GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

358 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
societies (the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the U.S. Southeast) were never
connected by fast, high-volume trade on the scale that brought plague,
influenza, and possibly smallpox to Europe from Asia. As a result, even
malaria and yellow fever, the infectious diseases that eventually became
major obstacles to European colonization of the American tropics, and
that posed the biggest barrier to the construction of the Panama Canal,
are not American diseases at all but are caused by microbes of Old World
tropical origin, introduced to the Americas by Europeans.
Rivaling germs as proximate factors behind Europe's conquest of the
Americas were the differences in all aspects of technology. These differences
stemmed ultimately from Eurasia's much longer history of densely
populated, economically specialized, politically centralized, interacting
and competing societies dependent on food production. Five areas of technology
may be singled out:
First, metals—initially copper, then bronze, and finally iron—were used
for tools in all complex Eurasian societies as of 1492. In contrast, although
copper, silver, gold, and alloys were used for ornaments in the Andes and
some other parts of the Americas, stone and wood and bone were still the
principal materials for tools in all Native American societies, which made
only limited local use of copper tools.
Second, military technology was far more potent in Eurasia than in the
Americas. European weapons were steel swords, lances, and daggers, supplemented
by small firearms and artillery, while body armor and helmets
were also made of solid steel or else of chain mail. In place of steel, Native
Americans used clubs and axes of stone or wood (occasionally copper in
the Andes), slings, bows and arrows, and quilted armor, constituting much
less effective protection and weaponry. In addition, Native American
armies had no animals to oppose to horses, whose value for assaults and
fast transport gave Europeans an overwhelming advantage until some
Native American societies themselves adopted them.
Third, Eurasian societies enjoyed a huge advantage in their sources of
power to operate machines. The earliest advance over human muscle
power was the use of animals—cattle, horses, and donkeys—to pull plows
and to turn wheels for grinding grain, raising water, and irrigating or
draining fields. Waterwheels appeared in Roman times and then proliferated,
along with tidal mills and windmills, in the Middle Ages. Coupled to
systems of geared wheels, those engines harnessing water and wind power
were used not only to grind grain and move water but also to serve myriad