- one hypothesis for the demise of Australia's and New Guinea's giants is that they met the same fate around 40,000 years ago. In contrast, most big mammals of Africa and Eurasia survived into modern times, because they had coevolved with protohumans for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. They thereby enjoyed ample time to evolve a fear of humans, as our ancestors' initially poor hunting skills slowly improved. The dodo, moas, and perhaps the giants of Australia / New Guinea had the misfortune suddenly to be confronted, without any evolutionary preparation, by invading modern humans possessing fully developed hunting skills. - While those ancestral Maori who first colonized the Chathams may have been farmers, Maori tropical crops could not grow in the Chathams' cold climate, and the colonists had no alternative except to revert to being hunter-gatherers. Since as hunter-gatherers they did not produce crop surpluses available for redistribution or storage, they could not support and feed nonhunting craft specialists, armies, bureaucrats, and chiefs. Their prey were seals, shellfish, nesting seabirds, and fish that could be captured by hand or with clubs and required no more elaborate technology. - the Chathams are relatively small and remote islands, capable of supporting a total population of only about 2,000 hunter-gatherers. With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori had to remain in the Chathams, and to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization. - In contrast, the northern (warmer) part of New Zealand, by far the largest island group in Polynesia, was suitable for Polynesian agriculture. Those Maori who remained in New Zealand increased in numbers until there were more than 100,000 of them. They developed locally dense populations chronically engaged in ferocious wars with neighboring populations. With the crop surpluses that they could grow and store, they fed craft specialists, chiefs, and part-time soldiers. They needed and developed varied tools for growing their crops, fighting, and making art. They erected elaborate ceremonial buildings and prodigious numbers of forts. Thus, Moriori and Maori societies developed from the same ancestral society, but along very different lines. - When we consider the advantages that Spaniards derived from horses, steel weapons, and armor against foot soldiers without metal, it should no longer surprise us that Spaniards consistently won battles against enormous odds. - Why didn't Atahuallpa instead try to conquer Spain? Pizarro came to Cajamarca by means of European maritime technology, which built the ships that took him across the Atlantic from Spain to Panama, and then in the Pacific from Panama to Peru. Lacking such technology, Atahuallpa did not expand overseas out of South America. - literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trap and Atahuallpa to walk into it. - How, then, did early farmers domesticate plants unwittingly? For example, how did they turn poisonous almonds into safe ones without knowing what they were doing? What changes did they actually make in wild plants, besides rendering some of them bigger or less poisonous? - One criterion, of course, is size. You prefer large berries, because it's not worth your while to get sunburned and mosquito bitten for some lousy little berries. That provides part of the explanation why many crop plants have much bigger fruits than their wild ancestors do. It's especially familiar to us that supermarket strawberries and blueberries are gigantic compared with wild ones; those differences arose only in recent centuries. - Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and of which occasional sweet individuals must have sprouted around the latrines of ancient hikers. - A clear example involves peas, whose seeds (the peas we eat) come enclosed in a pod. Wild peas have to get out of the pod if they are to germinate. To achieve that result, pea plants evolved a gene that makes the pod explode, shooting out the peas onto the ground. Pods of occasional mutant peas don't explode. In the wild the mutant peas would die entombed in their pod on their parent plants, and only the popping pods would pass on their genes. But, conversely, the only pods available to humans to harvest would be the nonpopping ones left on the plant. Thus, once humans began bringing wild peas home to eat, there was immediate selection for that single-gene mutant. - What accounts for the great differences among plants in ease of domestication, such that some species were domesticated long ago and others not until the Middle Ages, whereas still other wild plants have proved immune to all our activities? We can deduce many of the answers by examining the well-established sequence in which various crops developed in Southwest Asia's Fertile Crescent. It turns out that the earliest Fertile Crescent crops, such as the wheat and barley and peas domesticated around 10,000 years ago, arose from wild ancestors offering many advantages. They were already edible and gave high yields in the wild. They were easily grown, merely by being sown or planted. They grew quickly and could be harvested within a few months of sowing, a big advantage for incipient farmers still on the borderline between nomadic hunters and settled villagers. They could be readily stored, unlike many later crops such as strawberries and lettuce. They were mostly self-pollinating: that is, the crop varieties could pollinate themselves and pass on their own desirable genes unchanged, instead of having to hybridize with other varieties less useful to humans. Finally, their wild ancestors required very little genetic change to be converted into crops for instance, in wheat, just the mutations for nonshattering stalks and uniform quick germination. - Cereal crops have the virtues of being fast growing, high in carbohydrates, and yielding up to a ton of edible food per hectare cultivated. As a result, cereals today account for over half of all calories consumed by humans and include five of the modern world's 12 leading crops (wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum). - A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world's annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana. Cereal crops alone now account for more than half of the calories consumed by the world's human populations. With so few major crops in the world, all of them domesticated thousands of years ago, it's less surprising that many areas of the world had no wild native plants at all of outstanding potential. Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating. - Foremost among these local domesticates is the modern world's leading crop, sugarcane, of which the annual tonnage produced today nearly equals that of the number two and number three crops combined (wheat and corn). - Protein starvation is probably also the ultimate reason why cannibalism was widespread in traditional New Guinea highland societies. - you have the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness. This principle can be extended to understanding much else about life besides marriage. We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure. - a domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal's breeding and food supply. That is, domestication involves wild animals' being transformed into something more useful to humans. - The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans. - To sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning. Hence measles and similar diseases are also known as crowd diseases. - Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians' introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily drawn as a picture) by means of the sign for a depictable noun that had the same phonetic pronunciation. For instance, it's easy to draw a recognizable picture of arrow, hard to draw a recognizable picture of life, but both are pronounced ti in Sumerian, so a picture of an arrow came to mean either arrow or life. The resulting ambiguity was resolved by the addition of a silent sign called a determinative, to indicate the category of nouns to which the intended object belonged. Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle. - (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j , u, and w). - The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive. - The first and most obvious factor is relative economic advantage compared with existing technology. While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters. - The remaining consideration affecting acceptance of new technologies is the ease with which their advantages can be observed. In A.D. 1340, when firearms had not yet reached most of Europe, England's earl of Derby and earl of Salisbury happened to be present in Spain at the battle of Tarifa, where Arabs used cannons against the Spaniards. Impressed by what they saw, the earls introduced cannons to the English army, which adopted them enthusiastically and already used them against French soldiers at the battle of Crecy six years later. - The availability of cheap slave labor in classical times supposedly discouraged innovation then, whereas high wages or labor scarcity now stimulate the search for technological solutions. For example, the prospect of changed immigration policies that would cut off the supply of cheap Mexican seasonal labor to Californian farms was the immediate incentive for the development of a machine-harvestable variety of tomatoes in California. - The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and supported. - New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language groups (still with a mere 100,000 speakers) were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages. Each of those microsocieties alone was far too small to support chiefs and craft specialists, or to develop metallurgy and writing. - Agriculture was another nonstarter in Australia, which is not only the driest continent but also the one with the most infertile soils. In addition, Australia is unique in that the overwhelming influence on climate over most of the continent is an irregular nonannual cycle, the ENSO (acronym for El Nino Southern Oscillation), rather than the regular annual cycle of the seasons so familiar in most other parts of the world. Unpredictable severe droughts last for years, punctuated by equally unpredictable torrential rains and floods. Even today, with Eurasian crops and with trucks and railroads to transport produce, food production in Australia remains a risky business. - Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia's ENSO- driven resource unpredictability. When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better. Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in good years and a sufficiency in bad years. - Tasmania and those three smaller islands thus illustrate in extreme form a conclusion of broad potential significance for world history. Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture. - White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia. Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the livestock, all of the crops (except macadamia nuts), the metallurgical knowledge, the steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions, even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colonists who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. Robert Burke and William Wills were smart enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert regions where Aborigines were living. The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment. - Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople. It was already unified politically in 221 B.C. and has remained so for most of the centuries since then. From the beginnings of literacy in China, it has had only a single writing system, whereas modern Europe uses dozens of modified alphabets. Of China's 1.2 billion people, over 800 million speak Mandarin, the language with by far the largest number of native speakers in the world. Some 300 million others speak seven other languages as similar to Mandarin, and to each other, as Spanish is to Italian. Thus, not only is China not a melting pot, but it seems absurd to ask how China became Chinese. China has been Chinese, almost from the beginnings of its recorded history. - China's role was nonetheless disproportionate. For example, the prestige value of Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han'gul alphabet. That persistence of Chinese writing in Japan and Korea is a vivid 20th-century legacy of plant and animal domestication in China nearly 10,000 years ago. - Inhabitans of Rennell Island, a traditional Polynesian island that did not become West- ernized until the 1930s, told me that Westernization yielded the wonderful side benefit that the island became quiet. No more sounds of bark beaters everywhere, pounding out bark cloth from dawn until after dusk every day! - Semitic lnguages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa. Even the Semitic subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization. - The southernmost Bantu people, the Xhosa, stopped at the Fish River on South Africa's south coast, 500 miles east of Cape Town. It's not that the Cape of Good Hope itself is too dry for agriculture: it is, after all, the breadbasket of modern South Africa. Instead, the Cape has a Mediterranean climate of winter rains, in which the Bantu summer-rain crops do not grow. By 1652, the year the Dutch arrived at Cape Town with their winter-rain crops of Near Eastern origin, the Xhosa had still not spread beyond the Fish River. That seeming detail of plant geography had enormous implications for politics today. One consequence was that, once South African whites had quickly killed or infected or driven off the Cape's Khoisan population, whites could claim correctly that they had occupied the Cape before the Bantu and thus had prior rights to it. That claim needn't be taken seriously, since the prior rights of the Cape Khoisan didn't inhibit whites from dispossessing them. The much heavier consequence was that the Dutch settlers in 1652 had to contend only with a sparse population of Khoisan herders, not with a dense population of steel-equipped Bantu farmers. When whites finally spread east to encounter the Xhosa at the Fish River in 1702, a period of desperate fighting began. Even though Europeans by then could supply troops from their secure base at the Cape, it took nine wars and 175 years for their armies, advancing at an average rate of less than one mile per year, to subdue the Xhosa. How could whites have succeeded in establishing themselves at the Cape at all, if those first few arriving Dutch ships had faced such fierce resistance? Thus, the problems of modern South Africa stem at least in part from a geographic accident. The homeland of the Cape Khoisan happened to contain few wild plants suitable for domestication; the Bantu happened to inherit summer-rain crops from their ancestors of 5,000 years ago; and Europeans happened to inherit winter-rain crops from their ancestors of nearly 10,000 years ago.