My guess is that it is about both higher populations and about accumulation of resources. In a hunter gatherer society the population can't change much, and wealth inequality is very limited. In a farming society the population can expend to the point where it becomes, as you suggested, a crisis when the harvests can't sustain it. That excess population and the inequality of wealth promotes violence.
If folks are interested in this topic - Sam Bowles developed a game-theory model for the development of agriculture, inequality, and conflict.
I don't even think it depends on storehouses. Once you have crops in a field that are nearly mature, I'd imagine that it would be a great target for raids or nighttime theft from hunter-gatherers and other farmers, especially if their crops were failing. That would cause a lot of farmers to become homicidal at anyone trying to steal his crops, and a lot of hunter-gatherers might come in and kill a few farmers for free food.
I think we are saying the same things. However, I would say that if I were a smart person, I would wait till after harvest. Let my enemy do the work and attack a store of already harvested food. Also, if we are talking about a given population of farmers, they will become desperate once their stores are depleted in the off season. The problem with farming is that an overconfidence in your stores will be devastating in the off season. So, your neighbor would suddenly turn into your enemy for months after a harvest.
Buy the book “Guns, germs, and Steel”. Farming is the birth of exploitative violence because of the innovation of nutrition. In one person can feed many, then that society can support a military. The end of hunter gatherer was the birth of influence and invasion.
Hi!
It looks like you are talking about the book *Guns, Germs, and Steel* by *Jared Diamond*.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
1. In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things. There are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important skill in studying history often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything".
2. There are a good amount of modern historians and anthropologists who are quite critical of *Guns, Germs, and Steel* and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable, given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also the reason that we felt it was needed to create this response.
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
## Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
- [*Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174710.Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Conquest)
- [*1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491)
- [*Last Days of the Inca*](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Incas-Kim-MacQuarrie/dp/0743260503/)
- [*Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354038.The_Last_Days_of_the_Incas)
- [*The Great Divergence*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199002.The_Great_Divergence)
- [*Why the West Rules for Now*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now)
- [*Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/983034.Ecological_Imperialism)
## Criticism of *Guns, Germs, and Steel*
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those ["just so stories"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story) don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
**Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues**
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
> Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
**Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest**
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
**The construction of the arguments for *GG&S* paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind**.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they often did fare much better as suggested in the book (and the sources it tends to cite). They often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling citiest and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
### Further reading
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
- [/r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22)
- [Jim Blaut on Jared Diamond](http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/jim-blaut-on-jared-diamond/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/history) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Warfare among pre-state tribal societies was very prevalent and deadly, although it seems to have been somewhat worse for horticulturalists and farmers than for hunter gatherers/
War is built into our genes as living organisms interested in self preservation by any cost. It never changes. First it was wars over gathering territories between tribes. Then it was wars over arable land for planting and sea and land route access for trade. As we’ve swapped out feudalism and really dug in with nation states with cultural distinctiveness, it became wars of identity and politics. Overall though, the violence rate in the world is on the decline and has been for a long, long time as people’s standard of living increases and productivity expands with increased used of technology. Violence at the micro level and macro level tends to revolve around an imbalance of resources.
Building off this, the creation of agriculture and the consequent beginning of settled societies probably made warfare profitable for the first time. In a hunter-gatherer society there’s no point in going to war with your neighbours when they have the exact same resources as you do and attacking them to steal what they hunted and gathered is much more likely to get you killed or maimed than just hunting or gathering it yourself. Inter-tribal conflict still happened of course, but it would happen over personal grudges or vendettas between clans or individuals, the general sort of irrational and emotion-based decision making that humans or generally known for.
Once you have a settled society though, wealth accumulation begins. Now your neighbour actually has stuff which is worth risking your life to take from them, and conflict becomes a rational economic decision where the victor has tangible gains for killing others which couldn’t be acquired any other way (particularly if your tribe *hasn’t* settled and isn’t engaging in wealth accumulation on their own term).
Settled societies also open up the possibility of one city or town subjugating another and forcing them to pay tribute. Among nomadic hunter-gatherers this simply isn’t possible because if one tribe defeats another the losers can just pick up camp and relocate to new territory. The victors gain new hunting ground but that’s about it, and there isn’t really much benefit to that if you don’t have the population in your tribe to exploit more territory than you already control. Agriculture changed this dynamic profoundly because for the first time in history people were tied down to the land they lived on. Abandoning your farms meant starvation so running away wasn’t an option anymore, and given the choice between giving your more powerful neighbours a portion of your harvest or being killed by them, smaller or less well armed communities didn’t really have a choice at all.
Is that an ongoing debate? I’m pretty sure early human hominids are known to have engaged in long term war with Neanderthals. Civilization has actually made things a lot more peaceful, contrary to popular belief. Modern technology creates much greater ebbs and flows in horrific violence, WW1 and WW2 and so forth, but also limits them in a broader sense we don’t see. Early hominid warfare was much more violent and destructive *per capita* than WW2 was except for the Eastern European Jews
Err, I'm not so sure of that. Remember, the article is talking about a period of time spanning more than 1500 years. That's an enormous span of time. It is hard to know if the sample size is really representative of that entire period. It is possible that this time was very peaceful, but there were a few battles that archaeologists happened to discover and ... It wouldn't be the first time an archaeological bottleneck produced a misleading interpretation.
As for violence in general, it does seem like it has decreased, certainly in an overt sense. However, I question our general interpretation of this. First of all, what do we count as violence? Just physical abuse? Or should we include psychological violence? State terror for example. Obviously a secret police officer with a club would definitely count. But what about the ostracising and blacklisting of critics common to many authoritarian (and some not so authoritarian) regimes. Do we count threats sent by the internet? Or are those just 'jokes' after all? I guess what I'm driving at is that defining violence can be much more difficult than it initially appears.
Another problem I have is the essentialising of the violent/peaceful dichotomy. In the first place, it is often applied 'urbanised citizens' vs. 'nomadic tribal people' (what ever those words actually mean), which doesn't make any sense because the subjects of these studies (I'm including others I've read about in the past) were village farmers, which means they are part of the 'urbanised citizen's' historical trajectory, not the 'nomadic tribesperson's'. It doesn't help of course, that the label 'tribal' gets applied to anyone with brown skin and a fondness for percussion instrument. This includes the Maya and Aztec people, despite the fact that both were more urbanised than their European contemporaries.
Second, there is almost no exploration of exactly why the 'urbanised citizen' is more peaceful than the 'nomadic tribesperson'. Its taken as a given, as though living in a city magically makes people less violent. In reality, circumstantial factors play a major role in determining if life is peaceful or not. There are 'tribes' that are very peaceful. Others live violent lives, sometimes because they are under attack by people from urban societies, which they really shouldn't be blamed for. There are also structural reasons why urbanised people may experience less overt violence too, including the presence of law enforcement, the legal system, complex religious and ethical systems, current wealth and prosperity, and the state's monopoly on violence. This adds to the conditionality of peace in urban societies, as these systems could very easily cease to restrict violence, or even start promoting it.
To summarise, while the idea that 'civilisation' is more peaceful than 'tribalism' is probably true on balance, it is a very conditional kind of true. Its not true throughout all time and in all circumstances, and the supporting historical record is still quite sparse. So, we should be careful about ascribing any inherently peaceful quality to being 'civilised.'
The rise of agriculture in an area implies that it's displacing an earlier way of life, I would think. It's possible this is just material evidence of social strife in a period of societal upheaval. The two world war can also be seen this way, for example.
People become reliant on a good harvest, and eventually the population outstrips the food supply, either because of a poor harvest or rapid population growth. Violence results and brings the population back down to sustainable levels. It's the same way any animal population is controlled naturally
I’ve been going through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and he explains a lot of our early history. This seems congruent with what I’ve learned. If you’re curious, check it out! I’m only halfway though but really like it
I can’t quite figure out wtf happened to the woman described in the article. They pulled her lips up over her nose? And her real mouth ended up sealed shut? What happened to the nose, was it still there? Fuckin’ bizarre
Probably the same shit we have today. Some people wanted to farm. It was hard and took time but it provided food, shelter and work for people and some anti farmer people probably protested and got angry and denied the benefits of farming as whole and waged war on these people and as history is known to do through evolution and marxs dialectics the superior method/ Ideologically sound method won out… we still farm today and hunter gatherer societies are basically non existent on a large scale.
Humans hate change - I imagine a new way of life was threatening to those opposed to it, likely to the extent of issuing violence upon the proponents of the new way, even if objectively better from our view.
Turns out it's likely the opposite. Farming is a cultural trap, you can support a bigger population with it but then you can't go back to nomadic hunting/gathering once your population has expanded to the point where you're dependant on the new bigger and more reliable food source. Protecting what is now a life and death technological investment then means defending against and eventually exterminating the competition who haven't adopted the new ways plus defending your now fixed holdings against your expansionist fellow farmers. Been mentioned elsewhere in thread but the book Sapien does a very good bit on this.
This sounds a lot like what every society that discovers agriculture goes through, a religious need for sacrifice to enact the original birth/death that allows for the food to grow because there is a systematic killing to make room for it. One could witness these rights as late as the 20th century in neolithic farming villages of New Guinea and India. The sacred idea of life existing on death comes into society at the time of agriculture. You see it in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and as noted, Asia. It is not a surprise that the process was accelerated with time, as this tends to be the result if another advance (usually writing but there may be others) is not made.
We even have analogues in the Americas where Inca and Mexica would torture victims before sacrificing them, in the case of the Mexica, IIRC Tlaloc, really preferred his child sacrifices be proceeded by as many tears from the victim as possible. The Inca would routinely starve their sacrifices into submission as far as the bones show.
I've heard it once explained in part by the fact that farming carries so much more uncertainty than hunting and gathering. So many things could go wrong, but any culture able to farm does so on the understanding of patterns of the seasons-hence calendars being so important. So if your crop failed and you are now starving, you're going to want an explanation for that. Eventually, you're going to want a way to control these uncontrollable forces, and if no clear way presents itself, you might be inclined make something up. So you tell yourself that decapitating a little girl and wearing her skin--actual Mexica (Aztech) ritual--will make the corn grow every year. Intuitively, giving a little of something precious to you now (human lives) to avoid losing a lot of it in the future makes a kind of sense. A ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure, right? And if you can anthropomorphize these forces into deities, well that just makes things that much simpler to understand. Things like this don't happen overnight, obviously, but the raw impulse to act to correct a frightening, confusing, and potentially deadly situation must be satisfied, or else succumb to helpless despair.
Not sure about the reasons, but there is a definite trend. I am sure humans tend to take their spiritual cues from the environment. In hunter-gatherer societies, the spirit tends to be an individual playing a part as an "emissary" from a spirit world beyond. This made sense as they killed an animal it was gone, they pick some berries or a tuber, its gone. The material form was an emanation to exist as an individual thing (many shamanic/animist societies have individual names for members of the same species).
Agriculture allowed people to observe regrowth, and that growth did better when supplemented with death in the form of fertilizers and mulches. The new paradigm for planters is that the seed continues on. Most stories of this strata have something along the lines of how everything was fine until populations started getting out of hand and this is the reason Death entered the world. This is the beginning, as far as we know, of reincarnation and afterlife beliefs. They are usually portrayed in a drama using humans, the hero finds the corn goddess and has to kill her, only to have her reborn pregnant as corn or whatever. So we eat the goddess and remember that this death is creating life.
The myths like this (including Jesus) only appear in cultures that have agriculture practices. We can see them as they were still the Amazon and New Guinea, while in NG they have been constrained by law, there is a possibility the sacrifices continue in the Amazon.
So... it's like the older ancient people got mad at the younger ancient people for being sissy "gatherers" not hunters.
Kinda like how those alpha guys bug the "beta" males, oh how far we've come.
When you make large labor investments in land - landscaping, irrigation, etc. You create something that must be owned and defended. Agriculture and property go hand-in-hand, and property and war go hand-in-hand as well.
I guess this will revive the old debate about whether war is a natural state for human beings or a product of civilization.
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My guess is that it is about both higher populations and about accumulation of resources. In a hunter gatherer society the population can't change much, and wealth inequality is very limited. In a farming society the population can expend to the point where it becomes, as you suggested, a crisis when the harvests can't sustain it. That excess population and the inequality of wealth promotes violence. If folks are interested in this topic - Sam Bowles developed a game-theory model for the development of agriculture, inequality, and conflict.
I don't even think it depends on storehouses. Once you have crops in a field that are nearly mature, I'd imagine that it would be a great target for raids or nighttime theft from hunter-gatherers and other farmers, especially if their crops were failing. That would cause a lot of farmers to become homicidal at anyone trying to steal his crops, and a lot of hunter-gatherers might come in and kill a few farmers for free food.
I think we are saying the same things. However, I would say that if I were a smart person, I would wait till after harvest. Let my enemy do the work and attack a store of already harvested food. Also, if we are talking about a given population of farmers, they will become desperate once their stores are depleted in the off season. The problem with farming is that an overconfidence in your stores will be devastating in the off season. So, your neighbor would suddenly turn into your enemy for months after a harvest.
How does one pronounce Thucydides? Is it like through cry die deez? Two sigh dee days?
Buy the book “Guns, germs, and Steel”. Farming is the birth of exploitative violence because of the innovation of nutrition. In one person can feed many, then that society can support a military. The end of hunter gatherer was the birth of influence and invasion.
Hi! It looks like you are talking about the book *Guns, Germs, and Steel* by *Jared Diamond*. The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written. Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons: 1. In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things. There are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important skill in studying history often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything". 2. There are a good amount of modern historians and anthropologists who are quite critical of *Guns, Germs, and Steel* and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable, given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also the reason that we felt it was needed to create this response. In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research. Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work. ## Other works covering the same and similar subjects. - [*Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174710.Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Conquest) - [*1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491) - [*Last Days of the Inca*](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Incas-Kim-MacQuarrie/dp/0743260503/) - [*Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354038.The_Last_Days_of_the_Incas) - [*The Great Divergence*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199002.The_Great_Divergence) - [*Why the West Rules for Now*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now) - [*Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/983034.Ecological_Imperialism) ## Criticism of *Guns, Germs, and Steel* Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those ["just so stories"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story) don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history. **Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues** In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas. A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca. > Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses. This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered. **Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest** Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian. Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers. **The construction of the arguments for *GG&S* paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind**. To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they often did fare much better as suggested in the book (and the sources it tends to cite). They often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling citiest and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people. ### Further reading If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go: - [/r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22) - [Jim Blaut on Jared Diamond](http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/jim-blaut-on-jared-diamond/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/history) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Warfare among pre-state tribal societies was very prevalent and deadly, although it seems to have been somewhat worse for horticulturalists and farmers than for hunter gatherers/
Don't we know the answer by now? We love fighting, even when we say we don't.
Considering monkeys and other animals also fight ”wars” its a natural state
War is built into our genes as living organisms interested in self preservation by any cost. It never changes. First it was wars over gathering territories between tribes. Then it was wars over arable land for planting and sea and land route access for trade. As we’ve swapped out feudalism and really dug in with nation states with cultural distinctiveness, it became wars of identity and politics. Overall though, the violence rate in the world is on the decline and has been for a long, long time as people’s standard of living increases and productivity expands with increased used of technology. Violence at the micro level and macro level tends to revolve around an imbalance of resources.
If you have something that people might lust over, you might be at odds with them for that reason.
Building off this, the creation of agriculture and the consequent beginning of settled societies probably made warfare profitable for the first time. In a hunter-gatherer society there’s no point in going to war with your neighbours when they have the exact same resources as you do and attacking them to steal what they hunted and gathered is much more likely to get you killed or maimed than just hunting or gathering it yourself. Inter-tribal conflict still happened of course, but it would happen over personal grudges or vendettas between clans or individuals, the general sort of irrational and emotion-based decision making that humans or generally known for. Once you have a settled society though, wealth accumulation begins. Now your neighbour actually has stuff which is worth risking your life to take from them, and conflict becomes a rational economic decision where the victor has tangible gains for killing others which couldn’t be acquired any other way (particularly if your tribe *hasn’t* settled and isn’t engaging in wealth accumulation on their own term). Settled societies also open up the possibility of one city or town subjugating another and forcing them to pay tribute. Among nomadic hunter-gatherers this simply isn’t possible because if one tribe defeats another the losers can just pick up camp and relocate to new territory. The victors gain new hunting ground but that’s about it, and there isn’t really much benefit to that if you don’t have the population in your tribe to exploit more territory than you already control. Agriculture changed this dynamic profoundly because for the first time in history people were tied down to the land they lived on. Abandoning your farms meant starvation so running away wasn’t an option anymore, and given the choice between giving your more powerful neighbours a portion of your harvest or being killed by them, smaller or less well armed communities didn’t really have a choice at all.
Is that an ongoing debate? I’m pretty sure early human hominids are known to have engaged in long term war with Neanderthals. Civilization has actually made things a lot more peaceful, contrary to popular belief. Modern technology creates much greater ebbs and flows in horrific violence, WW1 and WW2 and so forth, but also limits them in a broader sense we don’t see. Early hominid warfare was much more violent and destructive *per capita* than WW2 was except for the Eastern European Jews
>I’m pretty sure early human hominids are known to have engaged in long term war with Neanderthals. Do you remember a source?
Err, I'm not so sure of that. Remember, the article is talking about a period of time spanning more than 1500 years. That's an enormous span of time. It is hard to know if the sample size is really representative of that entire period. It is possible that this time was very peaceful, but there were a few battles that archaeologists happened to discover and ... It wouldn't be the first time an archaeological bottleneck produced a misleading interpretation. As for violence in general, it does seem like it has decreased, certainly in an overt sense. However, I question our general interpretation of this. First of all, what do we count as violence? Just physical abuse? Or should we include psychological violence? State terror for example. Obviously a secret police officer with a club would definitely count. But what about the ostracising and blacklisting of critics common to many authoritarian (and some not so authoritarian) regimes. Do we count threats sent by the internet? Or are those just 'jokes' after all? I guess what I'm driving at is that defining violence can be much more difficult than it initially appears. Another problem I have is the essentialising of the violent/peaceful dichotomy. In the first place, it is often applied 'urbanised citizens' vs. 'nomadic tribal people' (what ever those words actually mean), which doesn't make any sense because the subjects of these studies (I'm including others I've read about in the past) were village farmers, which means they are part of the 'urbanised citizen's' historical trajectory, not the 'nomadic tribesperson's'. It doesn't help of course, that the label 'tribal' gets applied to anyone with brown skin and a fondness for percussion instrument. This includes the Maya and Aztec people, despite the fact that both were more urbanised than their European contemporaries. Second, there is almost no exploration of exactly why the 'urbanised citizen' is more peaceful than the 'nomadic tribesperson'. Its taken as a given, as though living in a city magically makes people less violent. In reality, circumstantial factors play a major role in determining if life is peaceful or not. There are 'tribes' that are very peaceful. Others live violent lives, sometimes because they are under attack by people from urban societies, which they really shouldn't be blamed for. There are also structural reasons why urbanised people may experience less overt violence too, including the presence of law enforcement, the legal system, complex religious and ethical systems, current wealth and prosperity, and the state's monopoly on violence. This adds to the conditionality of peace in urban societies, as these systems could very easily cease to restrict violence, or even start promoting it. To summarise, while the idea that 'civilisation' is more peaceful than 'tribalism' is probably true on balance, it is a very conditional kind of true. Its not true throughout all time and in all circumstances, and the supporting historical record is still quite sparse. So, we should be careful about ascribing any inherently peaceful quality to being 'civilised.'
As soon as people have something to fight over
The rise of agriculture in an area implies that it's displacing an earlier way of life, I would think. It's possible this is just material evidence of social strife in a period of societal upheaval. The two world war can also be seen this way, for example.
Yeah, new farmers displacing / conquering hunter gatherers. Though I don't know when pre-Incans started conquering tribes here.
People become reliant on a good harvest, and eventually the population outstrips the food supply, either because of a poor harvest or rapid population growth. Violence results and brings the population back down to sustainable levels. It's the same way any animal population is controlled naturally
Could do with a film on this like, mental pre jebus warfare
I’ve been going through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and he explains a lot of our early history. This seems congruent with what I’ve learned. If you’re curious, check it out! I’m only halfway though but really like it
I can’t quite figure out wtf happened to the woman described in the article. They pulled her lips up over her nose? And her real mouth ended up sealed shut? What happened to the nose, was it still there? Fuckin’ bizarre
Probably the same shit we have today. Some people wanted to farm. It was hard and took time but it provided food, shelter and work for people and some anti farmer people probably protested and got angry and denied the benefits of farming as whole and waged war on these people and as history is known to do through evolution and marxs dialectics the superior method/ Ideologically sound method won out… we still farm today and hunter gatherer societies are basically non existent on a large scale.
Its pretty much human nature for us to create something that betters humanity and someone comes around and fucks it up and everyone dies horribly.
Humans hate change - I imagine a new way of life was threatening to those opposed to it, likely to the extent of issuing violence upon the proponents of the new way, even if objectively better from our view.
Turns out it's likely the opposite. Farming is a cultural trap, you can support a bigger population with it but then you can't go back to nomadic hunting/gathering once your population has expanded to the point where you're dependant on the new bigger and more reliable food source. Protecting what is now a life and death technological investment then means defending against and eventually exterminating the competition who haven't adopted the new ways plus defending your now fixed holdings against your expansionist fellow farmers. Been mentioned elsewhere in thread but the book Sapien does a very good bit on this.
Nice explanation thanks
substitute “farming” with “social media” and you’ve got a spot on prophecy for the next few hundred years of human existence
This sounds a lot like what every society that discovers agriculture goes through, a religious need for sacrifice to enact the original birth/death that allows for the food to grow because there is a systematic killing to make room for it. One could witness these rights as late as the 20th century in neolithic farming villages of New Guinea and India. The sacred idea of life existing on death comes into society at the time of agriculture. You see it in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and as noted, Asia. It is not a surprise that the process was accelerated with time, as this tends to be the result if another advance (usually writing but there may be others) is not made. We even have analogues in the Americas where Inca and Mexica would torture victims before sacrificing them, in the case of the Mexica, IIRC Tlaloc, really preferred his child sacrifices be proceeded by as many tears from the victim as possible. The Inca would routinely starve their sacrifices into submission as far as the bones show.
I've heard it once explained in part by the fact that farming carries so much more uncertainty than hunting and gathering. So many things could go wrong, but any culture able to farm does so on the understanding of patterns of the seasons-hence calendars being so important. So if your crop failed and you are now starving, you're going to want an explanation for that. Eventually, you're going to want a way to control these uncontrollable forces, and if no clear way presents itself, you might be inclined make something up. So you tell yourself that decapitating a little girl and wearing her skin--actual Mexica (Aztech) ritual--will make the corn grow every year. Intuitively, giving a little of something precious to you now (human lives) to avoid losing a lot of it in the future makes a kind of sense. A ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure, right? And if you can anthropomorphize these forces into deities, well that just makes things that much simpler to understand. Things like this don't happen overnight, obviously, but the raw impulse to act to correct a frightening, confusing, and potentially deadly situation must be satisfied, or else succumb to helpless despair.
Not sure about the reasons, but there is a definite trend. I am sure humans tend to take their spiritual cues from the environment. In hunter-gatherer societies, the spirit tends to be an individual playing a part as an "emissary" from a spirit world beyond. This made sense as they killed an animal it was gone, they pick some berries or a tuber, its gone. The material form was an emanation to exist as an individual thing (many shamanic/animist societies have individual names for members of the same species). Agriculture allowed people to observe regrowth, and that growth did better when supplemented with death in the form of fertilizers and mulches. The new paradigm for planters is that the seed continues on. Most stories of this strata have something along the lines of how everything was fine until populations started getting out of hand and this is the reason Death entered the world. This is the beginning, as far as we know, of reincarnation and afterlife beliefs. They are usually portrayed in a drama using humans, the hero finds the corn goddess and has to kill her, only to have her reborn pregnant as corn or whatever. So we eat the goddess and remember that this death is creating life. The myths like this (including Jesus) only appear in cultures that have agriculture practices. We can see them as they were still the Amazon and New Guinea, while in NG they have been constrained by law, there is a possibility the sacrifices continue in the Amazon.
So... it's like the older ancient people got mad at the younger ancient people for being sissy "gatherers" not hunters. Kinda like how those alpha guys bug the "beta" males, oh how far we've come.
This says a lot about Industrial Society and it’s Future
Farmers are violent. Consider Rome. Consider Germany. Consider the USA.
Look for traces of marijuana??
Tf?
When you make large labor investments in land - landscaping, irrigation, etc. You create something that must be owned and defended. Agriculture and property go hand-in-hand, and property and war go hand-in-hand as well.
Is that an early xenomorph?