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Guns Germs And Steel part 1 | Worth Ofit | YouTubeToText
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modern history has been shaped by
Conquest the conquest of the World by [Music]
[Music]
Europeans the con adors 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
[Applause]
place why did the world ever become so [Music]
[Music]
unequal these are questions that
Professor Jared Diamond has spent more
answer one of the most original thinkers
of our age Diamond has traveled the
world looking for [Music]
[Music]
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
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 J
seal because they're the biggest
history what separates the halves from
the hav
knots how have Guns Germs and Steel
Jared Diamond's quest to uncover the
roots of inequality began in the
[Music]
oh diamond is a professor at UCLA in Los
Angeles he's a biologist by training a
physiology but his real passion has
I love watching birds in this place I
began watching Birds when I was 7 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 squirty squirty and is now a
leading expert on the bird life of the island
morning W talk but in the course of his
field work he's become just as curious
about the people of New Guinea you go
find a pish plenty pish he got T number
cry over the years I've gotten to know
and like thousands of new guineans the
name belong again you talk name name y yanai
yanai
I've learned several of their languages
and much of what I know about birds I
picked up from them
hard 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 1 2 3 456 P they're among the
most culturally diverse and adaptable
people in the world
so why are they so much poorer than modern
[Music]
Americans the question was put the
diamond bluntly by a man called yali
whom he met on a beach more than 30 years
years
ago why you white men have so much kago
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 kago and we
little ninians use the word cargo to
describe the material Goods first
westerners cargo was regarded by many as
evidence of The White Man's
power it was treated with an almost religious
religious [Music]
[Music]
reverence for their part Western
Colonials typically believed that power
was determined by
race they saw themselves as genetic Ally
superior to the native
population to them it was only natural
that they should have so much cargo and
new guineans so [Music]
[Music]
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
impressed
me now rope you pass them they can go
empty-handed into some of the most
difficult environments on Earth knock up
a shelter in a few hours and survive me
trying just p a step just p a rope be
strong and up and up and up and up I
wouldn't know where to start in this
them so why didn't these ingenious
people invent metal tools
or build great
cities or develop any of the other
civilization the world that I'm from is
so different the modern US is the
richest most powerful state on [Music]
[Music]
Earth it's crammed with more cargo than
most new guineans could ever
imagine but why that's what you wanted to
to [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
different Diamond realized that yali's
question was Far bigger and more complex
appeared it was really about the roots
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
Maya all great civilizations have had
some things in common advanced
technology large populations and 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 halves and have
knots it was a massive challenge that
on he was a scientist not a
historian how could he possibly solve
the great puzzles of human history [Music]
to understand where inequality came from
Diamond needed to identify a time before
inequality when people across the world
way he had to turn back the clock
thousands of years back before the first [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
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 [Music]
East 13,000 years ago the Middle East
was far less arid than today with more
Forest s trees and
plants people here lived like people
everywhere at this time as hunter
gatherers in small mobile [Music]
[Music]
groups they were frequently on the Move
making shelters wherever they could find
animals to hunt or plants to [Music]
[Music]
gather they'd live in these shelters for
weeks or months at a time as long as
themselves but as Seasons changed and
animals migrated they'd move on to the
next Valley or Ridge looking for new
food one of the few places on Earth
where it's still possible to find people
hunting and Gathering is the rainforest
of Papa Nini yeah
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
food to catch an animal requires skill
stealth and encyclopedic knowledge about
hunter 13,000 years ago people in the
Middle East hunted in the same way
tracking down whatever game they could [Music]
[Music]
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 [Music]
[Music]
animal and with a bow and arrow there's
end one of something you know could lap
you try him again okay him
okay one time more yes one you put him
strong me P him yeah yeah you put him strong
strong
Strong you strong yeah me no strong what
strong
die you number one me number two me try
because hunting is so unpredictable
traditional societies have usually
[Music]
gathering in this part of Papa nugini
the Gathering is done by [Music]
[Music]
women an important source of food here
by stripping a SEO tree they can get to
the pulp at the center which can be
cooked although it's physically harder
work Gathering is generally a more
hunting but it still doesn't provide
enough calories to support a large population
this jungle around us you might think
it's a
cornicopia but it isn't most of these
trees in the jungle don't yield don't
give us anything edible they were just a
few SEO trees and the rest of these
eat and then SEO itself has got
limitations one tree yields only maybe
about 70 lb of SEO it takes them 3 or 4
days to process that tree so it's a lot
of work really for not a great deal of
food plus the SEO starch is low on
protein and also the SEO can't be stored
for a long
time and that's why Hunter gather
populations are so sparse if you want to
feed a lot of people you got to find a
different food supply you got to find a
really productive environment and it's
in the Middle East there were very
different plants to
gather growing wild between the trees
were two seral grasses barley and
wheat far more plentiful and nutritious than
than [Music]
[Music]
SEO these simple grasses would have a
profound impact setting Humanity on a
but it would take a catastrophic change
in the climate before this would [Music]
happen 12 1/2 thousand years ago the
world's climate became highly [Music]
[Music]
volatile the long-term thaw that had
brought about the end of the last ice
age suddenly went into
reverse global temperatures dropped and
the world became colder and [Music]
[Music]
drier the Middle East suffered an environmental
environmental
collapse animal herds died off so did
plants the drought lasted for more than
a thousand [Music]
[Music]
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 [Music]
Prosper here in the Middle East a new
way of life would come into being one
that would change the face of the Earth [Music]
Ian kite is a Canadian archaeologist who
specializes in the Stone Age history of
East his work is focused on a site in
the Jordan Valley near the Dead
dra kite is a co-director of the Dig and
works with an international team of archaeologists
archaeologists [Music]
[Music]
they've uncovered the remains of ancient
dwellings that were clearly more
sophisticated than any hunter gatherer
shelters this is here those are never
really exposed all [Music]
[Music]
around 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 to 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 uh and
these would have been very much the the
first time people settled down and lived
way when they radiocarbon dated the site
they discovered that the village first
emerged 112,000 years ago at the the
same time as the end of the drought in
East but how is it possible to feed an
hard after 4 years of digging at draw
the archaeologists believe they have an
structure what you can see here is the
outline of mud wall coming all the way
around here and in the 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
percolating
through what that ends up being from our
perspective Ive is probably the world's
first Granary in some form a place where
they're able to store food in a
[Music]
bases the team at draw believes The
Granary was an oval-shaped mud wall
building at the center of the village a
collectively and the grains that were
being stored were primarily wheat and barley
while other plants were no longer
available these seral grasses were Hardy
enough to survive and durable enough to
be stored for [Music]
[Music]
years but if this was a time of scarcity
granery the answer suggests a radical
shift in human
behavior at some point during the
drought in the Middle East people
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
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
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 AG people of the Middle
East were becoming Farmers the first
without realizing it these new farmers
were changing the very nature of the
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 [Music]
[Music]
cultivation they interrupted the cycle
they interrupted the normal uh
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 [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
the way crops are changed by human
interference is known as [Music]
[Music]
domestication today it happens in
research Labs with Scientists selecting
genes and breeding crops to be ever more
useful to [Music]
[Music]
humans it's a very precise deliberate process
process
but not so different from what the first
farmers were doing unconsciously
[Music]
East the transition to fing 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
chronic [Music]
disadvantage now I needed to know where
else in the ancient world people had
if I could establish links between the
spread of farming and the spread of
civilization I'd be well on my way to
answering y's [Music]
[Music]
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
beans later in Africa people farmed
sorghum Millet and
yams and in most places where farming
emerged a relatively large Advanced civilization
civilization
followed but there was an exception to
the rule an area where farming didn't
bring the same benefits
Guinea for 50 years after westers
colonized New Guinea they thought the
Highland valleys in the interior were [Music]
[Music]
uninhabited in fact they were the most
densely populated part of the island
with one of the oldest systems of
archaeologists now believe that people
have been farming here for almost 10,000
years almost as long as the people of
East it's amazing to think that these
people y's people were some of the
world but if they were farmers why
weren't they propelled down the same
path towards civilization as the people
America why didn't they end up producing
yes 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 Tara Roots
which are very different from from Cal
crops to is much more work you 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 beaten in a
short time they were also low in protein
compared to wheat so these farmers of
the New Guinea Highlands suffered from
there's not much protein to be gotten
from New Guinea's other crops
either people here Farm local varieties of
of
bananas but although bananas are rich in
sugar and starch like tarot they're low in
protein in fact people in the highlands
have so little protein that sometimes
they eat giant spiders to supplement
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
Farmers ultimately it came down to Geographic
Geographic [Music]
[Music]
look it's an audacious idea that the
inequalities of the world were born from
eat according to Jared Diamond Americans
have had an advantage over ninians
because for centuries they've grown
productive crops like wheat which
provides about a fifth of all the
calories they [Music]
eat the wealth of modern America could
bananas but Diamond's idea seems almost too
too [Music]
[Music]
simple could plants alone really have
the power to to shape the course of human
history or was there something else at
play another reason for the division of
Nots by 9,000 years ago the first
settlements in the Middle East were
giving way to much larger villages [Music]
[Music]
people were only able to live on this
scale by becoming more productive
Farmers they were surrounded by fields
barley but by now they also had another
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
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 uh year round around your
sight rather than being subject to
seasonal variations Wild
game as well as meat animals could be
used for their milk providing an ongoing
protein their hair and skins could be
warmth over time domestic animals became
an integral part of the new agricultural
life we know that uh the communities
which first started to have domestic
animals already had seral crops so they were
were
cultivators and the combination of these
particular animals and the plants
becomes an extremely attractive package
complimentary after the Harvest period
animals could be turned out on the
stubble and they can actually eat the
remains of the Cal crop harvest in their
turn animal dung can be used to provide
sort of a fertilizer for the cereal
crops as well for crops so the whole the
whole package you know is seen to be
mutually beneficial both for the animals
and the plants and of course for the [Music]
[Music]
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
of
today all of them were used at first for
their meat but they all proved useful in other
other
ways especially with the invention of the
plow before the Industrial Revolution
beasts of Burden were the most powerful
machines on the [Music]
[Music]
planet a horse or an ox harnessed to a
plow could transform the productivity of
the land
land allowing Farmers to grow more food
people in New Guinea and many other
parts of the world people never used
plows because they never had the animals
them the only big domestic animal in 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 cow 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 hards and most important of all pigs
can't be used for muscle power pigs
don't pull plows or pull
cards the only muscle power in New
even today there are no beast of burden
in New Guinea and almost all of the farm
hand but if farm animals were so useful
why didn't ninians domesticate any of their
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
found [Music]
there are nearly 2 million known species
of wild animals but the vast majority
have never been [Music]
[Music]
farmed most insects and rodents are of
no practical use to humans and not worth
farming some birds fish and reptiles
have been domesticated but most are
farm so are most carnivores not because
they're dangerous but because you'd have
them the best animals to farm are large
mammals and over the years humans have
probably tried to domesticate all of
despite repeated efforts Africans have
never domesticated the [Music]
[Music]
elephant in South Asia some elephants
are used as work
purpose instead each elephant is caught
in the wild and then tamed and [Music]
[Music]
trained it doesn't make economic sense
to farm an animal that takes some 15
years to mature and reach an age where
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
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
flock there is another crucial
requirement for a domestic
humans some animals don't have the
farm a zebra could be an ideal domestic
animal potentially as useful as a [Music]
[Music]
horse but evolving in the midst of
Africa's great Predators zebras have
creatures they have a vicious streak
tame that may be why zebras have never
battle I counted up 148 different
species of wild Plante eating
terrestrial mammals that weigh over 100 pound
pound
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
bory and camels Arabian camels water
buffalo llamas reindeer Yaks myons and B
cattle just 14 large domestic animals in
10,000 years of domestication [Music]
[Music]
and where did the ancestors of these
animals come from none was from New
Guinea or
Australia or subsaharan Africa or the
whole continent of North
America South America had the ancestor
of just one large domestic animal the
Llama the other 13 were all from Asia
North Africa and [Music]
[Music]
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
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 [Music]
[Music]
Start what had begun with the sewing of
Wheat and the pinning of goats was
civilization the archaeological site of
gu in southern Jordan is 9,000 years
old but it has has all the Hallmarks of a
town a few hundred people lived here in
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 uh this window here is
for 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
Blaster so people were moving to the
concept of [Music]
[Music]
homes it's it's not place just to sleep
it is a proper home and people started
to decorate the houses from the from
from the
inside and people were started 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
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
specialist within the
community freed from the burden of
farming some people were able to develop new
new
skills and new [Music]
[Music]
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 1,000°
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
by contrast places like New Guinea never
technology even today some people in the
highlands are working in ways that have
barely changed for centuries [Music]
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 smell 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
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
the [Music]
country yet for all its advantages the f
Fertile Crescent is not the PowerHouse
of the modern world nor is it the Bread
Basket it once
start within a thousand years of their
emergence most of the new Villages of
abandoned ironically the region had a
despite having some of the most
nutritious crops on the planet its
climate was too dry and its ecology too
farming people were destroying the
environment the waters had been
overexploited the trees had been cut and
this is what when when you when you face
it did end I mean you are facing the wall
you will end with landscape like that I
mean with uh with with few trees with no
water so what we are looking at today is
the outcome of ere exploiting the [Music]
[Music]
environment unable to farm their land
entire communities were forced to move on
the advantages they'd accured from
centuries of domestication might have been
side the Fertile Crescent is in the
middle of a huge land mass 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 [Music]
[Music]
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 in [Music]
[Music]
vegetation crops or animals domesticated
in the Fertile Crescent were able to
prosper at other places along the east
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
societies once the crops and animals of
the Fertile Crescent reached Egypt they
caused an explosion ion of [Music]
[Music]
civilization suddenly there was enough
food to feed the Pharaohs and Generals
the engineers and scribes and the armies
[Music]
civilization from ancient times until the
the
Renaissance the crops and animals of the
Fertile Crescent fed the artists
Europe in the 16th century the same
crops and animals were taken by
Europeans to the new [Music]
[Music]
world at the time there was not a single
Americas now there are a 100 million
cattle in the us alone
and Americans consume 20 million tons of
wheat a [Music]
[Music]
year modern industrialized America would
be Unthinkable without the spread of
Crescent there are some who think Jared
easy can the distribution of wealth and
power really be reduced proded to cattle and
and
wheat what about culture politics and
important Diamond's been criticized for
being too deterministic for ignoring the
part people have played in shaping their own
own [Music]
[Music]
destiny my Years in New Guinea have
convinced me that people around the
world are fundamentally similar [Music]
[Music]
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
root [Music]
[Music]
cause kind what's far more important is
the hand that people have been dealt the
raw materials they've had at their [Music]
[Music]
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
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 Papa New Guinea
are becoming bigger and more
developed populated by modern new
guineans trying to catch up with the
world unfortunately for them there's
overcome why you white men have so much
kago and we new guineans have so
little Yi 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
invent [Music]
helicopters Jared Diamond set out to
explore the division of the world into
halves and have knots
he's convinced the blueprint for that
division lies within the land [Music]
itself but can his way of seeing the
world really shed light on the turning
points of human [Music]
[Music]
history can it explain how a few hundred
Europeans conquered the new
world and began an age of [Music]
[Music]
domination the age of Guns Germs and Steel
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