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Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

Jared Diamond

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Jared Diamond
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: September 10
Biologist
Ecologist
Geographer
Ornithologist
Physiologist
Scientist
University Teacher
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Jared Mason Diamond
Jared M. Diamond
Weapons
Native
Ridden
Advantage
Stone
Wooden
Americans
Thousands
Enabled
Military
Indian
Repeatedly
Animal
Defeat
Armies
Literature
Stones
Advantages
Numbering
Army
Dozen
Mounted
Animals
Troops
Spaniards

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Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?
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In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.
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Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
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Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
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We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about.
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It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?
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Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.
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Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
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The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
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Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.
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The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.
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Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.
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I personally am not conscious of my accent.
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We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
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African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.
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History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves
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Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
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With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
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The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
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The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.
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