Part of the reason why he had a massive technological advantage, though, is that he came from a society that had so many resources to spend on things that are strictly about waging war on its neighbors more effectively. And because its neighbors were also like that - they also had resources to spend on both the tech and the soldiers - both Spain and its opponents were engaged in a brutal never-ending arms race. So when Cortes came to the Americas, he came bearing all the fruit of that. Which in this case was technology, primarily.
With respect to food in general, it's not that it's difficult to produce at scale. But your ability to produce food is inherently limited by three factors - the land, the people to work that land, and the tech those people use. Now, pretty much any agricultural society can produce enough food to feed all the people who produce the food (and all other basic necessities besides). Everything past that point is surplus, which can then be spend to feed people who are not producing food. Which is first and foremost the rulers and the priests - and thus you start getting social stratification - but then also artisans (who make tools) and soldiers (who go and conquer more land to farm and subjugate more people to farm it). And, at some point, a portion of those elites - who have enough calories and enough leisure time to waste on "frivolous" activities not having to do with immediate survival - uses that time to do research that eventually translates to better tools. Furthermore, if their society is in a constant state of war with neighbors - as was the case in Europe for most of its history - those tools are likely to be better weapons specifically.
Horses are clearly not the single definitive factor here, but I don't see why it couldn't be a significant one. This whole setup I just described is clearly a positive feedback loop, so even relatively minor factors introduced early can compound massively over time. And if horses meant that a single European farmer could produce, say, as much food as two Incan farmers, that's a lot more resources that can be spent on waging war and on figuring out how to do it more efficiently.
I should note that the above is not a rehash of Diamond, but rather my own thoughts on this matter. Speaking for myself, I think that it's really the non-stop warfare in Europe, where no single entity managed to unify the entire continent and make it stick for long enough, that was the defining factor in pushing Europe ahead in military science specifically (and other things more or less incidental to that). And then its relatively small size meant that much of this aggressive potential was directed outside of the continent - as military tech progresses, wars of conquest against peer-level neighboring states become less and less lucrative, because you have to spend considerably more resources to conquer the same amount of land and population. Much easier to take all that tech you already have and go curb-stomp some civilization that doesn't have it yet.
One surprising fact is that hunter-gatherer societies actually have substantially more free time than agricultural ones! [1] Something probably less surpising is that And Native American tribes, African tribes, and well pretty much everybody everywhere was also constantly at war! Europe was not especially unique in that regard, at all.
I also have to add that many of the advances we're talking about are not things that require any sort of special preconditions. I can setup a furnace capable of creating and forming steel in my backyard out of clay, straw, wood, and perhaps some leather if I really want to go all out and add a billows. Similarly I can even make gunpowder in my backyard - straw, wood/charcoal, sulfur, urine, and you're good to go! One curious and experimental individual is all it takes to reshape a people.
At least if they're willing to be reshaped. There's a lot of weird things in history. For instance the Zulu were a warlike people, yet their traditional shield was made of cowhide! And it was "real" - not just ceremonial/ornamental. Obviously they were aware of the possibility of making one out of thin wood, which might be a bit heavier yet orders of magnitude more protective - yet they chose not to. Similarly they preferred to fight near naked, as opposed to wearing cowhides - which again, I think it goes without saying they were aware of the possibility of.
Even simple things like fortifications seem to largely have not been a thing in much of the world in spite of never-ending wars. Simple wooden defenses, moats, etc are utterly trivial to construct, and that sets you almost immediately down the technological path towards the massive spiraling castles that would end up dotting the European landscape. But most of these other cultures simply failed to create such things.
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EDIT: You know, thinking about this some more - I can even see this weirdness in our own cultures today. For instance everybody knows that fertility rates are plummeting to the point that most Western societies stand a large risk of simply dying off. Yet most people simply shrug. It may be that the first 'grand reshaping' of Earth was technology, but the second may simply be fertility. And an anthropologist looking back find himself struggling to answer why it was that people simply didn't adapt when the answer was right in front of them. And living through this, perhaps there is no answer - certainly no neat and tidy one.
> The surprising fact is that hunter-gatherer societies actually have substantially more free time than agricultural ones!
They don't actually have to. The reason why that is the case is because agricultural societies very quickly stratify - which happens because it is very profitable to be on the top in such society, since there's so much more surplus wealth produced by people under you that you can forcibly take away. Hunter-gatherer societies only see that at the richest end of their scale (again, the Salish were a good example of that), and even then the stratification is fairly meager by agriculturalist standards.
And so the farmers end up working more, because forcing them to work more means more surplus to take from them. But without that - i.e. if the farmer only has to feed themselves and their family - they do in fact have more leisure time than a hunter-gatherer would, simply because it takes less time to farm the same amount of calories.
> I also have to add that many of the advances we're talking about are not things that require any sort of special preconditions. I can setup a furnace capable of creating and forming steel in my backyard out of clay, straw, wood, and perhaps some leather if I really want to go all out and add a billows. Similarly I can even make gunpowder in my backyard - straw, wood/charcoal, sulfur, urine, and you're good to go!
If you already know how (and why) to make either, absolutely. But technological development itself is highly path-dependent. A person who is not familiar with the concept of smelting is not going to set up a furnace with billows out of the blue, because, well, why would they bother doing something as complicated as that with no good reason?
> For instance the Zulu were a warlike people, yet their traditional shield was made of cowhide! And it was "real" - not just ceremonial/ornamental. Obviously they were aware of the possibility of making one out of thin wood, which might be a bit heavier yet orders of magnitude more protective - yet they chose not to. Similarly they preferred to fight near naked, as opposed to wearing cowhides - which again, I think it goes without saying they were aware of the possibility of.
Yes, and many Polynesians similarly eschewed the bow for warfare despite knowing of them and even using them for sports.
But this seems to be an unstable arrangement that is easily upset. For example, Maori were also in the same boat wrt bows. But after Europeans came to New Zealand and Maori chiefs saw just how powerful guns are, a few decided that, whatever the custom is, they need to acquire some for themselves. And so they did, leading to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars, in which many traditionalist iwi were nearly wiped out, and most of them also adopted firearms out of necessity. And note that this wasn't the case of Europeans pushing the guns onto the natives - no, Hongi Hika actually organized a mission to UK to see for himself how those warlike British people live, and to obtain the same arms (he exchanged the gifts received in UK for muskets and gunpowder in Australia on his way back).
And those who refuse to change - or change in the way that makes them intentionally less competitive in warfare - end up like the Moriori...
> Even simple things like fortifications seem to largely have not been a thing in much of the world in spite of never-ending wars. Simple wooden defenses, moats, etc are utterly trivial to construct, and that sets you almost immediately down the technological path towards the massive spiraling castles that would end up dotting the European landscape. But most of these other cultures simply failed to create such things.
Did they, though? Looking at Maori again, during their earlier, more peaceful period (when their population size was small enough that living off the land could easily sustain everyone with no need to fight for resources), they didn't have fortifications. But once that was no longer the case and their culture became dominated by war, their villages very quickly turned into fortified pā.
I have to say I'm not entirely following your argument here. I mean I completely agree with what you're saying, but I think this supports my view? I'm unfamiliar with Maori history, but following with what you're saying it sounds as though their decision to not proactively advance until introduced to technology many eras ahead of their own, was indeed just that - a decision. And I think that's, more or less, the gist of the argument that I'm making.
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On the invention aspect, it seems that metal working is a pretty logical and natural path for an experimental mind. Like when you were a child and first got to play with firecrackers, didn't you do all the typical things? Place one in a bottle and see what happens. Place one under a bucket and see what happens. Bury one and see what happens. And so on. Similarly when playing with fire.
And when people early people were experimenting with fire they no doubt realized that fire has an ability to do very different things, at different heats, to different substances. Heat wood and make charcoal, heat food and its flavor and texture changes, heat dried grass or straw and it's effectively disintegrated. Heat metals and...? All you need to imagine is that perhaps you might need a hotter fire, which is far from difficult when many metals start to change color and consistency even at relatively low heats. And the knowledge that fires fed 'air' grow hotter is something that is also trivial to discover. Things like billows and ever more sophisticated setups follow relatively naturally.
With respect to food in general, it's not that it's difficult to produce at scale. But your ability to produce food is inherently limited by three factors - the land, the people to work that land, and the tech those people use. Now, pretty much any agricultural society can produce enough food to feed all the people who produce the food (and all other basic necessities besides). Everything past that point is surplus, which can then be spend to feed people who are not producing food. Which is first and foremost the rulers and the priests - and thus you start getting social stratification - but then also artisans (who make tools) and soldiers (who go and conquer more land to farm and subjugate more people to farm it). And, at some point, a portion of those elites - who have enough calories and enough leisure time to waste on "frivolous" activities not having to do with immediate survival - uses that time to do research that eventually translates to better tools. Furthermore, if their society is in a constant state of war with neighbors - as was the case in Europe for most of its history - those tools are likely to be better weapons specifically.
Horses are clearly not the single definitive factor here, but I don't see why it couldn't be a significant one. This whole setup I just described is clearly a positive feedback loop, so even relatively minor factors introduced early can compound massively over time. And if horses meant that a single European farmer could produce, say, as much food as two Incan farmers, that's a lot more resources that can be spent on waging war and on figuring out how to do it more efficiently.
I should note that the above is not a rehash of Diamond, but rather my own thoughts on this matter. Speaking for myself, I think that it's really the non-stop warfare in Europe, where no single entity managed to unify the entire continent and make it stick for long enough, that was the defining factor in pushing Europe ahead in military science specifically (and other things more or less incidental to that). And then its relatively small size meant that much of this aggressive potential was directed outside of the continent - as military tech progresses, wars of conquest against peer-level neighboring states become less and less lucrative, because you have to spend considerably more resources to conquer the same amount of land and population. Much easier to take all that tech you already have and go curb-stomp some civilization that doesn't have it yet.