Summary Of Guns, Germs, And Steel By Jared Diamond

Why did wealth and influence get to be circulated as they now seem to be, as opposed to in some other way? Why did history unfold differently on different continents? These are the simply stated questions that Jared Diamond attempts to answer in his novel, Guns, Germs, and Steel. [1] Diamonds book takes on the monumental task of turning 13000 years of developmental history into a 430 page novel. Diamond attempts to account for most of the disparities which ascended from the technological endowment of Eurasia, the Americas & other remote regions. Diamond also attempts to debunk the theory that it is not race that makes one society better than the other but the underlying factors of geography, technology, and immunology that explain these differing

Diamond postulates that the advantage is of geography that makes one society greater than another but isn’t all happenstance, New Guineans could have been dropped in Eurasia and flourished. For Diamond it comes down to luck and geography. The lucky ones started in the area known as the Fertile Crescent, currently the Middle East, where the crops where plentiful, the soil was nutrient rich, and many domesticated animals.[1] In the Fertile Crescent villages grew from the surplus of crops that they were producing. Many crops such as wheat and barley originated from this area along with the domestication of cows, goats, sheep, and pigs. After a 1000 years of exploiting an already fragile ecosystem, the land dried up and productivity shut down. The ecological factors and human action lead to the Fertile Crescent downfall. The area was already receiving less rainfall than northern and western Europe and simply put there were too many people that were farming too much and too many animals living off the land. The area can still be seen recuperating from this period of overuse today. [4] As people were leaving the Fertile Crescent, they migrated east and west throughout Eurasia bringing with them their crops and animals to populate and cultivate the land. When people have enough crops they can feed no only themselves but their people too. New Guineans simply couldn’t produce enough to sustain a larger work force because they did not have the technology to harvest more. They would spend too much time trying to feed themselves and did not have enough time to grow, they would have needed more food to have specialized workers.