Guns Germs And Steel Catalyst For Cultural Evolution

Lauren Collegnon

ANP 121

29 February 2024

Guns, Germs, and Steel.

In the movie “Gun, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, he explores the question of European dominance through Eurasian dominance and attributes it to factors like geographic or environmental rather than genetic. A lot of the world remained hunters and gathers after the first agricultural evolution because the environment was not useful for farming. The Eurasian region stretches from west to east has relatively the same climate, which is good for the trade of domestic animals and various crops being planted across the region whereas north and south America and Africa has quite an extreme variation of environment and temperature, which would not be useful for planting similar

It is easier to spread societies from east to west, because the climate doesn't change rapidly when you go from north to south, making it impossible for animals with a thick winter coat to migrate north into tropical areas. These small differences allowed, the Europeans, to colonize the world better than anyone else. In Michigan, we have people called “snowbirds” that in the winter they move down to the southern states like Florida so they can get away from the cold and winter goes away. They migrate back to Michigan for the summer. This works for people but not when it comes to crops or animals since each plant or animal needs specific conditions and they can't just move up or down to fit the peoples needs. This is why the European and Asian countries are so efficient, since they move parallel to the equator, maximizing their land. This would allow as the people expanded either or west their crops, and their animals could be expanded with them as they grow. This process was so smart and critical that it caused the food production to be one of the main catalysts for cultural

This movie reminds me of a quote that I read in Chapter 5 of Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Anthropology, it talks about subsistence. One quote that stood out to me was “The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step towards a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered” (Brown, Nina, et al, 2020). I thought this quote was very well worded, and it made me take a step back to think of how much agriculture could have made life worse for us. A few advantages of agriculture I thought of was it allows us to know where and how our food is being made, it provides material for food or other products, and it allows us to still use trade, which provides many jobs in this industry. A few disadvantages I thought of is that because agriculture uses technology, it leads to air pollution and pollution in the soil from either pesticides or fertilizers. Another disadvantage is that pollution doesn't just go away. It remains in the environment for many years. Although it might look like an advantage, there are also big disadvantages that come with agriculture. The Eurasian people were smart when they decided what to do with their food production since they expanded from east to west, so that the temperature would be the same and they had more land for crops and animals to