In which the author sets out to explain why (among other things) Europe colonised Africa rather than the other way round.

This was quite a long book, and there were a lot of useful nuggets of information in there. For example:

• Hunter-gather cultures spend most of their time looking for food. It's only when societies began to farm and store food that they had spare capacity to develop other abilities/technologies/political organization. Therefore a key factor to "civilisation" is farming
• Different areas of the world varied dramatically in the "raw materials" available - in terms of animals suitable for domestication, plants suitable for cultivation, climate suitable for farming, etc.
• Europe has an advantage over Africa and America in that it is more wide (longitudinally) and has relatively fewer mountainous regions, which means the climate is less varied, and so crops and animals are more compatible over the region. In comparison, both Africa and the Americas are taller (cover more latitudes) and so much more varied in climate.
• A consequence of domesticating animals is that you're in closer contact with them, and this is a major source of disease. So a society which farms animals will tend to evolve resistance to diseases. So when the Spaniards invaded the Americas, one of the major reasons they conquered the Incas and Aztecs was that they brought disease with them to which the natives had no defence. There was only one native species (llama) in the Americas which was suitable for domestication.
• Why do humans only raise a small set of animals (cattle, sheep, pigs, goats) for meat? It's not because they don't taste good, rather:
  • Meat-eating animals (e.g. lions) are very expensive to raise; you not only have to feed them, you have to feed the animals that they eat
  • Many species (e.g. zebra, giraffe, bear) can be tamed individually, but attempts to domesticate then and raise them in herds do not work because the animals are not amenable to it (e.g. won't breed in captivity)
  • Some species don't grow fast enough to make it viable to farm (e.g. elephants)
  • Some animals have a "nasty disposition", e.g. African Buffalo
• Australia was home to many large mammal species, all of which died out shortly after humans arrived. This is likely because they never evolved alongside humans and so had no defences when the humans suddenly appeared

If I had to criticise, then I thought perhaps he tended to over-labour the point on certain things. Also, it felt as if he was trying not to offend anyone - emphasising that it is likely to be differences in environment, rather than racial distinctions, which lead to one group of people gaining superiority over another. Not that I disagree with him, but it sometimes came across as a bit deliberately uncontroversial.

Completed : 18-Aug-2003