Guns Germs and Steel Summary of Book

This book is inspired by just such a cross-cultural encounter as that between Kamal the border raider and the Colonel’s son of the Guides. In the first chapter the author recounts a conversation that he, a biologist studying bird evolution, had in New Guinea in 1972 with Yali, a local politician preparing his people for self-government, which culminated in the searching question ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [goods] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own’ [p. 14]. ‘Yali’s question’ plays a central role in Professor Diamond’s enquiry into ‘a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’, leading him into a wide-ranging discussion of the history of human evolution and diversity through a study of migration, socio-economic and cultural adaptation to environmental conditions, and technological diffusion. The result is an exciting and absorbing account of human history since the Pleistocene age, which culminates in a sketch of a future scientific basis for studying the history of humans that will command the same intellectual respect as current scientific studies of the history of other natural phenomena such as dinosaurs, nebulas and glaciers.

This is an ambitious project, and no reviewer can comment on all of it with equal authority. My own background as an historian of European expansion and Asian response over the last two hundred years requires me to take most of the account of prehistory on trust - which is a drawback since Diamond asserts that most of the really important influences on modern history had already occurred before the birth of Christ. To a non-specialist, the account of human prehistory presented here seems plausible and well-founded - the argument is that, as homo sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated to colonise first Asia, then Europe, then Australia, and finally the Americas, so a technical progression from hunting to settled agriculture, and a societal progression