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

by Jared Diamond

The most direct contribution of plant and animal domestication to wars of conquest was from Eurasia’s horses, whose military role made them the jeeps and Sherman tanks of ancient warfare on that continent. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, they enabled Cortés and Pizarro, leading only small bands of adventurers, to overthrow the Aztec and Inca Empires. Even much earlier (around 4000 B.C.), at a time when horses were still ridden bareback, they may have been the essential military ingredient behind the westward expansion of speakers of Indo-European languages from the Ukraine. Those languages eventually replaced all earlier western European languages except Basque. When horses later were yoked to wagons and other vehicles, horse-drawn battle chariots (invented around 1800 B.C.) proceeded to revolutionize warfare in the Near East, the Mediterranean region, and China. For example, in 1674 B.C., horses even enabled a foreign people, the Hyksos, to conquer then horseless Egypt and to establish themselves temporarily as pharaohs.