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Excerpts

In the last two months of 1835, the Moriori people of the Chatham
Islands, off the coast of New Zealand, were slaughtered and enslaved
by a small group of invaders who, like Pizarro's men, used
sophisticated weapons and unmitigated brutality to defeat a
politically and technologically more primitive native population. In
this case, however, the conquerors were some 900 Maori warriors from
the New Zealand mainland, 500 miles away. Both the Maori and the
Moriori were Polynesians; the Moriori were descendants of a group of
Maori who had colonized the Chatham Islands only a few centuries
before. Biology was thus clearly not a factor in their separate
fates. What lay behind the Maori triumph was instead the very
different political and social organization of the two tribes. The
invaders were members of a dense population of farmers with a
penchant for belligerence fostered by generations spent living in
proximity to other equally ferocious tribes, while the Moriori were
peaceful hunter-gatherers who had developed elaborate mechanisms for
avoiding conflict rather than for profiting from it. These
differences in social structure in turn had their roots in the very
different natural environments that had produced them.

Fossils indicate that the evolutionary line leading to us had
achieved a substantially upright posture by around 4 million years
ago, then began to increase in body size and in relative brain size
around 2.5 million years ago. Those protohumans are generally known
as Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus,
which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence. Although
Homo erectus, the stage reached around 1.7 million years ago, was
close to us modern humans in body size, its brain size was still
barely half of ours.  (ch.1)

Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes
living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our
own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong
evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick.

Some 40,000 years ago, into Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their
modern skeletons, superior weapons, and other advanced cultural
traits. Within a few thousand years there were no more
Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe
for hundreds of thousands of years. That sequence strongly suggests
that the modern Cro-Magnons somehow used their far superior
technology, and their language skills or brains, to infect, kill,
or displace the Neanderthals, leaving behind little or no evidence
of hybridization between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.

The tortuous path of Inventions: Motor vehicle

When Nikolaus Otto built his first gas engine in 1866, horses had been
supplying people's land transportation needs for nearly 6000 years.
[Railroads had come in only a few decades earlier]

Otto's engine was weak, heavy and 7 feet tall - it did not recommend
itself over horses.  Not until 1885 did engines improve to the point that
Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the
first motorcycle; he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.  It was
only in WWI that military wanted trucks; and intensive postwar lobbying by
truck manufacturers and the military finally enabled trucks to replace
horse-drawn wagons.  Even in the largest American cities, the changeover
took 50 years.  [Kunal Basu's The Opium Clerk refers to horse-drawn
trams in 1870s Calcutta.

[QWERTY keyboard] designed to force typists to type as slowly as
possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all
keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where RH
people have their weaker hand).  The reason is that typewriters of
1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession.
By the time improvements in typewriters eliminated jamming, trials
in 1932 showd that an efficiently laid-out keyboard would double
typing speed and reduce typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY
keyboards were solidly entrenched by then.
Also see JD's detailed article, "The curse of QWERTY", in
Discover magazine, Apr 97.

Ancient native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for
use as toys, but not for transport.  . . . [they] lacked domestic
animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, offering no advantage
over human porters. (248)

kleptocracy: society that transfers net wealth from commoners to
upper classes. (276)

NYT review James Shreeve

On the morning of Nov. 16, 1532, the Incan Emperor Atahualpa greeted
the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in the Peruvian highland
town of Cajamarca. Atahualpa was surrounded by some 80,000 Indian
warriors; Pizarro came accompanied only by a ragged group of 168
horsemen and foot soldiers. The meeting was ostensibly friendly, but
when Atahualpa scorned an offered Bible, the Spaniards attacked. By
nightfall, 7,000 Indians had been slaughtered, without the loss of a
single Spanish soldier. (Atahualpa was captured alive and held for an
enormous ransom of gold. When the ransom was delivered, Pizarro
executed him anyway.) Within a few decades the Incan, Aztec and Mayan
civilizations had crumbled, and within a few centuries 95 percent of
the native population of two entire continents had disappeared as
well.

The proximate cause of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, for instance,
was the potent triad of guns, germs and steel of the book's title. But
Pizarro and his compatriots did not enjoy the benefit of steel swords and
horses because Spaniards were inherently smarter folk. Mr. Diamond traces
these advantages instead to the early development of farming in prehistoric
Europe -- a means of food procurement that supported denser populations,
which in turn allowed for the establishment of hierarchical societies with
centralized governments, strong leaders and social classes such as soldiers
and bureaucrats, who, freed from the daily toil of providing food, were
available to carry out other functions furthering the interests of the larger
society. Lest the headstart on agriculture in Europe be itself mistaken for
some kind of witness to European intelligence, Mr. Diamond shows how it in
fact originated elsewhere (in the Fertile Crescent of southwestern Asia),
and not through any particular cleverness on the part of the people of that
region either. It just happened that the Fertile Crescent offered by far the
world's richest assortment and abundance of wild grasses and other plants
that lent themselves to a gradual, almost unconscious process of
domestication. And it just happened too that the east-to-west orientation of
the Eurasian continent meant that regions with similar climate and growing
seasons butted up against one another, leading to the faster spread of
agriculture there than on the largely north-to-south-oriented continents of
the Americas and Africa.

Similar happenstances of prehistory, Mr. Diamond says, underlay the
devastating effect of Old World diseases on New World people. Smallpox had
arrived in Peru only five years before Pizarro, but so many of the ruling
class of the Incas had already succumbed that their entire political
leadership was in shambles. Had it been otherwise, the Spaniards would have
faced a more powerful emperor with a more unified force behind him.

But why did Native Americans fall prey to European germs instead of the
other way around? Dense human populations are required for the spread of
infectious diseases, but before contact some Native American societies were
as densely populated as European ones. Why didn't the conquistadors return
to their homeland carrying germs that would wipe out 95 percent of the
population of Europe?

Most deadly human pathogens, Mr. Diamond says, actually originated in animal
hosts. The domestication of animals emerged in the Fertile Crescent around
8000 B.C. and quickly spread. Europeans had thus been living close to animals
for millenniums -- ample time to develop a genetic resistance to diseases
harbored in livestock and pets. In contrast, most of the wild animals that
might have been suitable for domestication in the New World had been hunted
to extinction by the earliest arrivals over the Bering land bridge, 12,500
years before the Europeans arrived. Ironically, if those first Native
Americans had been less adept hunters, their descendants might have been able
to domesticate the indigenous American horse and camel, providing them with
an invisible arsenal of microbes of their own when Columbus made his first
fateful landing thousands of years later. The European conquest of the New
World would have been far more difficult, and might never have taken place at
all.