Guns Germs And Steel Book Report

In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond is the response to a question Diamond had been asked by a New Guinean politician, Yali, in 1972. The question was, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people have little cargo of our own?” This refers to the inequality between many different civilizations, quite like how Europeans developed great objects and wealth that they used to dominate over other societies. Diamond begins to wonder why that is, “Why did human development proceed at different rates on different continents?” Before explaining possible answers, Diamond clarifies that his book isn’t to justify European domination of other civilizations nor does the answer take a European historic approach. Diamond also clarifies that hunter-gatherer civilizations are not inferior to agricultural or industrial civilizations. Diamond uses part of the prologue to prove that in many ways, New Guineans were smarter than white foreigners/westerners. Diamond
Differences like climate, which many believe that in colder climates more technology and ideas developed to either help survive in the cold or the result of spending more time indoors with nothing else to do. Yet many of the ideas from cold climate European thinkers were from Eurasia where it is warmer. Even in the New World the first proof of writing came from places nearest to the equator. Another answer to why some civilizations were more powerful is due to their location near rivers and the development of a complex irrigation system lead to basis of government and societies. But studies have shown that early civilizations created complex irrigation systems after they had already developed centralized governments . Both answers show that environments can shape a civilization, but the data that the ideas rely on is