Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

First, when Eurasia’s Major Five domestic mammals reached sub-Saharan Africa, they were adopted by the most diverse African peoples wherever conditions permitted. Those African herders thereby achieved a huge advantage over African hunter-gatherers and quickly displaced them. In particular, Bantu farmers who acquired cows and sheep spread out of their homeland in West Africa and within a short time overran the former hunter-gatherers in most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Even without acquiring crops, Khoisan peoples who acquired cows and sheep around 2,000 years ago displaced Khoisan hunter-gatherers over much of southern Africa. The arrival of the domestic horse in West Africa transformed warfare there and turned the area into a set of kingdoms dependent on cavalry. The only factor that prevented horses from spreading beyond West Africa was trypanosome diseases borne by tsetse flies.