Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.
A major landmark in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way in which the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
Diamond starts off shooting and raising major questions that are not only intriguing but worth knowing right at the book’s inception. Why wasn’t Africa the foundation of modern human progress and civilization if that’s where human ancestors arose? Why weren’t Native Americans able to topple European conquistadors with their own set of germs and technology? Why were certain populations more susceptible towards defeat and demise than others? Why weren’t aboriginal Australians or the powerful Aztec Indians the ones to come over to Eurasia to conquer and pilfer? The answers have more to do with food and agriculture than genetic predisposition and intellectual superiority.
Diamond’s real challenge more so than connecting these various theories, arguments, and evidence was to be able to present it at a readable pace. Diamond succeeds greatly whether you hold a science degree or not. This is a remarkable book to help you connect the dots at some of society’s greatest puzzles. It makes you understand how historical implications rooted back to the birth of the homo sapiens specie helped charter the world we see and live in today, and exactly how much of it is due to chance and lucky dispositions based on environmental factors rather than differing physical and mental capabilities as some (cough…cough…racists) would have you believe.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.