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?
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.
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 and steel,
because they're the biggest questions of human history.
What separates the haves from the have-nots?
How have guns, germs and steel shaped the history of the world?
Jared Diamond's quest
to uncover the roots of inequality
began in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea.
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.
Look, look, look, look, look.
Diamond has been making regular trips
to new Guinea ever since,
and is now a leading expert on the bird life of the island.
Good morning.
But in the course of his fieldwork,
he's become just as curious about the people of new Guinea.
Plenty fish you got?
Over the years,
I've gotten to know and like thousands of new Guineans.
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.
Look 'em, look 'em, look 'em!
Look 'em, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
They are among the most culturally diverse
and adaptable people in the world.
So why are they so much poorer than modern Americans?
The question was put to Diamond bluntly
by a man called yali...
whom he met on a beach more than 30 years ago.
why you white men have so much cargo
and we new Guineans have so little?
Yali's question really threw me.
It seemed 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.
why you white men have so much cargo
and we new Guineans have so little?
New Guineans use the word "cargo"
to describe the material goods
first brought to their country by westerners.
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 their 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.
Me try this step.
I wouldn't know where to start...
in this environment I'd be helpless without them.
So why didn't these ingenious people invent metal tools
or build great cities
or develop any of the other trappings
of modern civilization?
The world that I'm from is so different.
The modern U.S. 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.
How did our worlds ever become so different?
Diamond realized that yali's question
was far bigger and more complex than it first appeared.
It was really about the roots of inequality.
A question as old as human history itself.
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 Maya?
All great civilizations have had some things in common...
advanced technology, large populations,
and a well-organized workforce.
If I could understand
how those things came into existence,
then I'd understand
why some people marched faster than others
during the course of history.
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?
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.
13,000 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.
13,000 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 or plants to gather.
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 rainforest of Papua New Guinea.
Instead of just reading about this lifestyle
in archaeological books,
I've been lucky enough to witness it firsthand.
To see for myself how we all lived 13,000 years ago...
and how we found food.
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.
13,000 years ago people in the middle east
hunted in the same way,
tracking down whatever game they could find.
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...
and with a bow and arrow,
there's no certainty of how the hunt will end.
Ugh!
You no can laugh. Me try again.
Pull it. Ok.
Ugh!
One time more.
Yes. You're pulling strong.
Me pull strong.
Yeah, you're pulling strong.
Me pray broken bow.
You no strong.
Me no strong.
You pulling strong.
Me pulling strong.
Grrr...aah!
Ah ha ha ha!
I did it!
You number one, me 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.
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.
There are just a few sago trees,
and the rest of these trees
don't yield anything that we could eat.
And then sago itself has 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 not a great deal of food.
Plus the sago starch is low on protein,
and also the sago can't be stored for a long time.
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 sago swamp.
In the middle east
there were very different plants to gather.
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 a course towards modern civilization.
But it would take a catastrophic change in the climate
before this would happen.
12 and a half thousand years ago,
the world's climate became highly volatile.
The long-term thaw
that had brought about the end of the last ice age
suddenly went into reverse.
Global temperatures dropped and 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.
Here in the middle east
a new way of life would come into being...
one that would change the face of the earth.
Ian kuijt is a Canadian archaeologist
who specializes in the stone age history of the middle east.
His work has focused on a site in the Jordan valley,
near the dead sea... a place known as dhra.
Kuijt 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.
They believe this was a small village...
one of the earliest permanent villages anywhere in the world.
People were starting to put down roots.
Kuijt: what we would have had was this village of...
I don't know... 40 to 50 people living in the same place.
We would have had a series of oval huts
that would have been partially cut into the ground,
and these would have been very much the first time
people settled down and lived in communities
in a really extensive way.
When they radiocarbon-dated the site,
they discovered that the village first emerged
11 and a half thousand years ago...
at the same time as the end of the drought
in the middle east.
But how was it possible to feed an entire village
if times were so hard?
After four years of digging at dhra,
the archaeologists believe they have an answer.
It lies in this unique structure.
Kuijt: what you can see here is the outline
of a mud wall coming all the way around here,
and 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 there 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 were able to store food
in a particular location on a year-round basis.
The team at dhra 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.
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.
Kuijt: rather than just following food sources
around different locations,
for the first time, what people start to do
was that they'd 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.
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.
Kuijt: they interrupted the cycle...
they interrupted the normal environmental cycle
and started to select these individual plants
and basically rewarding those
that were gonna be most profitable to them.
And so even though it was accidental,
once that whole process started,
people were starting to control nature.
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.
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 gonna be at a chronic disadvantage.
Now I needed to know
where else in the ancient world people had 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 yali's 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 cereal grass... rice.
Pockets of farming also emerged in the americas...
based on corn, squash and beans.
Later in Africa, people farmed sorghum, millet and yams.
And in most places where 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 believe that people have been farming here
for almost 10,000 years...
almost as long as the people of the middle east.
It's amazing to think
that these people, yali'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.
Taro is much more work.
You got to plant it one by one,
unlike wheat, where you throw your hand and spread the seed.
These new Guinea crops can't be stored for years
the way wheat can.
They rot quickly.
They have to be eaten 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.
There's not much protein to be gotten
from new Guinea's other crops, either.
People here farm local varieties of bananas.
But although bananas are rich in sugar and starch,
like taro, 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 farmers.
Ultimately it came down to geographic luck.
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 a fifth of all the calories they eat.
The wealth of modern America
could never have been sustained by taro and bananas.
But Diamond's 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.
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 on-going 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 package, you know,
is seen to be mutually beneficial
both for the animals and the plants
and of course for the humans.
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 it 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 that you get
from those European and Asian animals.
Pigs don't give you milk or wool or leather or hides.
Most important of all, pigs can't be used for muscle power.
Pigs don't pull plows or pull carts.
The only muscle power in new 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 farm animals were so useful,
why didn't new Guineans domesticate any of their own?
I decided to add 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.
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 impractical to farm.
So are most carnivores, not because they're dangerous,
but because you'd have to grow other animals just to feed them.
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.
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's 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 the whole herd or whole flock.
There's 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 100 pounds.
But of those 148,
the number that have ever been successfully farmed
for any length of time is just 14.
Goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys,
bactrian camels, Arabian camels, water buffalo, llamas, reindeer,
yaks, mithans and Bali cattle.
Just 14 large domestic animals
in 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...
or 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 four 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.
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.
What had begun
with the sowing of wheat and the penning of goats
was leading towards the first human civilization.
The archaeological site of gwair in Southern Jordan
is 9,000 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 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 the concept of homes.
It's not a place just to sleep.
It is a proper home,
and people started to decorate the houses from the inside,
and people were starting to invest in their homes,
because if we are talking about plaster,
it is time-consuming, it's effort-consuming.
It's very expensive to have a 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.
Making plaster from limestone
was a major technological breakthrough.
The stones had to be heated for days at a time
at a temperature of 1,000 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.
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 new Guinea develop metal tools by itself?
And eventually I realized that to have metalworking specialists
who can figure out how to smelt 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 metalworkers, 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.
Yet for all its advantages, the fertile Crescent
is not the powerhouse of the modern world...
nor is it the bread basket 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.
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 overexploited,
the trees had been cut,
and this is what you face at the end.
I mean, you are facing the wall.
You will end with landscape like that,
with few trees, with no grass, and with less water.
So what we are looking at today
is the outcome of overexploiting the environment.
Unable to farm their land,
entire communities were forced to move on.
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 land mass... 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's that so important?
Because any two points on the globe
that share the same latitude
automatically share the same length of day,
and they often share a similar climate and vegetation.
Crops or animals domesticated in the fertile Crescent
were able to prosper at other places
along the east-west axis of eurasia.
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.
Once the crops and animals of the fertile Crescent
reached Egypt,
they caused an explosion of civilization.
Suddenly there was enough food
to feed the pharaohs and generals,
the engineers and scribes...
and the armies of people required to build the pyramids.
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.
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
in all the americas.
Now there are 100 million cattle in the U.S. alone,
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.
Diamond's been criticized for being too deterministic,
for ignoring the part people have played
in shaping their own destiny.
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're mainly the result of inequality,
they're not its root cause.
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
trying to catch up with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately for them, there's still a big gap to overcome.
why you white men have so much cargo
and we new Guineans have so little?
Yali 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.
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.
But can his way of seeing the world
really shed light
on the turning points of human history?
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?