Review of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 480 pp.

In general, Guns, Germs and Steel is well-written and introduces the lay reader to many areas of prehistory that, until now, have been discussed mainly in academic circles. It has more of what I like than of what I dislike, so I hope this review won't sound too negative. If I dwell too much on its negative aspects, it's because I hope that Jared Diamond will correct them in a future edition.

The first problem I notice in GGS is what I would call "shifting comparisons" and even "forgotten comparisons." Since Jared covers so much territory in his book, it's easy to lose track of what is being compared to what. Hence, in the Epilogue (p. 409), he asks "why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than those of the Fertile Crescent or China or India, the ones that colonized America and Australia, took the lead in technology, and became politically and economically dominant in the modern world?" The case of the Fertile Crescent is easy to explain: erosion and salinization turned most of it into desert (pp. 410-411). Jared then considers the case of China: here, a single unified state stifled innovation and produced technological conformity. Potential innovators could not switch their allegiance to more progressive and open-minded rulers, as they could in Europe, because there was only one state (pp. 411-416).

And India? Why didn't its multiplicity of kingdoms and principalities produce the same kind of creative interstate rivalry that took place in Europe? Aside from a brief (one sentence) allusion to India's caste system on p. 419, Jared doesn't address the question. In any case, Europe's own rigid class system broke down in response to technological and economic progress; so the relative absence of social class barriers in Europe cannot be invoked as a pre-existing cause of such progress.

The same kind of shifting comparison turns up when Jared asks why sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind Europe: "But why did Europeans develop those three advantages [technology, literacy, political organization] before sub-Saharan Africans could?" (p. 398). He then notes that domestic animals reached sub-Saharan Africa well after they were domesticated in the "emerging Eurasian civilizations" (i.e., the Fertile Crescent). Similarly, new crops and new technologies didn't reach southern Africa until long after their creation in the Fertile Crescent.

Thus, what started out as a comparison between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe becomes a comparison between sub-Saharan Africa and the Fertile Crescent and then between the Fertile Crescent and southern Africa. If we re-establish the initial comparison, the situation is no longer so clear. West Africa made the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture at about the same time as Europe (c. 5,000 B.C.). Domestic animals were also introduced to West Africa at about this date: "Saharan pastoralism precedes the earliest known date (5200 B.C.) for the arrival of food production in Egypt ... Food production also arose in West Africa and Ethiopia, and by around 2500 B.C. cattle herders had already crossed the modern border from Ethiopia into northern Kenya" (p. 390). As for technology, Jared himself says that "pottery and iron metallurgy arose in or reached sub-Saharan Africa's Sahel zone (north of the equator) at least as early as they reached western Europe" (p. 263).

So, for sub-Saharan Africa north of the equator, we are left with only one answer to the initial question: "its much smaller area suitable for indigenous food production" (p. 398). Yet West Africa alone is much larger than the thin strip of land along the Nile, or even the Fertile Crescent in its entirety.

Then there are the comparisons that should be made but are not. Jared does a superb job of explaining the constraints that hindered cultural development in Mesoamerica in comparison to Europe and the Middle East, notably the problems in developing corn as a viable cereal crop (p. 137). Yet once corn had been developed, Mesoamerican civilizations reached milestones in cultural development at a faster rate than did civilizations in the Middle East. The Zapotecs developed calendar and writing systems barely 1,000 years after the first permanent farming villages. In the Middle East, the time span was over 5,000 years. Finally, Jared fails to explain why Mesoamerica attained a level of cultural development in the 15th century comparable to most of Asia, despite the many constraints it had to face and that Asia did not.

As well, GGS contains an annoying number of "bloopers" that do not really undermine Jared's thesis but should, I hope, be rectified in any future edition:

1. On pp. 393-394, Jared states that archeological and linguistic evidence put the beginning of the Bantu expansion at 3,000 B.C. In fact, comparison of maximally diverse Bantu languages puts the date at 3,000 B.P. (Olmsted 1957).
   
2. The map on p. 326 (Fig. 16.1) is clumsily drawn. Most of peninsular Malaya is depicted as being inhabited by Austroasiatic speakers (i.e., the Semang and Senoi). In fact, these people occupy only a few isolated pockets of territory.
   
3. On p. 262, the Sahara desert is mentioned as an obstacle to the diffusion of technology from Eurasia. No example is offered. Jared then cites Africa's north-south axis as a "further obstacle," giving the example of pottery and iron metallurgy which had reached the Sahel zone at least as early as they had reached western Europe but which failed to reach the southern tip of Africa until much later. This example certainly supports Jared in his contention that the north-south axis was an obstacle. But how could it be a "further obstacle"? By his own admission, the Sahara desert did not impede this case of cultural diffusion. Jared mentions the Central Asian desert, the Tibetan plateau, and the Himalayas as an obstacle to east-west diffusion on p. 189. Yet this barrier is not mentioned in the general conclusion at the end of his book, or anywhere else.
   
4. On p. 399, Jared states that "The Sahel, Ethiopia, and West Africa did yield indigenous crops, but many fewer varieties than grew in Eurasia. Because of the limited variety of wild starting material suitable for plant domestication, even Africa's earliest agriculture may have begun several thousand years later than that of the Fertile Crescent." Yet Table 7.1 (pp. 126-127) shows West Africa/Sahel crops as being comparable in variety to Eurasian crops.

It might be instructive to compare Jared's comments with those of George P. Murdock, the main authority on West African agriculture and, like Jared, a pioneer in cross-cultural and interregional studies. Murdock (1959:68-70) lists over twenty cultivated plants that are indigenous to West Africa. "... the Sudanic cultigens include representatives of all the principal categories of cultivated plants. Among them are some of genuinely outstanding importance, notably sesame, probably the world's foremost oil plant; cotton, the greatest of all textile crops; and sorghum, which ranks with American maize, Southeast Asian rice, and Southwest Asian wheat as one of the world's four leading cereal grains." (Murdock 1959:70). Admittedly, only one domestic animal, the Guinea fowl, is of West African origin. All of the others, however, were introduced at an early date, including cattle, goats, sheep, dogs, chickens, bees, and occasionally horses, donkeys, and ducks (Murdock 1959:70).

The starting date for this "Sudanic food complex" is still controversial but could not have been later than 5,000 B.C. and may be much earlier. In fact, the Sudanic complex had already reached the borders of ancient Egypt by at least 3,000 B.C. (Murdock 1959:67)

References

Murdock, G.P. 1959. Africa. Its Peoples and Their Culture History. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Olmsted, D.L. 1957. Three tests of glottochronological theory. American Anthropologist 59:839-842.