Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant
work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents
succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing
their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new
illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC,
all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a
great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In
Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the
prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals
were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond
vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing
food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world
through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from
scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal
to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies
arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones
to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories
tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles
convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs
that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of
discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of
agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a
unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of
dinosaurs and glaciers.
