Part 13 - Migration, Technology, and Disease

My ideas for this post come primarily from Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel and from a discussion of this book on Episode 67 of the Mormon Expression podcast.  Diamond's book attempts to answer the question of why some societies become much more advanced than others.  He dispels the racist notion that it has anything at all to do with the inherent intelligence of a particular race or ethnicity.

The title of the book refers only to the proximate causes.  The ultimate causes came earlier.  The proximate causes of European domination of much of the world were their superior military capabilities, and their immunity to communicable diseases.  Those abilities were developed because of their agrarian lifestyle which brought them together into cities where they developed industrial complexes.  The disease immunity came from their close proximity to farm animals from which the diseases originated, and close proximity to each other which allowed the diseases to spread.  The spread of disease encouraged the survival of those with immunities, while hunter-gatherer societies, never being exposed to the diseases, developed no such immunity.

Diamond takes the causal chain back one step further to address the question of why some groups developed agriculture while others remained primarily hunter-gatherer societies.  Diamond's argument is complex and nuanced, but the gist of it boils down to having domesticable plants and animals available and having adjacent regions of similar climate for crops to spread to other regions.  The east-west orientation Europe and Asia provides this latter requirement much better than the primarily north-south orientation of Africa and the Americas.  Diamond argues that not all animals and plants are equally domesticable and that all that are have eventually been domesticated.

The idea that I found most relevant to a critical examination of the Book of Mormon as a genuine historical document has more to do with the proximate causes than the ultimate causes that answer Diamond's central question.  What happens when an technological, agricultural society moves into a region dominated by hunter-gatherers?  We have the post-Colombian, European conquest of the Americas as an example.  First, the indigenous populations were decimated with disease for which they lacked immunity.  Disease alone reduced the native populations of many regions by as much as 90 percent.  The second effect is that European technology spread among the natives that remained.

The Book of Mormon proposes that a group of people who were relatively technologically advanced, from an agricultural society came to the Americas around 600 BC.  They brought their steel swords, farm animals, and crop seeds with them.  They presumably also brought their diseases, just like the later Europeans.  We know that the continent was already inhabited.  There should be some evidence that the technology Lehi's band brought with them spread to the native populations, but there is no evidence of steel production, nor the spread of crops and animals brought from the middle east.  There is no evidence either that the population was decimated with disease.  This is just one more example of where the Book of Mormon story does not bear out with what is known about ancient America.