Guns Germs And Steel Summary

In Jared Diamond’s Collision at Cajamarca and Hemispheres Colliding from his book Guns, Germs, and Steel he addresses the factors relating to the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. This is seen in their differences in development, warfare, disease and politics. Firstly, it is important to start by taking a looking at the Empire’s themselves. The Spanish Empire, like many in Europe, developed sooner than their Native American counterparts in agriculture and industries.

In the historical book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” by Jared Diamond, Diamond attempts to provide an understanding to the inequality in modern times. He attempted to provide this understanding by stepping 13,000 years back and figuring out why each continent had a different history from one another. Diamond first got inspired to discover the reasons for this inequality in New Guinea, where he was studying bird evolution. In the prologue, he explained how it was one simple question from his friend Yali, a local politician of New Guinea, that aroused his curiosity and pushed him to write this book. While on a walk with his friend, Diamond was asked, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black

Yali met Jared Diamond on a beach over 30 years ago in New Guinea and Yali’s question was “Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so

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

The overall point of this chapter in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond was to give a quick explanation on why Europeans societies have dominated, and even stomped out, other ones. He attempts to find this answer after a man named Yali, asked him, “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?” It was a seemingly simple question that Diamond did not have the answer to. He researches and writes this book, years later, to answer Yali’s question. The author acknowledged other answers to this question, for example: Europeans are more intelligent. Diamond rebuttals this with an explanation on why that is not correct, and tells us why he believes people like the New Guineans, are more intelligent. He points out that European children stay at home and watch tv, sit at the computer, and play video games, while New Guinean children, play outside with friends and family. Though, how playing outside, rather than inside, is a good point to make about who is more intelligent, is not explained any further. A lot of the answers historians have come up with are racist, that many do not accept, but many also do.

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 by Jared Diamond, Diamond’s explains that Europeans progressed faster than Native Americans technologically. Since the beginnings of time Europeans advanced faster than Native Americans, but why? To begin with, the Eurasian land mass had more species of large animals to domesticate. In addition, Eurasia had more varieties of grains for large scale farming. Finally, Eurasia was more accessible for trade between civilizations.

The reason Pizarro succeeded was he had originally gained the trust of Atahualpa and then captured him and used his advanced weaponry to conquer the Incans

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)

"Guns, Germs, and Steel," written by Jared Diamond, seeks to answer a simple question asked by a friend of his in New Guinea, "[w]hy is it that... white people developed so [many commercial tools and luxuries] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little [of these goods ourselves]." (Diamond 14). Recognizing that the question could be applied more broadly around the world, he simplified the question; asking why wealth and power were distributed among people of Asian and European descent, rather than those of African, Aboriginal, and Native American descent? To answer the question, the entirety of world history must be explored, from the early expansion out of Africa around the world to the

Prologue: “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?” is how Diamond reworded it in the prologue.

1. 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?"

From the beginning of the book, Diamond focuses on answering Yali’s question. Yali is a New Guinean, who out of curiosity would ask Diamond questions, one of which was hard for Diamond to answer. That question was, "Why is it that you white people developed so much

Yes, if there is a lot of resources around it can support a large group of people instead of a small group of gatherers