Guns Germs And Steel Summary

The transition to farming was a turning point in human history since people who remained hunter/gatherers couldn’t produce food as quickly as farmers, and couldn’t produce food that could be stored for a long period of time. Instead of roaming to search different locations for food, farming allowed them to drop seeds in soil that grow next to their

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

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

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

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.

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,

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

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

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.

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?”

Yali’s question, based on Professor Diamond, asks, why is it that countries arising from people of caucasian descent had gained immense power and industrial development while the people of New Guinea and other “black” countries had gained little material development or global power and influence?

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.

Overall, Guns Germs, and Steel earned a 4/5 for how I thought the book went. The chapters are very interesting, and they make reasonable approach out of various historical situations you wouldn’t think of the first time. The book also goes in depth of how many things can negatively impact society more so than positively, especially agriculture and the spread of ethnicity.

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