#31789: DouglasG — 07/12  at  07:44 AM
I have often found that to be the case as well. That was noticeably true in the "History Detectives" before "Guns, Germs, and Steel" What could have been a 5 minute segment was dragged out to a 25 minute segment. It might be quicker to read the book...

#31790: coturnix — 07/12  at  07:45 AM
I missed it, and will miss next two weeks again, as I am teaching summer school on Monday nights. Documentaries tend to drive me crazy in the same way - too little stuff in too much time.

#31791: — 07/12  at  07:47 AM
Maybe it's not just the format. I'm about three quarters of the way through the book and while I like it a lot there's two problems I have with it. One, and it's easily the most irksome, is the complete absence of footnotes. Time and again he'll say something like "archeological finds date the earliest domestication of x at time y". I want to know what finds, and what papers to read on them. The other, less troublesome, is the way his prose style keeps on looping back to make the exact same point again and again in different forms, as a kind of reinforcement. I'd much rather he presented more evidence or cut the book's length by a half.

#31797: Pete — 07/12  at  08:52 AM
My thoughts exactly, PZ - and we didn't even get to see the whole process of pith extraction through to the final product! I think that actually showing the biogeography of the various places does bring his point home more viscerally, and the series might entice more people to read the book (or his new book, Collapse, which I'm waiting for in softcover.)

I think his arguments are very sound and interesting. But what I always wondered was, is the explanandum very interesting? Imagine if the world's landmasses consisted of six equally-sized and equally-spaced continents, three in the Northern hemisphere and three in the southern, all with the same plant and animal species, and the same geographical features, and you took a few hundred thousand humans from 50,000 years ago and sprinkled them on each continent. Would you expect the first exploration fleets of the cultures that develop to collide with each other at some point in the mid-ocean, and find that they had developed to exactly the same technological level at the same time? Or would stochastic fluctuations govern the rate at which technology progressed, leading to a few cultures dominating the globe?

I think Diamond is right that the basic ingredients have to be there, and not every place on the globe has them, but even if every place on the globe did have them, then random fluctuations would still have led to inequality.

#31801: — 07/12  at  09:15 AM
"I think Diamond is right that the basic ingredients have to be there, and not every place on the globe has them, but even if every place on the globe did have them, then random fluctuations would still have led to inequality."

Inequality yes, but utter disparity? The difference in technological terms between the Europeans who 'discovered' Tasmania and the Tasmanians who lived there could scarcely haven been greater.

#31803: coturnix — 07/12  at  09:20 AM
Collapse is much better, IMHO.

And I agree with Ginger that in Pete's scenario there would be disparity, and definitely difference, but that it would be far from the chasm we actually see.

#31810: Ali — 07/12  at  10:37 AM
I've got to admit I was fairly disappointed. The conclusions he came to were the same ones I did in grade school Social Studies class. If I had known PBS would give me a documentary on that... well, you would have seen this show years ago, with only a slightly more annoying, pubescent voice narrating. I agree with PZ - the real information was sparse, which is especially frustrating, given that PBS is one of the few outlets available for more dense, less-easily-consumed information. If there was something more substantive than my schoolboy meanderings on the topic, I didn't see it.

#31816: — 07/12  at  11:14 AM
Wait a minute! Are you all saying that TV might not be the best place to get information?! I'm shocked!

#31817: Ali — 07/12  at  11:16 AM
I should have said "PBS is one of the few outlets on TV" - but yeah, I guess I should go read a book instead.

#31819: — 07/12  at  11:19 AM
On a more sci-fi-ish note, Diamond's basic premise of agriculture=civilization has made me wonder: what sort of society might emerge if there were people in an ecosystem that _did_ productively support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with many fruiting plants _and_ an abundance of of megafauna (there's no such terrestrial ecosystem...but one can dream).

Civilization without farmers...without economy as we know it. Trying to concieve of such a thing can _really_ stretch the brain. Too much of what we know as "the human condition" is rooted in that wheat scattering behavior 12000 years ago.

#31827: — 07/12  at  11:57 AM
That goes double here Thom Larsen, and gosh do I resent having to remember not to fall asleep while waiting for what sparse information there just might be.
Same with tv news and current affairs.
I'm thankful for the transcripts which most broadcasters usually provide

#31829: — 07/12  at  12:03 PM
By the third or fourth time we saw the "cargo" guy on the beach, I was warning him through the screen, "Don't ask the question again! Don't do it!"

#31836: — 07/12  at  12:53 PM
"On a more sci-fi-ish note, Diamond's basic premise of agriculture=civilization has made me wonder: what sort of society might emerge if there were people in an ecosystem that _did_ productively support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with many fruiting plants _and_ an abundance of of megafauna (there's no such terrestrial ecosystem...but one can dream)."

Eric, While the agriculture/civilization dichotomy holds true more often than not, there are some very notable exceptions. The best I can think of off hand is that of the Pacific Northwestern tribes of North American at the time of Western contact.

Due to their prime location within an ecosystem containing an overwhelming abundance of resources, the PNW tribes were able to organize themselves into the dominant civilization in the region. Granted the only megafauna they had were Sockeye Salmon (don't knock it!) and brown bear, but nonetheless they were able to enjoy perks such as social specialization and food surplus as a result. These further led to the establishment of large towns, trade networks, and a ruling class (that in other regions came only with the adoption of sedentary agriculturalism) all while retaining an essentially archaic hunter-gatherer adaptation.

They really had the best of both worlds. As many incipient farmers learned the hard way when they stopped foraging to depended on a single crop, that their quality of life and general health most often went down the tubes. A look at dental and skeletal pathologies among New World groups (such as the Mogollon or Mayan maize growers) would suggest that malnutrition and disease were rampant problems.

Sedentary agriculturalism was not an improvement over nomadic hunting and gathering in terms of quality of life, but for most regions it was still a necessary step for the development of larger populations, and subsequently more advanced civilizations.

#31840: — 07/12  at  01:06 PM
"My gripe, though, is with the nature of television documentaries. The information density is appallingly low, and what we got in an hour was the equivalent of reading a handful of pages from the book."

Every media has its own properties - video should be able to get a lot more hands-on and feelings over. (At least for visual people.) But I see the feeling this series got over was mostly boredom....

"Inequality yes, but utter disparity?" Perhaps.

Did all high cultures invent the wheel? If they didn't, did they fare as well in terms of goods transports or mechanics?

Another example may be musics and instruments. They seem pretty disparate between separated cultures.

#31843: — 07/12  at  01:22 PM
TL

Many higher cultures developed the wheel without ever applying it to transportation. Often this had more to do with a lack of draft animals or the complexity of terrain. In the new world, humans were the more economically effective pack animals. It is thought by some that Central Mexican Poctechas (professional traders) could have traded goods as far as the Ohio River Valley to the Amazon basin 3000 B.P. or before. They would have done so with no more than a canoe or a rough wooden frame on their backs and trundle strap across their foreheads to steady the weight.

As far as mechanics go, the Olmec were moving and erecting enormous stone constructions(including their famous heads)by 3500 BP, only a thousand or so years after Giza in Egypt was built.

All in all, the people in the new world fare pretty well without the wheel. What they needed was some resistance to smallpox and influenza.

#31871: Ophelia Benson — 07/12  at  05:25 PM
Ain't it the truth about tv documentaries. I had the same problem with Ken Burns' Civil War thing and all his other Works. A still photo on the screen for a long time, some reading aloud, some plangent music, all very s l o o w. Why not just read a damn book on the subject?

And it's not true that this kind of thing is inherent to the medium; there is no law that documentaries have to be like that.

Trackback: GG&S Episode One Review Tracked on: Nomadic Thoughts (67.138.240.12) at 2005 07 12 17:36:18
I'll give a complete series review in about three weeks when it's over, but if the first episode of Guns, Germs and Steel is any indication, this PBS special is going to rank up there with Nature's Africa mini-series (the...

#31876: — 07/12  at  06:48 PM
Did anyone else notice some conspicuous puffery, calling Diamond the most original thinker of the century, or words to that effect? The facts alone would've sufficed.

It also jumped quickly to the "I'm not a racist" posture, and repeated it several times. Probably a wise choice, given how easily some viewers might see the show as somehow explaining why Europeans deserve to dominate the globe.

BTW, I'll second Timageous' suggestion of PNW tribes as the closest thing to urbanized hunter-gatherers. Just looking at architecture, the Tlingit managed some impressive buildings using the huge lumber available to them.

#31883: — 07/12  at  07:43 PM
I thing that visual-media documentaries ought to be evaluated by how well they make use of that medium. Do they do more than show talking heads? Do they use lots of movie footage, pictures, diagrams, animations, you name it, as appropriate?

My favorite example was in Brian Flemming's The God Who Wasn't There; he showed a timeline to illustrate when Jesus Christ lived and when his biographers wrote. JC he illustrated with a rectangular collage of film clips from a 1905 movie about him. There was a sizable gap between its usual dating (1 - 30 CE) and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. BF illustrated alternate possibilities by moving the collage further back, to ending at 1 BCE, or even at 100 BCE. In between JC and the Gospels was Paul, and BF illustrated Paul's lack of mention of most of JC's biography by switching on one JC-collage film clip after another to show Paul's omissions. All of it except for the last few clips were switched on.

It fell a bit short in the part where it discussed how well JC fit Lord Raglan's mythic-hero profile. It would have been nice to see side-by-side Lord-Raglan checklists, but that documentary did not have that.

So for "Guns, Germs, and Steel", it would be nice to have some illustrations of climate zones and animations of the spread of crop plants and livestock animals through them.

Like illustrate why llamas and potatoes could not make it from the Andes to North America. I imagine showing a cartoon llama and potato plant going northward, and at the Equator, the llama sweating cartoonishly, and in Mexico, the llama thinking "Water!" and the potato plant wilting.

While in Eurasia, one could show wheat plants going east and west across it from the Middle East, and rice plants going west across it from eastern Asia.

Other things could be illustrated in similar fashion, like showing why large populations can incubate diseases more easily than small populations.

#31903: Ron Sullivan — 07/12  at  11:25 PM
Yeah, it was slow and ponderous, and that had the usual effect of making it all seem a bit pious. There were some annoying copyediting-style glitches, too -- the talk about European tech and art while showing fireworks, the line about plowing with horses and oxen over a clip of a plow drawn by three mules. (So when were mules invented, and by whom? Which of the three species involved had the idea?)

Nice birds tho'. Possibly my expectations of TV are a bit low.

And doesn't Diamond have the damnedest accent?

Trackback: TV documentaries are crap Tracked on: David Galbraith (140.186.45.14) at 2005 07 13 09:23:07
PBS' Guns Germs and Steel documentary took an hour and several tons of jet fuel to explain, well nothing. The...

#31992: John M. Price — 07/13  at  12:35 PM
My unix fortune just spewed this:

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
-- Rod Serling

Thought I'd share, but granted PBS is only interrupted about every 30 or greater. Still, the mindset may be in the back of the producer's head.

Trackback: Television documentaries are slow, repetetive, and information-poor Tracked on: kottke.org remaindered links (67.18.227.74) at 2005 07 14 07:19:45
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/guns_germs_and_steel_on_pbs/...

Trackback: Guns, Germs and Steel Tracked on: heat death of the universe (69.5.13.2) at 2005 07 14 08:20:19
I've come across the name Jared Diamond a few times in the last year or two, and he sounds intriguing, but I hadn't gotten around to reading any of his books. So, I was excited to hear that a three-part...

#32107: Aegir — 07/14  at  11:06 AM
Ever watch any Horizon from the BBC? It runs like this:

What people currently believe.
Wild contradictory assertion.
Spangly graphics, sound effects.
"And then they discovered something amazing!"
Spangly graphics, sound effects.
Sound bite from Some Guy, with some computers behind him.
Another sound bite from some woman who's wearing Sensible Clothing.
Spangly graphics, sound effects.
Scientific-looking graphics, that could in fact show anything.
Wild assertions, supported by specious arguments.
Spangly graphics...

you get the idea.