Guns Germs And Steel Summary

According to page 103, “The people of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading towards guns, germs and steel.”

They didn’t have the proper farmland and the same animals. Furthermore, this digressed the way their civilization spread and grew. Diamond researched and established that certain lands were blessed only due to their geographical location. The earliest civilization began in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. This land had rich soil and a variety of animals, which made the land promised and geographically lucky. As time passed people living in the area learned new ways to keep their civilization alive. The Fertile Crescent became known as the “Promised Land” and a way of survival was introduced as farming and the domestication of

In the book Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond who is a biophysics scientist and a psychologist, set out on a journey to find out the reason behind great achievements and conquest of the Europeans. What is the secret of success of Europeans? His hypothesis was very original and at first looked very simple, it was guns, germs and steel. The journey of Diamond took over 30 years and helped him answer the main questions of human history and what is it that separates humans today from "rich and poor" and from "haves and have not’s." To do this he had to go back when everyone was equal.

Many geographers have attempted creating a unified theory explaining why cultures advance much more readily than others. Very few have actually reached mainstream society and even fewer seem reasonable. However, Jared Diamond shines where most do not. His book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, proposes an idea that has long been established called environmental determinism. Most view environmental determinism as a racist theory attributing a peoples’ intelligence only to their oppressive climates and geographical barriers. Diamond instead has created a theory that applies environmental determinism to only a peoples’ technology—not the people themselves. This has given researchers valuable tools that allow them to explain why some nations have

Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Line – In this chapter Jared Diamond attempts to answer Yali’s question by explaining how and where some of the first human settlements were located and where the earliest signs of evolution are. Diamond explains how many settlements had a clear advantage over others due to where they were located. He then shows the advantage by stating “… the earliest human fossil in Europe, the earliest evidence of domesticated corn in Mexico, or the earliest evidence anywhere…” This shows how the advantages played out. Diamond then goes on to explain how certain civilizations needed to adapt differently to survive. Diamonds last point describes how many of the civilizations were colonized and how certain colonies developed much

Yali’s question puzzles over why the white people have become more successful than others. Diamond states that Eurasian societies were set to dominate from before 3000 B.C. He wants to know why other races are unable to be as advanced with technology and power.

The argument begins with a brief summarization of Diamond’s theory. The main point being that the distribution of wealth or success to countries or continents is decided geographically. And within the geographic category is the importance of farming and domestication of animals. Diamond says Eurasia’s advancement happened because of their

In the book, Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, the author asks many questions about histories of the world. These question are questions that lie in the main question Jared Diamond is trying to answer. In the Prologue, the author discussed about his personal experience in New Guinea where a local politician asked him the major 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?” (Diamond 14). When further exploring the meaning of this question it could represent why major civilizations developed and advanced so much faster technologically and economically but other civilizations like New Guineans are behind in these advancements. Which could explain

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.

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,

A. The author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond, is researching birds on the island of New Guinea. When he is there Yali asks him a question. Yali’s question is "why is it that white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but black people had little cargo of our own?"

As Professor Diamond walked along the side of the beach he came upon a politician named Yali who was preparing his people in New Guinea for self-government. Yali and Professor Diamond talked each about their jobs and soon Yali started quizzing Professor Diamond and asking him many questions but only one had really made Diamond think leaving him without an answer. “ Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea , but we black people had little much cargo of our own,” asked politician Yali. After thinking about the question for a while, Diamond saw that the true question was much more broad and universal than Yali's initial question. He reworded the question as follows: "Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are rather than in some other way?”

In the movie Guns, Germs, and Steel and Matthew Restall’s book Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, two very different accounts of the early conquests by the Spaniards are uncovered. The movie, which follows Jared Diamond through his studies, presents a more European-centered view, while Restall individually debunks commonly believed myths of the conquest that are perpetuated in the film.

Jared Diamond is a professor of Geography at UCLA and a world traveler. He believes that in the past 13,000 years of human history, agriculture has lead humans to conquer, develop and prosper and therefore cause the rise of civilizations. In 1972 he was in New Guinea when he met a local named Yali who asked him a simple question that took years for Diamond to answer. Yali said “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [goods] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own”. [Work cited 7] Diamond was profoundly puzzled and couldn’t answer right away. In fact it took him many years to come up with what he thinks is the right answer. ‘Yali’s question’ plays a central role in Professor Diamond’s enquiry into ‘a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’, leading him into a wide-ranging discussion of the history of human evolution and diversity through a study of migration, socio-economic and cultural adaptation to environmental conditions, and technological diffusion. (Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 22-23)

I first read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in the Fall 2003 based on a recommendation from a friend. Many chapters of the book are truly fascinating, but I had criticisms of the book back then and hold even more now. Chief among these is the preponderance of analysis devoted to Papua New Guinea, as opposed to, say, an explanation of the greatly disparate levels of wealth and development among Eurasian nations. I will therefore attempt to confine this review on the "meat and potatoes" of his book: the dramatic Spanish conquest of the Incas; the impact of continental geography on food production; and finally, the origins of the Eurasian development of guns, germs, and steel. In terms of structure, I will first summarize the