Guns Germs And Steel Summary

In fact, starting on this topic raises the first big question, why did older civilizations not conquer the world? Of course, Eurasians had to be superior in some aspects in order for this area and culture to thrive today. By pondering this question were are faced with yet another-

　　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:

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

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

The shape and geography of the Americas was formed over hundreds of millions of years by processes including continental drifting and the Great Ice Age. Through the exposure of the Bering Land Bridge, early immigrants reached the Americas and created diverse populations and cultures. Agriculture, especially the cultivation of corn/maize, played an important role in these early civilizations. European desires for Asian goods sparked an interest in finding a faster route to Asia, which led Christopher Columbus to land in the New World. The Columbian Exchange transformed life in both the New and Old Worlds with the introduction of new animals, plants, and diseases. With Spain and Portugal leading, the European countries began

Europe was a major power over the course of world history, before the rise of the United States, which was originally a British colony. As a result, many people wonder why that came to be. Why is it that Europeans became so dominant instead of the Native Americans or the Incas? Jared Diamond attempts to provide an answer to this question by writing the book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. In this volume, Diamond describes how geography is the major reason why history became history. Using Diamond’s explanation, we can see how geography determined Europe’s fate in the approaching future.

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.

Diamond explains the mass extinction of large mammals by stating they had been killed by the first arriving animals as he states, “An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the first arriving humans.” on page 43.

In the book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, Part One talks about what happened on the continents before 11,000 B.C, geography on the Polynesian Islands, and more importantly what happened in Cajamarca to the Inca emperor Atahuallpa when he was captured by the Spaniards. Jared Diamond will explain what happened at Cajamarca and why it was important or more specifically a turning point between different societies. However, he didn’t go into detail about other battles because he feels as if the advancement in technology was clearly shown better in Cajamarca.

Beginning his scientific career in physiology, then expanding into evolutionary biology and biogeography Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. On July 1972, Mr. Diamond visited New Guinea where he studied bird evolution along a beach. He met a local New Guinean named Yali, who would ask Diamond a question, which would take him twenty-five years to try to find an answer. Yali’s questions, "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?.” Guns, Germs, and Steel attempt to answer Yali’s question through following the first civilizations. Diamond discusses why some societies were able to develop writing, agriculture, change from framers to gathers while other societies stayed the same.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, dives into the past, examining historical developments of societies compared to each other in the form of time, resources, and environment. Diamond summarizes the book in one sentence: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among themselves” (Diamond 25). Diamond explains that dominance over others reflects the environment in which the people lived, not the people themselves. He backs this explanation with evidence from history in many different areas of history.

Jared Diamond’s theory of global differences in his book entitled “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is the result of geography and climate and not human differences such as race and culture. Jared Diamond is a biology professor at the University of California. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While studying birds in Papua New Guinea he was asked the question of “Why you white men have so much cargo and us New Guineans have so little.”

The European exploration and colonization introduced many new things to both sides. Through trade both sides obtained new items, food resources, and animals. North and South America were introduced to rice, wheat, horses, and tools like the plow. While Europe were introduced to peanuts, corn, potatoes, and a few new animals like

Instead, they hunted, fished, and grew corn, different from the cereal grains in Afro-Eurasia. Because of the different climates and vegetation zones in the north and south regions of the Americas, agricultural practices needed to be adapted as they spread. Since the east and west areas of North Africa and Eurasia were similar, agricultural innovations spread faster.

The beneficial continental circumstances enjoyed by Eurasians first appears in vegetation. The Fertile Crescent was endowed with diverse, abundant, and highly productive cereals and pulses such as wheat, barley, and pea that yielded both starch and protein. These food staples were domesticated very quickly and with little effort by Eurasians, whose newfound farms gave rise to specialization and division of labor. Conversely, in the Americas, the sole cereal crop of corn took many more thousands of years of domesticated refinement to prove useful to humans. Mr. Diamond also places great emphasis on the geographic East-West orientation of Eurasia. A plant growing at a given latitude can grow at that latitude the world over. Thus, Eurasia's East-West orientation was highly conducive to the rapid spread (by trade) of productive domesticated grains across the continent. Conversely, the Americas, Africa, and Australia were impaired by their North-South orientation, which dictated that domesticated plants from people of one latitude were of little use to their neighbors to the North and South. Compounding the effect, the trade of agricultural technology in Eurasia ultimately led to trade in other things, such as technological advances, including writing and language