This is a linkpost for the article “Ten Thousand Years of Solitude”, written by Jared Diamond for Discover Magazine in 1993, four years before he published Guns, Germs and Steel. That book focused on Diamond’s theory that the geography of Eurasia, particularly its large size and common climate, allowed civilizations there to dominate the rest of the world because it was easy to share plants, animals, technologies and ideas. This article, however, examines the opposite extreme.
Diamond looks at the intense isolation of the tribes on Tasmania—an island the size of Ireland. After waters rose, Tasmania was cut off from mainland Australia. As the people there did not have boats, they were completely isolated, and did not have any contact—or awareness—of the outside world for ten thousand years.
How might a civilization develop, all on its own, for such an incredible period of time?
If you ask any anthropologist to summarize in one phrase what was most distinctive about the Tasmanians, the answer will surely be the most primitive people still alive in recent centuries.
The “entire material corpus” of Tasmania only amounted to two dozen items in total—and did not include mounted stone stools, bone tools, or any clothing at all. Despite average low temperatures in winter of 41 degrees Fahrenheit, the Tasmanians were completely naked. In addition to the poor quality of tools in Tasmania, they also refused to eat fish, which were plentiful in the waters around the island. The material culture and wellbeing of the Tasmanians was significantly worse off than that of the Australians.
Australian products absent in Tasmania included the spear-thrower, a hand-held device to increase a spear’s throwing distance and propulsive force; ground or polished stone tools; mounted stone tools, such as hatchets or adzes with a handle; bone tools, such as needles and awls; fire-making equipment, such as a fire drill; and nets, traps, or hooks to catch fish, birds, or mammals. Without mounted stone tools, Tasmanians couldn’t fell a big tree, hollow out a canoe, or carve a wooden bowl. Without bone tools, they couldn’t sew warm clothes or watertight bark canoes.
The poverty of the Tasmanians was shocking to the first European explorers. They did not understand how the Tasmanians could have reached the island without boats, and they didn’t understand why the Tasmanians had astonishingly little technology. The ‘arrival’ question is easy to answer—they walked there when the oceans were lower—but it’s the technology question that I find most fascinating. If the Tasmanians came from Australia, then shouldn’t they at a baseline have the tools and skills that the Australians possessed at the time that they left? But in fact the Tasmanians seem to have regressed since the beginning of their isolation.
The Tasmanians actually abandoned some practices that they shared with Australia 10,000 years ago. This idea violates cherished views of human nature, since we tend to assume that history is a long record of continual progress. Nevertheless, it is now clear that Tasmanians did abandon at least two important practices.
One was the production of bone tools. With bone, one can fashion objects virtually impossible to make out of stone or wood—such as needles. In southeast Australia at the time of European discovery, aboriginal Australians were using bone tools as awls and reamers to pierce animal hides, as pins to fasten the hides into cloaks, and as needles to sew hides into still warmer clothing or to knit fishing nets. As recently as 7,000 years ago, Tasmanian tools included bone tools that resembled Australia’s awls, reamers, and needles. Thereafter, the variety of Tasmanian bone tools gradually decreased with time until they finally disappeared around 3,500 years ago. That seems a significant loss, because warm clothing sewn with bone needles would surely have been useful in Tasmanian winters.
The other, equally surprising loss was the practice of eating fish. European explorers were astonished to find that most Tasmanians lived on the coast and yet ate no fish. Tasmanians in turn were astonished to see Europeans eating fish and refused offers of fish with horrified disgust. Yet remains at archeological sites show that Tasmanians used to catch many fish species, which accounted for about 10 percent of their total calorie intake. Most of the species they caught are still common and easy to catch in Tasmanian waters today.
Over the millennia the Tasmanians developed cultural practices that left them worse off than they were before—and their isolation prevented them from fixing these mistakes.
In the closed system of the Tasmanians, maladaptation might have a better chance of surviving simply because of the lack of better-competing neighboring communities. If fish were not caught for several generations, much of the skill, technology, and ethnoscience concerned with their capture might also be forgotten. The isolated Tasmanians, unlike a group of tribes in a similar-size portion of a continent, would have had no opportunity of relearning such skills from neighbors even if they had wanted to.
The Tasmanians were not the only culture to develop these “maladaptations”, but they were unique in that they were unable to re-learn their lost skills.
One example involves Pacific Islanders who chose not to eat pigs; although the pig was their sole large domestic animal and a significant protein source, in several cases an island society decided to taboo pigs and killed them all.
But in a society closely connected with many other societies, such losses are more likely to be only temporary—either people see their neighbors continuing the practice and repent their folly, or people without the practice are outcompeted or conquered by people retaining it.
Pacific Islanders who killed their pigs eventually came to their senses and bought pigs again from other islands. In Tasmania’s isolation, though, cultural losses were irreversible. Inventions don’t just get adopted once and forever; they have to be constantly practiced and transmitted or useful techniques may be forgotten.
Diamond’s arguments in this article mirror those of Guns, Germs and Steel, and his telling of the decline of the Tasmanians is gripping. The article elaborates on this thesis—with many more examples and comparisons to other societies that developed similarly counterproductive taboos, but did not suffer the same isolation and were able to fix their mistakes.
The article also contains two other threads that I did not summarize here. One is the religious beliefs and worldviews that formed among the Tasmanians—who thought that they were the only people to exist, and the second is a graphic description of the brutalities the Europeans committed after they came in contact with the Tasmanians. I wanted to focus this summary on the technology of Tasmania—but I highly recommend reading the full article for those other details.
Sadly Discovery Magazine’s website leaves a lot to be desired, it’s clear they just threw the article from print online without checking any of the formatting. There are no line-breaks at all in the online version. If this bothers you enough then you can copy the article into some other text editor. There are characters for line breaks there—but they just don’t render properly on their website.
Note that while I haven’t seen any outside discussion of this article in particular, the consensus among historians seems to be that Guns, Germs and Steel cherry-picks its evidence and misrepresents its overall facts in order to support a thesis Diamond had decided he wanted to present as true (see e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4). As a result, my personal heuristic is to not believe any analysis that Diamond presents, since there’s a significant probability that it’s misleading in ways that I wouldn’t be able to spot.
Thank you for bringing this up—I’m sure that many people have seen those arguments and rate Diamond lower because of them. I have read each of those reddit posts over the years and have disagreements with them, I do not believe that, in it’s entirety, Diamond’s work is characterized by cherry-picking.
I find that arguments against Guns, Germs and Steel tend to be specifically about two chapters of the book, and also knock Diamond for pushing a monocausual explanation instead of a multicausual one.
The first chapter that’s most commonly criticized is the epilogue—where Diamond puts forth a potential argument for why Europe, and not China, was the major colonial power. This argument is not central to the thesis of the book in any way, and Diamond warns the reader that he’s speculating in this chapter, so I’m more than willing to look past it. I’m happy to see that none of the threads you linked to contain this line of attack, but it’s a common one I see online.
The other chapter that’s often the subject of attack is “Collision at Cajamarca” and focuses on Pizzaro’s conquest of the Incans. Again, I don’t think it’s fair to reduce a 400+ page book down to a single chapter. The main issue here is that Diamond seems to take Pizzaro’s account at face value—which I can accept as a valid criticism, but Diamond’s critics take this too far. These arguments downplay how important disease was to Pizzaro’s victory—and in some cases completely deny that Pizzaro and the Spanish won decisively. I see in those posts things like “The European conquest was hardly decisive” and “conquest was never a cut and dry issue”, citing later rebellions against Spanish rule. While it’s true that there were Indian revolts against the Spanish over the remaining centuries, the basic fact is that today they mostly speak Spanish in Peru and they don’t speak Quechua in Spain. I don’t think we can point to a few Indian revolts and claim that civilizations in Eurasia did not have an easier time conquering the New World than vice versa.
The final common argument is that Diamond focuses too much on “geographical determinism” and should instead find a variety of causes. I disagree with that line of thinking for the reasons outlined here.
Diamond’s approach is of the “rock falling down a mountain” genre. It’s much more likely that one big factor favored Eurasia, rather than lots of little things just happened to go their way time and time again. One of the few good arguments against Guns, Germs and Steel that I’ve seen is from LessWrong, and actually argues that in some places Diamond tries to find multiple factors, when in reality there are probably fewer!
In my mind a big portion of this hostility from historians comes from the fact that Diamond is himself, not an historian, and the historians aren’t happy that one of the most famous history books of the past thirty years came from someone outside of their field. You can see this hostility in some of those reddit posts. I don’t think it’s right to dismiss all of their arguments because of this, but I want to point out that they are not unbiased observers.
I would also like to link to this significantly more detailed defense of Guns, Germs and Steel. It does a much better job defending Diamond than I can here.
One problem I have with Diamond’s theory is that I doubt that there is anything for it to explain. The Americas and Eurasia/Africa were essentially isolated from each other for about 15,000 years. In 1500 AD, the Americas were roughly 3500 years less advanced than Eurasia/Africa. That seems well within the random variation one would expect between two isolated instances of human cultural development over a 15,000 year time span. If you think there is still some remaining indication that the Americas were disadvantaged, the fact that the Americas are about half the size of Eurasia/Africa seems like a sufficient explanation.
>The first chapter that’s most commonly criticized is the epilogue—where Diamond puts forth a potential argument for why Europe, and not China, was the major colonial power. This argument is not central to the thesis of the book in any way,
It is, though, because that’s a much harder question to answer. Historians think they can explain why no American civilization conquered Europe, and why the reverse was more likely, without appeal to Diamond’s thesis. This renders it scientifically useless, and leaves us without any clear reason to believe it, unless he could take his thesis farther.
The counter-Diamond argument seems to be the opposite of Scott Alexander’s “Archipelago” idea. Constant war between similar cultures led to the development and spread of highly efficient government or state institutions, especially when it came to war. Devereaux writes, “Any individual European monarch would have been wise to pull the brake on these changes, but given the continuous existential conflict in Europe no one could afford to do so and even if they did, given European fragmentation, the revolutions – military, industrial or political – would simply slide over the border into the next state.”
Devereaux’s quote there is similar to the argument that Diamond puts forward in the epilogue of his book. Diamond argues that the geography of Europe, with lots of mountains and peninsulas, encouraged the formation of lots of smaller countries, while the geography of China encouraged one large empire. So while one emperor could end Zheng He’s voyages, Europe’s geography encouraged the countries to compete and experiment. Columbus was Italian after all, but had to go to the competing kingdom of Spain to fund his voyage.
I agree that that is a harder question! Diamond doesn’t devote a ton of space to it however, the book focuses on Eurasia compared to the Americas/Africa/Oceania, and not really on Europe vs other parts of Eurasia.
My point in bringing it up is not so say necessarily that Diamond is correct, it’s just that if you read Diamond’s critics you might think that half of the book is about Pizarro and half is about Zheng He—when it’s actually mostly about things like the types of grass that cows eat.
I’m just trying to show that we can trust Diamond not to cherry-pick evidence when writing this article about Tasmania.
Perhaps you could see my point better in the context of Marxist economics? Do you know what I mean when I say that the labor theory of value doesn’t make any new predictions, relative to the theory of supply and demand? We seldom have any reason to adopt a theory if it fails to explain anything new, and its predictive power in fact seems inferior to that of a rival theory. That’s why the actual historians here are focusing on details which you consider “not central”—because, to the actual scholars, Diamond is in fact cherry-picking topics which can’t provide any good reason to adopt his thesis. His focus is kind of the problem.
Ah yes, that comparison makes sense.
The prologue to Guns, Germs, and Steel outlines what Diamond sees as the most common explanations for the differences between peoples, and then uses the rest of the book to show why they are wrong and to offer a different explanation.
These explanations are still somewhat common today, and I believe that they were much more common in 1997 when the book was published. Even in the comments section on this post there is a suggestion that the Tasmanians’ technological regression was caused by biology—a population bottleneck causing inbreeding (I’m not saying that argument is the same as the ‘Darwinian’ one, just that it is also an explanation stemming from biological differences).
Guns, Germs, and Steel kicked off a genre of discussion that attempted to explain why Europe took over the world without assuming biological superiority. It seems like at the time, Diamond was explaining something new.
Oddly enough, not all historians are total bigots, and my impression is that the anti-Archipelago version of the argument existed in academic scholarship—perhaps not in the public discourse—long before JD. E.g. McNeill published a book about fragmentation in 1982, whereas GG&S came out in 1997.
I did not intend to imply that historians were writing racist explanations for why Europe was able to colonize most of the world—sorry if that is how it came across! Instead, I believe those views were common among mainstream society. Part of that is because there had not been a cohesive, insightful, and popular alternate explanation.
McNeill is indeed one of the few historians who were investigating this question—and unfortunately I haven’t read any of his work. However, I don’t think that Jared Diamond was just repeating McNeill’s argument because the back of my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel has this excerpt from a review that McNeill gave the book:
I dug up the full review online here. There’s certainly lots of criticism in the review—particularly of that epilogue. But also pay attention to how much McNeill praises Diamond for the new ideas he brings forward.
The tone of this review is radically different from those reddit threads. The modern online discourse about Diamond has amplified all of the criticisms from early reviews like McNeill’s, but entirely removed all of the praise. One of the reddit threads compared Diamond to a student faking a chemistry experiment—I certainly don’t think that McNeill had the same perspective! McNeill seems to have an honest disagreement with Diamond, he doesn’t think that he’s a fraud.
Reading those reddit threads can definitely make someone develop a heuristic “to not believe any analysis that Diamond presents, since there’s a significant probability that it’s misleading”. But I think that’s a shame, because Diamond has lots of unique, well-praised insights that are missing from the discussion in those threads.
I offer a simpler criticism of Diamond: the historical commentary doesn’t deal in anything deeper than high-school public education as of the early 2000s, errors and all. This is the root of the “uncritically accepts” complaints. Historians don’t hold him in contempt because he isn’t a historian—it is because he seems not to have even checked the state of historical scholarship at the time of writing, much less seriously engaged with it. The book would have been much better, and much less despised, for the additional effort of one good review or summary article for each topic on colonialism he addressed.
This line leaves me wondering about human isolation on our little planet and what maladaptations humanity is stuck with because we lack neighbors to learn from.
Honestly some version of it scales to any size: planet, country, city, neighborhood, etc.
Failing to adopt cheap and plentiful nuclear power comes to mind as a potential example.
Aside from the obvious reasons already mentioned, I wonder if the reason for the regress was not partially related to compound inbreeding. In most cases when technological regress happens, it tends to coincide with a genetic bottleneck as well, which I have a hunch would make the problems worse.
For those who wondered about relative population size:
If interested...
Tasmanian Knowledge and Skill: Maladaptive Imitation or Adequate Technology? Dwight Read
I really like the overall picture that Guns, Germs and Steel presents and a book I believe compliments it very well if one is interested in the evolution of the human species is The Secret of Our Success which goes into more of the mechanisms of cultural evolution and our current theories for why Tasmanians for example fell behind mainland Australia as much as it did.