Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies

In the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, author Jared Diamond offers many different scientific, as well as historic, reasons for why the events of history unfolded the way they did, mainly the question of was there anything specific that lead to Europe becoming the dominate power in the world? Like much of history, there is no specific causation that led to European dominance over, initially, the Americas, and then later Africa, Australia, and parts of Asia. Diamond concurs, taking a look at multiple aspect of history included the development of agriculture and societal structure as well as evidence of available resources and geography. Ultimately, Diamond argues the geography of Eurasia and the availability of resources is what led to Eurasia developing complex, urban societies which offered them an advantage over societies in other areas of the world. One of the first pieces of evidence Diamond evaluates is the development of civilizations based off of agriculture compared to civilizations that chose to remain in the style of hunter-gatherers. Why did agriculture flourish in places such as the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent 9,000 years ago compared to areas such as New Guinea where
He understands he is greatly oversimplifying some concepts in order to illustrate a greater concept. But when looking generally at everything Diamond says within the novel, he does created, develop, and support many complex but understandable points in terms of historical as well as scientific perspective. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies may seem disjointed at times due to the sheer enormity of all the history Diamond is trying to condense, but all points introduced by Diamond do eventually tie together into a greater, understandable