Guns, germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Germs and Steel the two groups separated, they evolved in opposite directions, the North Island Maori developing more-complex and the Moriori lesscomplex technology and political organization. The Moriori reverted to being hunter-gatherers, while the North Island Maori turned to more intensive farming.

Those opposite evolutionary courses sealed the outcome of their eventual collision. If we could understand the reasons for the disparate development of those two island societies, we might have a model for understanding the broader question of differing developments on the continents.

MORIORI AND MAORI history constitutes a brief, small-scale natural experiment that tests how environments affect human societies. Before you read a whole book Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel examining environmental effects on a very large scale – effects on human societies around the world for the last 13,000 years – you might reasonably want assurance, from smaller tests, that such effects really are significant. If you were a laboratory scientist studying rats, you might perform such a test by taking one rat colony, distributing groups of those ancestral rats among many cages with differing environments, and coming back many rat generations later to see what had happened. Of course, such purposeful experiments cannot be carried out on human societies. Instead, scientists must look for "natural experiments," in which something similar befell humans in the past.

Such an experiment unfolded during the settlement of Polynesia. Scattered over the Pacific Ocean beyond New Guinea and Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel Melanesia are thousands of islands differing greatly in area, isolation, elevation, climate, productivity, and geological and biological resources (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1. Polynesian islands. (Parentheses denote some non-Polynesian lands.) For most of human history those islands lay far beyond the reach of watercraft. Around Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel 1200 B.C. a group of farming, fishing, seafaring people from the Bismarck Archipelago north of New Guinea finally succeeded in reaching some of those islands. Over the following centuries their descendants colonized virtually every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific. The process was mostly complete by A.D. 500, with the last few islands settled around or soon after A.D. 1000.

Thus, within a modest time span, enormously diverse island environments were settled by colonists all of whom stemmed from the same founding population. The ultimate ancestors of all modern Polynesian populations shared essentially the same culture, language, technology, and set of domesticated plants and animals. Hence Polynesian history constitutes a natural Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel experiment allowing us to study human adaptation, devoid of the usual complications of multiple waves of disparate colonists that often frustrate our attempts to understand adaptation elsewhere in the world.

Within that medium-sized test, the fate of the Moriori forms a smaller test. It is easy to trace how the differing environments of the Chatham Islands and of New Zealand molded the Moriori and the Maori differently. While those ancestral Maori who first colonized the Chathams may have been farmers, Maori tropical crops could not grow in the Chathams' cold climate, and the colonists had no alternative except to revert to being hunter-gatherers. Since as huntergatherers they did not produce crop surpluses available for redistribution or Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel storage, they could not support and feed nonhunting craft specialists, armies, bureaucrats, and chiefs. Their prey were seals, shellfish, nesting seabirds, and fish that could be captured by hand or with clubs and required no more elaborate technology.

In addition, the Chathams are relatively small and remote islands, capable of supporting a total population of only about 2,000 hunter-gatherers. With no other accessible