Reading 3

This passage is taken from a book titled Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (© 1997 Jared Diamond).

1. Where do innovations actually
2. come from? For all societies
3. except the few past ones that
4. were completely isolated, much or
5. most new technology is not
6. invented locally but is instead
7. borrowed from other societies.
8. The relative importance of local
9. invention and of borrowing
10. depends mainly on two factors:
11. the ease of invention of the
12. particular technology, and the
13. proximity of the particular society
14. to other societies.
15. Some inventions arose
16. straightforwardly from a handling
17. of natural raw materials. Such
18. inventions developed on many
19. independent occasions in world
20. history, at different places and
21. times. One example is plant
22. domestication, with at least nine
23. independent origins. Another is
24. pottery, which may have arisen
25. from observations of the behavior
26. of clay, a very widespread natural
27. material, when dried or heated.
28. Pottery appeared in Japan around
29. 14,000 years ago, in the Fertile
30. Crescent and China by around
31. 10,000 years ago, and in
32. Amazonia, Africa’s Sahel zone,
33. the U.S. Southeast, and
34. Mexico thereafter.
35. An example of a much more
36. difficult invention is writing,
37. which does not suggest itself
38. by observation of any natural
39. material. It had only a few
40. independent origins, and the
41. alphabet arose apparently only
42. once in world history. Other
43. difficult inventions include the
44. water wheel, magnetic compass,
45. and windmill, all of which were
46. invented only once or twice in the
47. Old World and never in the New
48. World. Such complex inventions
49. were usually acquired by
50. borrowing, because they spread
51. more rapidly than they could be
52. independently invented locally.
53. A clear example is the wheel,
54. which is first attested around
55. 3400 B.C near the Black Sea,
56. and then turns up within the next
57. few centuries over much of
58. Europe and Asia. All those early
59. Old World wheels are of a
60. peculiar design: a solid wooden
61. circle constructed of three planks
62. fastened together, rather than a
63. rim with spokes. In contrast, the
64. sole wheels of Native American
65. societies (depicted on Mexican
66. ceramic vessels) consisted of a
67. single piece, suggesting a second
68. independent invention of the
69. wheel—as one would expect from
70. other evidence for the isolation
71. of New World from Old World
72. civilizations.
73. No one thinks that that same
74. peculiar Old World wheel design
75. appeared repeatedly by chance at
76. many separate sites of the
77. Old World within a few centuries
78. of each other, after 7 million years
79. of wheel-less human history.
80. Instead, the utility of the wheel
81. surely caused it to diffuse rapidly
82. east and west over the Old World
83. from its sole site of invention.
84. Other examples of complex
85. technologies that diffused east
86. and west in the ancient Old
87. World, from a single West Asian
88. source, included door locks,
89. pulleys, rotary querns, windmills
90. —and the alphabet. A New World
91. example of technological
92. diffusion is metallurgy, which
93. spread from the Andes via
94. Panama to Mesoamerica.
95. When a widely useful invention
96. does crop up in one society, it
97. then tends to spread in either of
98. two ways. One way is that other
99. societies see or learn of the
100. invention, are receptive to it,
101. and adopt it. The second is that
102. societies lacking the invention
103. find themselves at a disadvantage
104. vis-à-vis the inventing society,
105. and they become overwhelmed
106. and replaced if the disadvantage
107. is sufficiently great.
108. A simple example is the spread of
109. muskets among New Zealand’s
110. Maori tribes. One tribe, the
111. Nagapuhi, adopted muskets from
112. European traders around 1818.
113. Over the course of the next 15
114. years, New Zealand was
115. convulsed by the so-called Musket
116. Wars, as musketless tribes either
117. acquired muskets or were
118. subjugated by tribes already
119. armed with them. The outcome
120. was that musket technology had
121. spread throughout the whole of
122. New Zealand by 1833: all
123. surviving Maori tribes now had
124. muskets.