One of my favorite witticisms is, “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.”
It’s easy to credit ourselves with our accomplishments and privileges, and to gloss over, or completely overlook how the generosity of others, or serendipity—just plain old good luck—might explain our favorable fortune.
Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel expertly explains how European colonizers sailed off into the world, discovered ‘new’ lands and peoples, and quickly developed a superiority complex. To their eyes, the ‘primitive,’ ‘barbaric’ peoples they met were clearly inferior and ignorant, living in cultures that were far less sophisticated, far more backwards than most of those that existed in Europe.
The subtitle of the book—“The Fates of Human Societies”—whitewashes the historical moment that Diamond so eloquently describes. “This Is When Racism Began in Earnest” might be a better subtitle for the colonization era. No doubt, H. sapiens had been critical of others—other clans, other tribes—since we walked out of Africa, but the colonization of the world put things into overdrive. To Europeans, the more pigmented, ‘foreign-looking’ people of North America, South America, Africa, and southeast Asia were something less than they—children playing an adult game, simpletons who should have been grateful to have been discovered and modernized—and also subjugated or even enslaved.
But as Diamond chronicles in detail, Europeans hadn’t hit a triple. It was a series of random geologic and biologic events—not their skin color, not a superior brain, not a superior God—that had landed them on third base. Reshuffle that deck, and it might have been the Incas sailing the Atlantic to colonize Europe.
By chance, the wild ancestors of domesticable grains and “pulses” (beans, peas, lentils) first developed in the Fertile Crescent
Wild forms of wheat, barley, and peas first emerged in the “Fertile Crescent”—the section of the Middle East that extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the western portions of Iran. Even in their wild form, these plants were easily edible, grew quickly and gave high yields, and did not rot when stored. Domesticating them (~8000 B.C.) was pretty simple: select the best seeds from the best plants and replant them.
Similarly, some of the most easily domesticated fruiting plants mother earth has to offer first emerged in the Fertile Crescent. Olives, figs, dates, pomegranates, and grapes were first domesticated about 4000 B.C..
This domestication of cereal grains and pulses was the beginning of what we now call agriculture, the “cash cow” that allowed humans to abandon our time-worn hunter-gatherer subsistence living in favor of a more sedentary and (typically) far more calorically rich agricultural life. There were other benefits. Although many grains are relatively low in protein, pulses are often 25% protein, meaning that humans were no longer obligated to chase down and kill their protein sources. They could grow them in their back yard.
Of the eight so-called “founder crops”—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch and the fiber crop flax—only barley and flax existed in the wild outside of Third Base (the Fertile Crescent) and Turkey.
By chance, the Fertile Crescent contained wild versions of four of today’s five most important domesticated large mammals: goats, sheep, cows, and pigs. The fifth, horses, came from southern Russia.
Domesticated large mammals offered humans two important options. First, they expanded our access to energy/calories by eating plants that humans simply can’t digest. Then we could access those calories by either drinking that animal’s milk or by eating said animal. Second, some of these mammals offered us “horsepower,” an engine that could help us break up fertile but heavy soils, carry water for irrigation, mill grains, or in the case of horses, transport us. And their manure fertilized our crops.
It’s not exactly clear why other large mammals suitable for domestication didn’t develop on other continents, but Diamond offers this explanation. Humans and large mammals evolved together in Africa, so they were quite naturally wary of u—and our arrows and spears. Conversely, when humans arrived in North and South America roughly 13,000 years ago, there were many large mammals and they hadn’t learned to be afraid of us. To their peril: we nearly killed them all before it dawned on us that they might be more use alive than dead.
The one-two punch of agriculture and domesticated large mammals allowed Fertile Crescent humans to bankroll complex cultures—and guns and steel
Freed from the incessant need to feed oneself, humans finally had some serious tinkering time—creating written language, religion, governments, metallurgy, weaponry and armies (so as to steal other people’s grains and domesticated mammals). Civilization fosters specialization and innovation, but civilization also requires capital.
The horizontal (east-west) global orientation of Europe and Asia works better for spreading agriculture than the vertical (north-south) orientation of North and South America, and Africa
It makes sense: it’s easier to move a domesticated plant laterally, east to west or vice versa, because at the same latitude, the weather conditions and seasons are similar. Many of the “founder crops” moved easily into north Africa, but they never got to south Africa because they couldn’t be raised and slowly transported down through the deserty Sahara, or through tropical central Africa. Hence, they did not arrive in southern Africa until Europeans brought them by ship. North and South America had similar challenges, but Eurasia’s bulging east-west waistline meant that by the time of Christ, cereals that were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent were being grown from Ireland to Japan.
Germs—not guns or steel—were the Old World’s most deadly export by far. Why couldn’t the New World reciprocate?
You’ve heard the numbers: in the century or two following Columbus’s arrival, native populations in the Americas declined by as much as 95%. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus were the top killers, but malaria, yellow fever, and tuberculosis contributed as well. And yet not a single major infective killer reached Europe from the Americas (the origin of syphilis is debated).
Why? Most of these pathogens developed out of a particular environment: large numbers of domesticated animals living in close proximity to large numbers of humans. As I mentioned earlier, the Americas had few large, domesticated mammals—primarily dogs, turkeys, llamas, guinea pigs, and something called the Muscovy duck in tropical South America.
There we have it: the roots of modern racism
The humans who were born on or near third base (the Fertile Crescent) were dealt two aces—easily domesticated cereals/pulses and large mammals—which served as the caloric cash infusion that allowed for more complex (and violence-prone) societies to develop, ones that included guns and steel. Those two aces required that humans and animals live in close proximity, which fostered a number of infective ilk that ultimately decimated native populations across the globe. Ironically, the native population’s lack of immunity only made them appear more feeble, and the colonizers more invincible, cementing a superiority complex, an arrogance born of ignorance, one that has lasted for centuries.
