Whites arrived, imposed centralized government and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches and medicines to clothing, soft drinks and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as “cargo.”
Many of the white colonialists openly despised New Guineans as “primitive.” Even the least able of New Guinea’s white “masters,” as they were still called in 1972, enjoyed a far higher standard of living than New Guineans, higher even than charismatic politicians like Yali. Yet Yali had quizzed lots of whites as he was then quizzing me, and I had quizzed lots of New Guineans. He and I both knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans. All those things must have been on Yali’s mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, “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?”
It was a simple question that went to the heart of life as Yali experienced it. Yes, there still is a huge difference between the lifestyle of the average New Guinean and that of the average European or American. Comparable differences separate the lifestyles of other peoples of the world as well. Those huge disparities must have potent causes that one might think would be obvious. Yet this simple question is a difficult one to answer.
We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities, which constitute the most basic fact of world history, have cast long shadows on the modern world because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies.
Although Yali’s question concerned only the contrasting lifestyles of New Guineans and of European whites, it can be extended to a larger set of contrasts within the modern world. Peoples of Eurasian origin, especially those still living in Europe and eastern Asia, plus those transplanted to North America, dominate the world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, have thrown off European colonial domination but remain far behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples, such as the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Americas and southernmost Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists.
Thus, questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows: Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated or exterminated Europeans and Asians?
We can easily push this question back one step. As of the year A.D. 1500, when Europe’s worldwide colonial expansion was just beginning, peoples on different continents already differed greatly in technology and political organization. Much of Europe, Asia and North Africa was the site of metal-equipped states or empires, some of them on the threshold of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Aztecs and the Incas, ruled over empires with stone tools. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa were divided among small states of chiefdoms with iron tools. Most other peoples — including all those of Australia and New Guinea, many Pacific islands, much of the Americas and small parts of sub-Saharan Africa — lived as farming tribes or even still as hunter-gatherer bands using stone tools.
Of course, those technological and political differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause for the modern world’s inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood. How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in A.D. 1500?
Once again, we can easily push this question back one step further, by drawing on written histories and archaeological discoveries. Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 B.C., all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native Americans remained hunter-gatherers, most of Eurasia and much of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa gradually developed agriculture, herding, metallurgy and complex political organization. Parts of Eurasia, and one area of the Americas, independently developed writing as well. However, each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia than elsewhere. For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia more than 4,000 years earlier. The stone technology of the Tasmanians, when first encountered by European explorers in A.D. 1642, was simpler than that prevalent in parts of upper Paleolithic Europe tens of thousands of years earlier.
Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern.
The answer lies not only in history and prehistory; this subject is not of just academic interest but also of overwhelming practical and political importance. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.
For example, much of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from recent colonialism. In other regions — including much of Central America, Mexico, Peru, New Caledonia, the former Soviet Union and parts of Indonesia — civil unrest or guerrilla warfare pits still-numerous indigenous populations against governments dominated by descendants of invading conquerors. Many other indigenous populations — such as native Hawaiians, Aboriginal Australians, native Siberians and Indians in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Chile — became so reduced in number by genocide and disease that they are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of invaders. Although incapable of mounting a civil war, they are nevertheless increasingly asserting their rights.
In addition to these current political and economic reverberations of past collisions among peoples, there are linguistic reverberations — especially in the impending disappearance of most of the modern world’s 6,000 surviving languages, becoming replaced by English, Chinese, Russian and a few other languages whose numbers of speakers have increased enormously in recent centuries. All these problems of the modern world result from the different historical trajectories implicit in Yali’s question.
Probably the commonest explanation of how some people came to dominate other people involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences among peoples. In the centuries after A.D. 1500, as European explorers became aware of the wide differences among the world’s peoples in technology and political organization, they assumed that those differences arose from differences in innate ability. With the rise of Darwinian theory, explanations were recast in terms of natural selection and of evolutionary descent. Technologically primitive people were considered evolutionary vestiges of human descent from apelike ancestors. The displacement of such peoples by colonists from industrialized societies exemplified the survival of the fittest. With the later rise of genetics, the explanations were recast once again, in genetic terms. Europeans became considered genetically more intelligent than Africans, and especially more so than Aboriginal Australians.
Today, segments of Western society publicly repudiate racism. Yet many (perhaps most!) Westerners continue to accept racist explanations privately or subconsciously. In Japan and many other countries, such explanations are still advanced publicly and without apology. Even educated white Americans, Europeans and Australians, when the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up, assume that there is something primitive about the Aborigines themselves. They certainly look different from whites. Many of the living descendants of those Aborigines who survived the era of European colonization are now finding it difficult to succeed economically in white Australian society.
A seemingly compelling argument goes as follows: White immigrants to Australia built a literate, industrialized, politically centralized, democratic state based on metal tools and on food production, all within a century of colonizing a continent where the Aborigines had been living as tribal hunter-gatherers without metal for at least 40,000 years. Here were two successive experiments in human development, in which the environment was identical and the sole variable was the people occupying that environment. What further proof could be wanted to establish that the differences between Aboriginal Australian and European societies arose from differences between the peoples themselves?
The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong. Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking. In fact, modern “Stone Age” peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. Paradoxical as it may sound, white immigrants to Australia do not deserve the credit usually accorded to them for building a literate industrialized society. In addition, people who until recently were technologically primitive — such as Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans — routinely master industrial technologies when given opportunities to do so.
Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in people’s status. We’re assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world’s inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we’re not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all.
Yet the truth, simply stated, is that history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
Naturally, the notion that environmental geography and biogeography influenced societal developments is an old idea. Nowadays, though, the view is not held in esteem by historians. It is considered wrong or simplistic, or it is caricatured as environmental determinism and dismissed, or else the whole subject of trying to understand worldwide differences is shelved as too difficult. Yet geography obviously has some effect on history. The open question concerns how much effect, and whether geography can account for history’s broad pattern.
The time is now ripe for a fresh look at these questions, due to new information from scientific disciplines seemingly remote from human history. Those disciplines include, above all, genetics, molecular biology and biogeography as applied to crops and their wild ancestors; the same disciplines plus behavioral ecology, as applied to domestic animals and their wild ancestors; molecular biology of human germs and related germs of animals; epidemiology of human diseases; human genetics; linguistics; archaeological studies on all continents and major islands; and studies of the histories of technology, writing and political organization.
Perhaps the biggest challenge ahead of us is to establish human history as a historical science, on par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence, the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history.
History, I am convinced, is not “just one damn fact after another,” as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation — for the answer to Yali’s question — is as productive as it is fascinating.
Excerpt from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. Copyright (c) 1997 by Jared Diamond. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
