But rather than make anyone go through the rather verbose things I linked, a simple example demonstrates the point: The core of Diamond's argument is that geographical factors determined the course of world affairs between approx. 1600-1900. Not the hundreds of millennia before, nor at any point in the future, only those 300 years. That's a weird argument to make about factors that have essentially always existed and presumably always applied. Even if we accept everything uncritically, the result is a pretty terrible "grand theory" that can only justify things post-hoc.
[1] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/eric-wolf-europe-peo...
[2] https://louisproyect.org/2009/04/24/jim-blaut-on-jared-diamo...
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3054276
[4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/guns-germs-an...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of... <--- Despite being reddit, it's actually credible and a good introduction to Restall's 7 myths
[6] https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2013.846490 <--- Despite being a published article, this infamous paper's commentary is on the same informal level as most of these.
- Syphilis may have a new world origin.
- The most productive crop is the potato, a crop of new world origin.
- The Inca farmed guinea pigs. These are a very viable farm animal.
- The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the Spanish.
- The Inca could have defeated the Spanish. They were encountered after a civil war where the nobility was purged. The Inca nobility knew how to run the empire.
Smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, whooping cough are all way scarier than syphilis.
> The most productive crop is the potato,
The thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel was Europe's east-west orientation allowed varieties domesticated in one place to easily grow in another. If different varieties of potatoes grow differently at different latitudes (I don't know, I'm not an expert), then it doesn't really matter how productive a crop the potato is. You may also be basing this on more modern potato varieties.
> The Inca farmed guinea pigs.
Guinea pigs are pretty small. The Inca didn't have horses, only llamas. Horses were militarily very important. Look at how much trouble the Plains Indians gave the US government, relative to their numbers. They only acquired horses after Europeans came to the New World and adapted their culture and ways around them very rapidly.
> The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the Spanish.
After initially being defeated, acquiring guns, steel, and horses from the Spanish and then rebelling against them.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arauco_War#Campaigns_of_Caupol...
It's worth noting that despite the east-west orientation of Eurasia, there is quite little evidence of technology and agriculture actually being shared between the Mediterranean and Chinese origins, especially if you restrict yourself to the traditional origin-of-civilization innovations such as agriculture itself, pottery, metallurgy. By contrast, the Americas show a great deal more transmission along its north-south axis, with maize (from Mesoamerica) almost completely supplanting native North American domesticants, pottery appearing to come from the Amazon rainforest, and metallurgy arriving from the Andes.
Isn't wheat itself something that spread both ways from the middle East?
Goats, sheep, pig...
Most of those come from the fertile crescent.
You mean apart from (just off the top of my head) gunpowder, paper, the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, stirrups, and pasta/noodles?
The introduction of the potato reshaped Europe and boosted European population by 25%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xROmDsULcLE
> The Inca didn't have horses, only llamas. Horses were militarily very important.
The horse is a valuable animal given a favorable terrain. But with elevations such as the Andes, a horse is not as useful. And wheels are a similar story.
Horses were useless in the Battle of Ollantaytambo, where the Inca used terraces to their advantage, but proved very useful in the defense of Lima (a coastal city) against the forces of general Quizquiz.
> After initially being defeated, acquiring guns, steel, and horses from the Spanish and then rebelling against them.[1]
The Mapuche did not "acquire" guns or steel. They could not manufacture them, but they became aware of them and developed techniques against them.
They knew harquebuses were not waterproof, and if they would prefer to engage during rainy weather. They knew that trying to pierce through steel was ineffective, so they prefered to stun.
They also became aware of the usage of cattle and they frequently raided cattle and set structures on fire.
I think you missed the parent’s explicit point or I missed your point. The parent wasn’t saying potatoes aren’t efficient; only that they didn’t spread widely throughout the new world due to geographic factors.
As for the rest of your post, I’m really not sure what point you’re making by focusing on the Inca. Specifically what about Diamond’s thesis are you refuting? Note that I’m not partial to “Guns, Germs, and Steel”; I just want to understand the criticism better.
The Inca had a population of 10,000,000, and warehouses with surplus food that could sustain the empire for over 10 years.
The central point of his book - that there was far more geographic luck involved in European dominance than is popularly understood - holds just fine with all those points you made.
Good points though.
If you're just trying to point out that "Guns, Germs, and Steel" isn't an all inclusive guide to the rise of civilization, or that different people may have made different choices in their analysis, okay I get that too. Every book is just a single voice in the choir of a genre.
Is that what you're trying to say? That you didn't like the book?
As a historical note, anthropology originally develops in the 18th and 19th centuries as a curiosity about how the great empires (especially Britain) came to be great, and was generally intertwined with a desire to justify the rule over, enslavement of, or even extermination of lesser peoples. The notion that Western Europeans were superior to everyone else was an unquestioned axiom. It's only in the mid-20th century that this inherent racism starts to squeeze out of the field academically, but in the popular culture, it tends to still remain--and books like Guns, Germs, and Steel work against the goal of removing the racism from our humanities.
As someone who is interested in Pre-Columbian Americas, I will attest that the the history is actually quite fascinating. It really does challenge all of the traditional notions of anthropology, more so than any place in the Old World. A much better book is Charles Mann's 1491, which highlights what newer research has concluded about Pre-Columbian Americas.
That said, cherry picked or not, the conjectures they come up with (both of them), are often thought provoking and lead to additional research for me.
In relation to the reference I made to the Gate's article that crop storage is a performance enhancer for agronomic cultures, is strongly supported by 1491 as well. Mann's discussion of the development of Maize as a food crop, with its ability to be stored for long periods, gave those cultures such as the Olmec greater resiliency against drought and famine. Two conditions which ravage south Saharan Africa today.
I agree with the author, 99%.
1) Conquest was achieved with the help of local allies, sometimes in the order of hundreds of thousands.
2) A significant part of the conquest was achieved by fighting small nations one at a time rather than a unified force.