Transcription
How did Europeans conquer the world? I hear a lot of talk and complaints about colonization, but why didn't Africa or the Americas colonize Europe instead of the other way around? Here's a crazy example.
In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and fewer than 200 Spanish conquistadors marched into modern-day Peru. They faced an Inca Empire with an army of 80,000 warriors with millions of residents. Using cannons, horses, and steel, the Spaniards attacked in a way the crowd had never seen. Within hours, they had slaughtered 7,000 Incas and captured the emperor Atahualpa without losing a single man. Within a generation, the entire empire fell.
This wasn't a one-time fluke. The pattern repeated itself on multiple continents. One side had steel, swords, guns, horses, oceangoing ships, writing systems. It's centralized kingdoms. The other side had stone and wooden weapons. No writing, no metal tools, and fragmented political structures. Why?
I'm Ken Lort. I do my best here to look at uncomfortable topics and give you a balanced overview. It's not about judging. It's trying to understand reality best we can. For my videos, I usually compile information from hundreds of sources, but this one is different. I took it from one, a wonderful book by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's possibly the best book I've ever read, and it reshaped how I view the world. I hope I do it justice.
He tackled the central question: why did Eurasia, the regions of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, become so successful? And he argues that it's not about intelligence or genetics, but geography. In this video, we'll look at a geographic lottery that determined which societies would dominate. We'll see how some areas hit the plant and animal jackpot and how the resulting surplus builds empires. Finally, we'll look at the invisible weapon that killed more people than guns and swords combined.
So, to understand how some tribes won the geographic lottery, we need to rewind the clock to about 11,000 BC. At that point, humans everywhere were remarkably similar. They were Homo sapiens who had basically had the same brains, the same cognitive abilities, and the same potential. Yeah, there were minor differences like skin color, body type, or adaptations to local climates, but a baby born in Europe had no built-in advantage over a baby born in Australia or the Americas or Africa. Everyone was a hunter-gatherer, following game, gathering plants, and living in small bands of people who moved with the seasons.
So, if everyone started at roughly the same place, how did things diverge so dramatically? So, look, I did a video recently on Africa, why it's still behind much of the world despite billions of dollars of help. And a lot of the comments were just like, well, they simply have lower IQs and they'll never catch up. But modern IQ tests measure abstract reasoning, literacy, and mathematical concepts taught in schools. They were designed by academics in countries to predict success in industrialized education systems.
Diamond spent years working in New Guinea. And one thing that struck him immediately was that people there were exceptionally observant, inventive, and mentally sharp. Survival demanded it. You had to know which plants were poisonous, how to read the weather, how to track animals, and mistakes would get you killed. If you gave a New Guinean farmer an IQ test designed for an American suburb, he'd bomb. He'd never seen the references or types of problems that it assumes. But if you gave a Harvard graduate a New Guinean IQ test and made him track an animal through the forest or navigate without a GPS, he'd probably be toast, too.
Diamond's conclusions were clear and persuasive. Geography determines which societies can develop agriculture, and agriculture determines everything that comes after. The societies that figured out agriculture got a massive head start by thousands of years. By the time the Europeans crossed the Atlantic with guns and steel, they had a 5,000-year advantage.
But why couldn't hunter-gatherers just catch up and develop their own complex civilizations? Because nomads, they have to stay mobile. They follow herds and track seasonal plants. If food moves, they move. And that mobility, it creates brutal constraints. One is essentially that everyone is in food-gathering mode. Calories are tough to come by, and they take a tribe's time and effort. And when you're constantly on the move, you can't accumulate possessions. You can't store food long-term. Everything you own has to be carried on your back. That means no heavy pottery or tools or building materials. A nomadic mother, she can only carry one child while she's also gathering food and hauling possessions. So hunter-gatherer women spaced births out about four years apart. Settled farmers space births out about every two years. That's half the population growth rate right there. Over centuries, that difference compounds into massive population gaps.
Or think about injuries. If you break your leg in a settled farming village, you heal. You break your leg as a nomad and you're a burden that the band can't afford. Either they leave you behind or the whole group slows down and risks starvation. The same goes for the elderly or the sick. And forget about developing more complex technology that requires time to tinker, experiment, fail. It just doesn't work. It's time you don't have when you're spending every day searching for food.
So, the first societies to stop moving were the first to start building. Agriculture allowed people to settle down and stay in one place, to accumulate surplus food, and that surplus food changed everything. Now, you might be thinking, okay, so why didn't everyone just figure out agriculture at the same time? How hard can it be to plant some seeds? As it turns out, it's really hard.
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Okay, so back to planting food and building civilizations. So agriculture just didn't happen everywhere at once. It happened in a handful of specific places. And those places shared something important. They all hit the plant and animal jackpot. Most wild plants are garbage for farming. They're inedible, poisonous, or so low in calories that they're just not worth the effort to cultivate. Out of the hundreds of thousands of plant species on Earth, only a few dozen ever made good crops. And the Fertile Crescent had a whole bunch of them. The region stretching from modern-day Egypt through Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and down into Iraq and Iran. It held wild wheat, barley, peas, and lentils growing naturally. And those weren't finicky plants. They had large seeds, predictable growth cycles, and they could be replanted easily.
China got pretty lucky, too. They had rice and millet. They were both solid crops that could support dense populations. The Americas eventually developed corn, but wild corn, called teosinte, was basically useless. It's scraggly grass with tiny kernels. And it took Native Americans 3,000 years of selective breeding to turn it into something that resembled modern corn. Think about that for a second. While one group of humans spent thousands of years slowly improving a single crop, people in the Fertile Crescent were already building cities.
Sub-Saharan Africa had sorghum. They were decent crops, but Africa had fewer plant species to choose from overall. And the Sahara Desert created a massive barrier that slowed the spread of agriculture and information from the Fertile Crescent. Australia essentially got nothing that could be farmed. Here's how lopsided this lottery was. 33 of the world's 56 most valuable wild grasses grew in the Fertile Crescent. That's why agriculture started there first. They had the raw materials, but plants are only half the story.
Animals matter just as much, maybe more. And similar to plants, there are lots of species, but only a few are easy to grow. Throughout all of human history, only about 14 large mammal species have ever been successfully domesticated. And there are strict requirements for why some animals can be tamed and others can't. It has to grow fast and breed in captivity. It needs a common enough disposition so it won't kill you. And it needs to live in a social hierarchy that humans can exploit. Basically, the animal has to recognize a pecking order. And you need to be able to slot yourself at the top. Again, Eurasia hit the jackpot. Sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, horses, donkeys, camels. That's seven of the big 14 species right there. The Americas had llamas and alpacas. That's it. And only in South America. North America, Africa, and Australia, zero.
And it's not like people didn't try. Native Americans desperately wanted to domesticate bison. Africans tried with zebras and antelopes, but it just didn't work. So why couldn't they domesticate bison? I mean, they don't seem all that different from cattle, but they are. When cattle are threatened, they bunch together. It's a defensive strategy that makes them manageable. Bison panic and stampede. Try to pen them in and they'll trample you or each other. Zebras, they look like nice stripey horses, but they're vicious. They bite and they don't let go. They can kick hard enough to kill a lion. Even in modern times, with all our knowledge and tools, we still can't domesticate zebras on a broad scale. Horses are skittish, but they're trainable. Zebras, they just aren't wired that way. So, this wasn't a failure of effort or ingenuity. It was biology. It was luck. Some animals can be domesticated. Most can't.
And geography shaped one more crucial advantage as well. Eurasia runs east-west, and you can travel 5,000 miles from Portugal to China and stay in roughly the same latitude. That means the same climate, the same growing season, and the same day length. Wheat domesticated in the Fertile Crescent could be spread to Europe, India, and China. Farmers didn't have to reinvent agriculture, but they could take what worked in one place and plant it somewhere else.
Africa and the Americas, they run north-south. You know, try taking corn from Mexico and plant it in Canada. It just doesn't work. They have different growing seasons and climates. Crops hit a different climate zone barrier and they stop spreading. Africa has the same problem, especially with the Sahara Desert cutting it right in half. It means thousands of years of lost agriculture knowledge that never spread. So, while Eurasian farmers were swapping seeds and sharing innovations across an entire continent, American and African farmers, they were stuck starting from scratch. It's a geographic orientation problem, and it's massive.
Okay. So once agriculture takes hold, everything changes because now there's a food surplus, and that surplus, it builds empires. When 20 farmers can feed a hundred people, that changes everything. When they could then, for the first time in their history, not everyone needed to spend their day hunting for food and gathering plants. Surplus gives you extra calories and extra time. It creates specialists. In a hunter-gatherer band, everyone hunts and gathers. There's no room for a guy who sits around thinking about better ways to make tools. But once you have agriculture, you can afford to have people who don't produce food. In fact, one of the first things you need when you have a surplus food is a way to store it, something permanent. Then you want guys to guard the food from animals or other tribes. Someone needs to organize and decide how and when to distribute the food. And the basics of government start to emerge. Later in development, professional armies conquer their neighbors. And those conquests bring in more land, more resources, more people. Civilization grows.
And here's where political structure becomes crucial. Innovation spread. Eurasia was fragmented in a way that actually helped ideas spread. It wasn't one giant unified empire, but competing kingdoms and city-states and feudal territories connected by trade and migration. When one kingdom invented something useful like better plows, bronze weapons, or gunpowder, that knowledge didn't stay contained. It spread in multiple ways. Essentially, it was adapt or die. Merchants carried innovations along routes connecting competing kingdoms. Craftsmen, inventors, they moved between territories, bringing their knowledge with them. And with important technology, you either adapted or someone took you over with it. And the east-west axis of Eurasia meant those innovations could travel thousands of miles without hitting climate barriers. Gunpowder invented in China reached Europe. Steelmaking techniques developed in the Middle East spread to India and Europe.
The Americas didn't have that same political structure or connectivity. So, innovation stayed local. The Maya developed writing, but it never spread to the Inca or the Aztecs. Each civilization was reinventing the wheel, sometimes literally. But China had the problem of too much unity. When China's emperor decided to halt oceanic exploration in the 1400s, that decision stuck for the entire huge empire. In Europe, when one kingdom stopped exploring, others continued. Spain's rivals couldn't afford to let Spain monopolize the New World. And technology, well, it kind of builds on itself. See, Eurasia moved from stone tools to copper to bronze to iron. So, when Cortez arrived in the Americas in the 1500s, the Aztecs were still in the Stone Age, literally. I mean, they had obsidian blades, which weren't terrible, but against steel swords, it wasn't even close.
But it wasn't because the Aztecs were dumb or lazy. It was because they started late. They didn't have the 5,000-year head start that Eurasia had. The Fertile Crescent got agriculture around 8,500 BC. Mesoamerica didn't get it until around 3,500 BC, 5,000 years. Now, put it in modern terms so that we can see how impossible this gap was to overcome. Imagine us here in the United States being attacked by a civilization just a hundred years younger than us. Think of the 1926 US Army attacking modern-day America. It it it would be almost laughable, and it wouldn't be a fight. Now, do the reverse. Try to imagine a society advanced 5,000 more years into the future attacking us, and how our military would fare against that or anything. I mean, I can't even fathom what that might look like. That's the situation that the Incas and the Native Americans and the Africans faced when Europeans arrived. They were fighting enemies that were millennia ahead of them.
But the most fearsome thing the Europeans brought to the Americas wasn't guns or steel swords or horses. It was germs. Europe's invisible and unintentional weapon. And the devastation was almost unimaginable. Scholars generally agree that over 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas died from disease after European contact. If you lived in a village of a hundred people, within a generation, only a handful of you would still be alive. Smallpox killed more Native Americans than all of the European weapons combined by a landslide. And some empires collapsed before the Europeans even showed up. The Inca Emperor Huayna Capac, he died of smallpox in 1527 without ever seeing a Spaniard. The disease traveled faster than the conquistadors did, spreading through trade routes and wiping out populations before Europeans ever arrived to conquer them. By the time Pizarro marched into Peru, the Inca Empire was already in chaos. A smallpox epidemic had killed the previous emperor and sparked a civil war over succession.
But why didn't it work the other way around? Why didn't Native American diseases wipe out the Europeans? Why was it a one-way street? Europeans brought smallpox, measles, flu, typhus, plague, tuberculosis, and more. The Europeans, the only thing they got from the natives was syphilis. The exchange wasn't even close. And the answer goes back to those domesticated animals. Those sheep, pigs, cows, and other animals. They weren't just food and labor. They were also disease factories. Eurasians lived intimately with their domesticated animals for thousands of years. They slept in the same structures, handled them daily. They breathed the same air. And diseases often leap from animal to humans. Smallpox jumped from cattle. Flu morphed from diseases in pigs and ducks. Measles came from cattle and sheep. It goes on and on. Native Americans had fewer domesticated animals and never lived in close quarters with them. So, they never developed these diseases.
But animals alone weren't enough to create some killer epidemics. You also needed something else. Lots of people, like cities. Diseases like measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis are what they call crowd diseases. They need large, dense populations to survive and keep progressing. Measles, for instance, it needs at least 500,000 people to keep circulating. And if the population is smaller than that, the disease burns through everyone and then it dies out as well. So hunter-gatherers, they didn't get those. A band of 50 people moving through the forest, it it's just not enough bodies for measles to survive. But agriculture created the population density, and thousands of people packed together were the perfect breeding ground. And the diseases were brutal over centuries and centuries. They killed millions of people across Europe, Asia, North Africa for thousands of years. But here's the thing about epidemic diseases. If you survive them once, you're often immune for life. Your body develops antibodies, and sometimes those are passed down. Over thousands of years, Eurasians developed genetic resistance. Not complete immunity, but enough that the diseases were manageable. The Americas didn't have any kind of protection like that. So when the Europeans arrived with all of these invisible plagues, Native Americans had zero defenses. The geographic lottery didn't just determine who had steel and guns. It determined germs as well. And that turned out to be the deadliest weapon of all.
So I started asking why the Europeans had taken over the world. But that certainly doesn't mean it's going to last forever. I mean, geography isn't destiny forever, and the advantages have shifted. Modern technology, it spreads globally in in in months, not thousands of years. But understanding this history matters, and it explains the world we inherited. It also helps explain why Africa is in compared to the rest of the world now. I mean, the world has given billions of dollars to the continent, and and to many, it seems like the problems are still there. And I ask a tough question: is it a lost cause? But as always, there's a twist to these things, and it's a fascinating video. I learned a lot from it. I'm Ken Lort. I did my best to give you these arguments straight. It's a terrific book. Thank you for watching and see you next time.