Guns Germs And Steel Summary

　　Due to luck, Eurasia had access to the greatest number of wild candidates for domestication. Thirteen of those were big domestics animals that helped in food production and industrialized settings.[ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel. Hemispheres Colliding. (New York:

Diamond describes the early parts of human history in a broad scope towards the beginning of the book. He focuses on both the evolution and spread of human beings, arguing that some civilizations had a head start over other ones because of when the period of human evolution took place. He explains how different environments shaped human history through an a example of how populations which inhabited the Polynesian islands developed differently due to the different environments and then by telling the stories about what happened as populations with better geographical advantages encountered more disadvantaged populations in the Americas. Diamond explains the many factors that influenced the historical progression of different societies. Diamond argues how food production was very much a primary factor in the advancement of each society. Societies

In this part he explains how the increase in food production enabled people to increase in population and create specialized jobs while the domestication of animals helped them with the production of tools, animal labor during farming (pulling wagons) and war (horses used for battle), warmth (leather and wool), transportation, food (meat and milk), and fertilizer. Then he explains the decision of people to move to farming. This decision was influenced by different factors in different parts of the world such a decrease in wild games’ population, more domestic plants, development of technologies for food producing, and human population vs food production. Then he explains how the environmental advantages such as biological, ecological, and geographical diversity allowed for a variety of crops. For example, the plants in the Fertile Crescent were self-pollinating which allowed an increase in crop production. He further explains how geography contributed to the domestication of animals. He states that “the wild ancestors of 13 of the Ancient Fourteen… were confined to Eurasia,” (Diamond 161) which shows the geographic advantage Eurasians had since most of the ancient 14 domestic animals were in Eurasia. Additionally, Eurasia had the least amount of extinction in the last 40,000 years along with more readily domestic animals who has a faster growth rate, diet, no problem breeding in captivity, and etc. Another geographical advantage Eurasians had was the axes of the continents. Since Eurasia has west-east axes, it was easier for Eurasians to transport food production such as crops due to the same latitude which resulted in the same climate, same day length and diseases. However, Africa and the Americas has a north-south axes which made transportation of food production difficult due to

Many historians and politicians ponder over the reason why Europeans have much more wealth and power than other ethnicities. However, this question was abandoned and rarely brought up because there wasn’t enough evidence to have a clear answer. Yali, a local politician in New Guinea, asked a similar question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, believes that the differences in wealth and power between different groups of people is because of the environmental differences. An event that helped answer this question was when the Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro easily defeated the Incas despite having only a few men because of their geographical location, resulting advanced military technology, and writing.

In the prologue of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond introduces readers to a question posed to him by Yali, a New Guinean politician. Yali inquired about the reason for different developmental rates of civilizations, and Diamond, who couldn’t explain at the time, began to search for the answer. Diamond links certain “power factors,” such as advanced weaponry, certain diseases, and metal tools, to the rate of advancement in civilizations. However, the causes for the creation and use of the “power factors” in some civilizations, but not others, remains an unsolved mystery. In the prologue, fittingly titled “Yali’s Question,” Diamond expresses his belief that throughout history, civilizations develop

Guns, Germs, and Steel starts off with an interesting conversation in the Prologue between the author, Jared Diamond, and a friend he made in New Guinea, a politician named Yali. Yali raises the question that why the rest of the world has so much of what he refers to as “cargo”, or in a broad sense technology, compared to his homeland of New Guinea which becomes the central focus for the entire book. The first chapter begins with the origins of humans and what Diamond calls the “Great Leap Forward” where the first tools, writings and paintings began to appear, as well as watercraft in aboriginal Australia and New Guinea. Then discussing the Ice Ages, leading up to the recent era and extinction of many large animals globally as humans began to spread out. Next Diamond uses the example of The Maoris and the Morioris in the Chatham Islands in 1835 and how one culture and civilization is able to overrun another due to geography, resources, and many other things and how that can lead

Jared Diamond, however, believes that the environmental differences are exactly the case. His thesis is, “The striking differences between the long-term histories of people of the different continents have been due, not to innate differences in the peoples themselves, but to differences in their environments.” He believes that it is not biology that makes some societies more advanced than others, but rather the environments that people were and are currently living

Jared Diamond starts off his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel with stating his attempt to answer Yali’s question, “Why is it that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own.” Diamond elaborates and brings to simpler terms how Yali’s question relates to many questions on the origins of humans, but more specifically, how Eurasians, the white people mentioned by Yali, came to successfully dominate the rest of the world. In the prologue, Diamond mainly drives his point of the “effects of continental environments on history over the past 13,000 years” as to what he believes is the main root to why Eurasians came to dominate so successfully. Alongside of continental environments,

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Out of Eden, it took place in Papua New Guinea. During this video it told us a little about Jared Diamond and his journey. Diamond was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a biologist and and a specialist in human physiology. Even though he was a professor, his real passion was to study birds. He has been studying bird since he was seven years old in the United States and has now been going to Papua New Guinea ever since he was twenty-six years old and he continues to take frequent trips to Papua New Guinea to learn more about the New Guineans life style. It also told us that Diamond is a leading expert on bird life on the island. With Diamond’s frequent visits he realized he is just as

In Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, he starts the prologue off by introducing the reader a question, Yali's question, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond set’s out to answer Yali's question by touching on a few main categories, such as food production, writing, technology, government, and religion.

The “Factors Underlying the Broadcast Pattern of History” chart shows the spreading and domesticating of plants and animals and the pros and cons of it on civilization. I agree with the author that when you have domesticated animals in the civilization food storage and surpluses; large dense, sedentary, stratified societies with political

1.Jared Diamond states that the environment of a race determines whether or not it’s going to survive.

“Ender did not hesitate. He stepped on the head of the snake and crushed it under his foot. It writhed and twisted under him and in response he twisted and ground it deeper into the stone floor… And in the mirror he saw a face that he easily recognized. It was Peter.” (117)

This example supports Diamond’s argument because it correlates with his thesis that people became a certain way due to arbitrary circumstantial happenings. The occurrence of diseases from animals to human beings happened by chance in Eurasia, and not in other places such as Australia. The conditions just happened to be right in Eurasia for germs to develop, since there were more domesticable plants and animals there. Additionally, the spread of diseases was much quicker across that continent compared to any other. I chose this example because diseases played a big determining factor in whether a conquest would be successful or not.

When reading the title of Jared Diamond’s, “Guns, Germs, and Steels,” the readers must initially think how do these three connect? After starting the first few chapters they will realize that Diamond is referring to the proximate and ultimate factors in that lead to the advancement of society. When Diamond talks about proximate and ultimate factors, he is explaining the cause of European dominance in the world. The proximate factors are the one that directly led to the European dominance and the ultimate factors are the ones that let to proximate factors. I believe that this book is referring to the Homo sapiens revolutionizing through the years, through the Neolithic Revolution through agriculture and industrialization.