Original subtitles

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modern history has been shaped by

conquest the conquest of the world by

Europeans

the conquistadors 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 these

advantages in the first place

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why did the world ever become so unequal

these are questions that Professor Jared

Diamond has spent more than 30 years

trying to answer one of the most

original thinkers of our age diamond has

traveled the world looking for clues

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he set himself a daunting task to peel

back the layers of the past and explore

the very roots of power in the 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

Germs seal because they're the biggest

questions of human history what

separates the haves from the have-nots

now have Guns Germs and Steel shaped the

history of the world

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jared diamond's quest to uncover the

roots of inequality began in the

rainforests of Papua New Guinea

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diamond is a professor at UCLA in Los

Angeles he's a biologist by training a

specialist in human physiology but his

real passion has always been the study

of birds I love watching birds in this

place I began watching birds when I was

seven 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 Diamond has been making regular

trips to New Guinea ever since and is

now a leading expert on the bird life of

the island

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morning 1 o'clock but in the course of

his fieldwork he's become just as

curious about the people of New Guinea

find a pitch 20 Tish she got that's old

number to push down I gone over the

years I've gotten to know and like

thousands of New Guineans the name Jana

I've learned several of their languages

and much of what I know about birds I

picked up from them 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

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look I'm 1 2 3 4 5 6 no.1 deer among the

most culturally diverse and adaptable

people in the world

so why are they so much poorer than

modern Americans

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the question was put to Dimond bluntly

by a man called Yali whom he met on a

beach more than 30 years ago why are you

white men have so much cobble and we New

Guineans have so little yollie's

question really through me it seems 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 so much cargo and we unions

have so little New Guineans use the word

cargo to describe the material goods

first brought to their country by

Westerners

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cargo was regarded by many as evidence

of the white man's power it was treated

with an almost religious reverence

for their part Western Colonials

typically believed that power was

determined by race they saw themselves

as genetically superior to the native

population to them it was only natural

that they should have so much cargo and

New Guineans so 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 the ingenuity

and their quickness to learn that have

always impressed me they can go

empty-handed into some of the most

difficult environments on earth knock up

a shelter in a few hours and survive

meet rhyme dispel a step just tell a

rope is flowing and up and up I wouldn't

know where to start

in this environment I'd be helpless

without so why didn't these ingenious

people invent metal tools or build great

cities or develop any of the other

trappings of modern civilization

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the world that I'm from is so different

the modern US is the richest most

powerful state on earth it's crammed

with more cargo than most New Guineans

could ever imagine but why

that's what Yali wanted to know

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how did our world ever come so different

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Dimond realized that yollie's question

was far bigger and more complex than it

first appeared

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it was really about the roots of

inequality

a question as old as human history

itself

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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 Romans or the mine

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

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diamond set out to explore the division

of the world into haves and have-nots it

was a massive challenge that few

scholars would have dared take on he was

a scientist not a historian how could he

possibly solve the great puzzles of

human history

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to understand where inequality came from

diamond needed to identify a time before

inequality when people across the world

were living more or less the same way

he had to turn back the clock thousands

of years back before the first

civilizations back into prehistory

thirteen thousand 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 East

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thirteen thousand years ago the Middle

East was far less arid than today with

more forests trees and plants people

here lived like people everywhere at

this time as hunter-gatherers in small

mobile groups they were frequently on

the move

making shelters wherever they could find

animals to hunt the plants together

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they'd live in these shelters for weeks

or months at a time

as long as they could keep feeding

themselves but as seasons changed and

animals migrated they'd move on to the

next Valley or Ridge looking for new

sources of food one of the few places on

earth where it's still possible to find

people hunting and gathering is the

rainforests of Papua New Guinea instead

of just reading about this lifestyle in

archaeological books I've been lucky

enough to witness at firsthand to see

for myself how we all lived 13,000 years

ago and how we found food

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to catch an animal requires skill

stealth and encyclopedic knowledge about

hundreds of animal species you have to

be pretty smart to be a hunter

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thirteen thousand years ago people in

the Middle East hunted in the same way

tracking down whatever game they could

find

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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 animal

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and with a bow and arrow there's no

certainty of how the hunt planned one

time or me pool you put him still and by

go more yet

meep-meep lay broken bow you number one

number two because hunting is so

unpredictable traditional societies have

usually relied more on gathering

in this part of Papua New Guinea the

gathering is done by women

an important source of food here is wild

sago

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by stripping a sago tree they can get to

the pulp at the center which can be

turned into a dough and then cooked

although it's physically harder work

gathering is generally a more productive

way of finding food than hunting

but it still doesn't provide enough

calories to support a large population

this jungle around us you might think

it's a cornucopia 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 sago trees and the rest of

these trees don't use anything that we

could eat

and then sago itself it's got

limitations one tree yields only maybe

about 70 pounds of sago it takes them

three or four days to process that tree

so it's a lot of work really for a not a

great deal of food plus the sago starch

is low on protein and also the sago

can't be stored for long time and that's

why hunter-gatherer 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 not

going to be a Seiko strong in the Middle

East there were very different plants

together growing wild between the trees

were two cereal grasses barley and wheat

far more plentiful and nutritious than

sago

these simple grasses would have a

profound impact setting humanity on the

course towards modern civilization but

it would take a catastrophic change in

the climate before this would happen

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twelve and a half thousand years ago the

world's climate became highly volatile

long-term thought that had brought about

the end of the last ice age suddenly

went into reverse global temperatures

dropped an ice age conditions returned

the world became colder and drier the

Middle East suffered an environmental

collapse animal herds died off so did

many trees and plants the drought lasted

for more than a thousand 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 prosper

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here in the Middle East a new way of

life would come into being one that

would change the face of the earth

ian's kite is a Canadian archaeologist

who specializes in the Stone Age history

of the Middle East

his work is focused on a site in the

Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea a place

known as draw

kite is a co-director of the dig and

works with an international team of

archaeologists

they've uncovered the remains of ancient

dwellings

that were clearly more sophisticated

than any hunter-gatherer shelters

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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 forty to fifty people

living in the same place we would have

had a series of oval huts would have

been partially cut into the ground and

these would have been very much the the

first time people settled down and lived

in communities in a really extensive way

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when they radiocarbon dated the site

they discovered that the village first

emerged eleven and a half thousand years

ago at the same time as the end of the

drought in the Middle East but how is it

possible to feed an entire village if

times were so hard after four years of

digging at draw the archaeologists

believe they have an answer

it lies in this unique structure

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what you can see here is the outline 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 it 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 through what that ends up

being from our perspective is probably

the world's first granary in some form a

place where they're able to store food

in a particular location on a year-round

basis the team at draw believes the

granary was an oval-shaped mud wall

building at the center of the village a

place where grain could be stored

collectively and the grains that were

being stored were primarily wheat and

barley while other plants were no longer

available these cereal grasses were

hardy enough to survive and durable

enough to be stored for years

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but if this was a time of scarcity how

was there enough grain to fill a granary

the answer suggests a radical shift in

human behavior at some point during the

drought in the Middle East people

started growing their own 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 barley around them

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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 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 Age people of the Middle

East were becoming farmers the first

farmers in the world without realizing

it these new farmers were changing the

very nature of the crops around them

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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 cultivation

they interrupted the cycle they

interrupted the normal 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

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the way crops are changed by human

interference is known as domestication

today it happens in research labs with

scientists selecting genes and breeding

crops to be ever more useful to humans

it's a very precise deliberate process

but not so different from what the first

farmers were doing unconsciously

thousands of years ago in the Middle

East

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the transition to farming 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 disadvantage

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now I needed to know where else in the

ancient world people have become farmers

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'all ease 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 serial grass rice pockets of

farming also emerged in the Americas

based on corn squash and beans

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later in Africa people farmed sorghum

millet and yams

and in most places were farming emerged

a relatively large advanced civilization

followed but there was an exception to

the rule an area where farming didn't

bring the same benefits the highlands of

New Guinea

for 50 years after Westerners colonized

New Guinea they thought the highland

valleys in the interior were uninhabited

in fact they were the most densely

populated part of the island with one of

the oldest systems of farming in the

world

archaeologists now believed that people

have been farming here for almost ten

thousand years almost as long as the

people of the Middle East it's amazing

to think that these people

yollie's people were some of the

earliest farmers in the world but if

they were farmers why weren't they

propelled down the same path towards

civilization as the people of the Middle

East or China or Central America why

didn't they end up producing their own

cargo 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 taro roots

which are very different from cereal

crops towers much more work got a

planted one by one unlike week where you

throw your hand and spread the seed and

these New Guinea crops can't be stored

for years the way we can they rot

quickly they have to beaten in a short

time they're also low in protein

compared to wheat so these farmers of

the New Guinea Highlands suffered from

protein deficiency

is not much protein to be gotten from

new guineas other crops even people here

form local varieties of bananas

but although bananas are rich in sugar

and starch like terrell they're low in

protein in fact people in the highlands

have so little protein that sometimes

they eat giant spiders to supplement

their diet 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

became the most productive farms

ultimately it came down to geographic

lock it's an audacious idea that the

inequalities of the world were born from

the crops we eat according to Jared

Diamond

Americans have had an advantage over New

Guineans because for centuries they've

grown crops that are more nutritious and

productive crops like wheat which

provides about 1/5 of all the calories

they eat the wealth of modern America

could never have been sustained by taro

and bananas the diamonds idea seems

almost too simple could plants alone

really have the power to shape the

course of human history

or was there something else at play

another reason for the division of the

world into haves and have-nots by 9,000

years ago the first settlements in the

Middle East were giving way to much

larger villages people were only able to

live on this scale by becoming more

productive farmers they were surrounded

by fields of domesticated wheat and

barley but by now they also had another

steady source of food

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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 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 year round around your site

rather than being subject to seasonal

variations in wild game as well as meat

animals could be used for their milk

providing an ongoing source of protein

their hair and skins could be used to

make clothes for extra warmth over time

domestic animals became an integral part

of the new agricultural way of life

we know that the communities which first

started to have domestic animals already

had cereal crops so they were

cultivators and the combination of these

particular animals and the plants

becomes an extremely attractive package

in that they're complementary after the

harvest period animals could be turned

out on the stubble and they can actually

eat the remains of the cereal 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 humans

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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 today

all of them were used at first for their

meat but they all proved useful in other

ways especially with the invention of

the plow before the Industrial

Revolution beasts of burden were the

most powerful machines on the planet a

horse or an ox harnessed to a plow could

transform the productivity of the land

allowing farmers to grow more food and

feed more people in New Guinea and many

other parts of the world people never

used plows because they never had the

animals to pull 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 cows sheep goats horses buffalo

camels and so on now pigs do give you

meat but pigs don't give you the other

products did you get from those European

nation animals pigs don't give you milk

or wool or leather or high it's most

important of all pigs can't be used for

muscle power pigs don't pull plows or

pull cars the only muscle power in

guinea was human muscle power even today

there are no beasts of burden in New

Guinea and almost all of the farm work

is still done by hand but if all animals

were so useful

why didn't you genius domesticate any of

their own

I decided had up all the animals in the

world that have ever been domesticated

and I was amazed by what I found there

are nearly two million known species of

wild animals but the vast majority have

never been farmed

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most insects and rodents are of no

practical use to humans and not worth

the effort of farming some birds fish

and reptiles have been domesticated but

most are simply impacted by define so

are most carnivores not because they're

dangerous but because you'd have to grow

other animals just to feed them

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the best animals to farm are large

plant-eating mammals

and over the years humans have probably

tried to domesticate all of them usually

without success despite repeated efforts

Africans have never domesticated the

elephant

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in South Asia some elephants are used as

work animals but they're not farmed for

the purpose instead each elephant is

caught in the wild and then tamed and

trained it doesn't make economic sense

to farm an animal that takes some 15

years to mature and reach an age where

it can start 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 is actually high

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 gain control over

whole herd whole flock

there is another crucial requirement for

a domestic animal it needs to get along

with humans some animals don't have the

temperament to live on a farm a zebra

could be an ideal domestic animal

potentially as useful as a horse

but evolving in the midst of Africa's

great predators zebras have become

flighty nervous creatures

they have a vicious streak that humans

have been unable to tame that may be why

zebras have never been harnessed to a

plow or ridden into battle I counted up

148 different species of wild plant

eating terrestrial mammals that weigh

over a hundred pounds but of those 148

the number that have ever been

successfully fought any length of time

is just 14 goats sheep pigs cows horses

donkeys Bactrian camels graving camels

water buffalo llamas reindeer yaks myth

ons and Bali cattle just 14 large

domestic animals and 10,000 years of

domestication

and where did the ancestors of these

animals come from none was from New

Guinea or Australia or sub-saharan

Africa while 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 Europe

and of these the big for 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 became known as the Fertile

Crescent

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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 start

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what had begun with the sowing of wheat

and the painting of goats was leading

towards the first human civilization the

archaeological site of Guerre in

southern Jordan is nine thousand years

old but it has all the hallmarks of a

town a few hundred people lived here in

rows of houses that were a wonder of

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 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

plaster so people were moving to a

concept of homes it's not place just to

sleep it is a proper home and people

started to decorate the houses from the

front from the inside and people were

started to invest in their homes because

if we are talking about plaster it is

time-consuming its effort consuming it's

very expensive to have plastered 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 specialists within the

community

freed from the burden of farming some

people were able to develop new skills

and new technologies

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making plaster from limestone was a

major technological breakthrough the

stones had to be heated for days at a

time at a temperature of a thousand

degrees 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

[Applause]

[Applause]

[Music]

by contrast places like New Guinea never

developed advanced technology

even today some people in the highlands

are working in ways that have barely

changed for centuries 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

you Jenny 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

specialists no metal workers no metal

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 country

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yet for all its advantages the Fertile

Crescent is not the powerhouse of the

modern world

nor is it the breadbasket it once was

how did it lose its head start

within a thousand years of their

emergence most of the new villages of

the Fertile Crescent were abandoned

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ironically the region had a fundamental

weakness

despite having some of the most

nutritious crops on the planet its

climate was too dry and its ecology too

fragile to support continuous intensive

farming people were destroying the

environment the waters had been over

exploited the trees had been cut and

this is what when you when you're faced

it did end

I mean you are facing the wall

you will end with landscape like that

man would with few trees with no grass

and with less water so what we are

looking at today is the outcome of over

exploiting the environment

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unable to farm their land entire

communities were forced to move on

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the advantages they'd accrued from

centuries of domestication might have

been lost

but again geography was on their side

the Fertile Crescent is in the middle of

a huge landmass 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

latitude why is that so important

because any two points the globe that

share the same latitude automatically

she had the same length of day and they

often share a similar climate and

vegetation

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props or animals domesticated in the

Fertile Crescent we're able to prosper

in other places along the east-west axis

of Eurasian

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 transformed human

societies

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once the crops and animals of the

Fertile Crescent reached Egypt they

caused an explosion of civilization

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[Applause]

suddenly there was enough food to feed

the pharaohs and generals the engineers

and scribes and the armies of people

required to build a pyramids

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the same is true of European

civilization

from ancient times until the Renaissance

the crops and animals of the Fertile

Crescent fed the artists inventors and

soldiers of Europe

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in the 16th century the same crops and

animals were taken by Europeans to the

New World

at the time there was not a single cow

or ear of wheat and all the Americas

now there are a hundred million cattle

in the US law

and Americans consume 20 million tons of

wheat a year

modern industrialized America would be

unthinkable without the spread of

farming from the Fertile Crescent

there are some who think Jared Diamond's

argument is too neat and easy

can the distribution of wealth and power

really be reduced to cattle and wheat

what about culture politics and religion

surely they've been just as important

diamonds been criticized for being too

deterministic for ignoring the part

people have played in shaping their own

destiny

[Music]

my years in New Guinea have convinced me

that people around the world are

fundamentally similar 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

mainly the result of inequality they're

not it's wound calls

[Music]

ultimately what's far more important is

the hand that people have been dealt the

raw materials they've had at their

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 they didn't have the

same raw materials

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 Papua New Guinea are becoming

bigger and more developed populated by

modern New Guineans tried to catch up

with the rest of the world

[Music]

unfortunately for them there's still a

big gap to overcome

why you what men have so much goggle and

we new guineans have so little

yaoi 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

helicopters

[Music]

Jared Diamond set out to explore the

division of the world into haves and

have-nots he's convinced the blueprint

for that division lies within the land

itself

[Music]

but can his way of seeing the world

really shed light on the turning points

of human history

[Music]

can it explain how a few hundred

Europeans conquered the new world and

began an age of domination the age of

Guns Germs and Steel

[Music]

[Music]

you

[Music]

you