guns, germs, and steel

February 20, 2018August 16, 2017 admin

In the year 1533, the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro, with a force of a few hundred, conquered the Inca Empire of perhaps 10 million people. Discuss and analyze the proximate and ultimate factors present in Diamond’s guns, germ, and steel and explain how the Spaniards were able to be at Cajamarca, and to overthrow an empire of millions. Your essay should have a brief indroduction and conclusion. Ues sepicific example and evidence from Guns, Germs and Steel and lecture to the greatest extent possible
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Introduction
Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel was also,
somewhat surprisingly, a national best-seller. At a time when other popular nonfiction topics centered on
personal relationships and diets, Diamond caught the attention of the reading public with a fascinating
account of more than 13,000 years of human evolution and societal development.
Although the book has raised a few points of controversy among scientists, it also has gained widespread
praise. Some scientists argue against Diamond’s thesis that geography and environment are the most
important factors in shaping the world as modern humans know it. But most critics praise Diamond for the
task he successfully took upon himself, which was to answer a very complex question. In the prologue of
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond recounts how he became intrigued when his New Guinean friend Yali
asked, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we
black people had little cargo of our own?” The cargo that Yali refers to is technology—tools as simple as
axes; accessories such as umbrellas; and more complicated inventions such as computers, cell phones, and
the Internet. After all, Diamond points out, a mere two centuries prior to his meeting Yali, New Guineans
were still using stone tools. What factors caused this gap between the development of one culture and
another?
Diamond searched for an answer by examining millions of years of history, mapping out the migrations of
early humans from Africa to Eurasia, from eastern Asia to the Pacific Ocean islands, and from Siberia to
the North and South American continents. He follows humans as they evolve biologically, and then he
concentrates on specific representative societies to illustrate his findings.
To define the differences between developing cultures, Diamond emphasizes the effects of food
production, writing, technology, government, and religion. Then he demonstrates, in his opinion, why the
differences among various cultures occurred. More important (and one of the reasons for some of the
controversy surrounding this book), Diamond concludes that it is ultimately geography, not biology or
race as some other studies have tried to prove, that produced the cultural disparities his friend Yali had
pointed out.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Summary
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel opens with a prologue in which the author presents a question
from a New Guinean politician and friend named Yali: why were Europeans able to conquer so many
other societies around the world? This question, in the past, has often been answered in terms of genetics,
a belief that Diamond sets out to disprove. People are not born superior to another group, Diamond
contends. To provide a background for, as well as an argument to support, his own explanation, Diamond
then briefly sketches millions of years of human evolution. When Diamond reaches the last 13,000 years,
he slows down to focus on specific societies and historical events. In the process, Diamond’s theory
becomes apparent. He believes that the success of a society is not based on intelligence and ingenuity but
instead on geography, food production, germs and immunity, the domestication of animals, and the
discovery and use of steel.
Societies become more stable as they move from hunting and gathering to cultivating crops and raising
domestic animals. What then inevitably follows is the development of specialized labor groups as well as
the establishment of hierarchies in ruling parties. Populations thrive under these conditions, and in time
empires rise. The stability provides farming societies with powerful advantages over nomadic huntergatherer
groups, which are forced to roam the countryside in search of food. One major advantage of
farming societies is that some members are eased from the burden of producing food and are then able to
devote their time to making weapons and perfecting the art of using them.
Major portions of the Eurasian area, Diamond points out, had a natural advantage in agriculture because of
the presence of plants and animals that were easily domesticated. Not only did this allow food surpluses to
develop, but it also enabled crops such as cotton, flax, and hemp to be easily processed into clothing,
blankets, nets, and ropes. Animals, besides providing food and labor, also gave Eurasians wool and leather
—protection from the cold. Gourds, such as those grown in North America, were used as containers,
which made life even easier for farming societies. Horses, which were domesticated in Europe, offered
significant advantages in wars. Animals such as camels, llamas, mules, reindeer, and yak pulled wagons
and sleds, easing the workload and allowing further exploration.
One of Eurasia’s main advantages in producing stable and profitable societies was its long landmass with
an east-to-west axis. Such an axis created an environment in which plants growing in one area in the east
were easily adapted in another section in the far west. The east-west axis also allowed the use of similar
animals that were easily domesticated. People from different groups in Eurasia were able to exchange
ideas, which increased the chances of innovation and thus helped technology advance more rapidly. This
was not as true in the Americas, whose land mass extended broadly on a north-south axis. Plants or seeds
taken from the more temperate areas would not grow in the tropical zones or the frigid areas, which
prevented people in different locales from exchanging ideas, crops, and innovations, thus decreasing their
chances for rapid advancement. Other impediments to progress included large bodies of water or land
barriers such as mountains and deserts. The slow development of Mexico’s corn crop is one example of
decreased adoption rates. The vast desert between present-day Mexico and the United States prevented, or
at least vastly slowed down, the knowledge gained by one group of people from being passed on to
another.
But among Eurasian societies, information flowed quite freely and relatively quickly. Because
communication was widespread through trading, Eurasians hurriedly developed and improved on such
innovations as the use of the wheel, metalworking, shipbuilding, and (one of the ultimate advantages)
guns. Their populations, food production, and technologies grew at faster and faster rates. This provided
them with greater economies, which in turn allowed them to conquer more people in more extended areas
of the world.
As a consequence of living in dense populations, trading with other dense populations, and living close to
domesticated animals, Eurasians came into contact with stronger germs. At first this might sound like a
disadvantage, but as weaker members of early societies succumbed to germs, the people who survived
built natural immunities against them and passed the immunities down to their children. This provided
later generations of Europeans with an extra advantage, especially when traveling to the Americas and
later to the Polynesian islands in the Pacific. The germs were devastating to the indigenous people of the
Americas and Polynesia, many of whom died without the Europeans even lifting a gun.
Diamond closes Guns, Germs, and Steel by briefly examining how his theories explain societal
development in five areas of the world: Australia and New Guinea, China, Polynesia, the Americas, and
Africa.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter Summaries
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 1 Summary
According to Diamond, the ancestors of human beings broke off as a separate lineage from other animals
about 7 million years ago in Africa. Human ancestors began walking upright around 4 million years ago,
and they moved to Eurasia around 1 or 2 million years ago. Sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years
ago, not long after human fossils began to resemble modern homo sapiens, our race created an explosion
of new technological and artistic innovations that far surpassed anything previously created.
Archaeologists call this period the Great Leap Forward.
Shortly after the Great Leap Forward, between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago, the human race expanded its
territory. Although human ancestors had remained in Africa and Eurasia for millions of years, people now
moved outward to Australia, the South Pacific, and the coldest northern regions of Eurasia. The precise
dates of human arrival in the Americas are harder to determine, but the colonization happened at least
12,000 or 13,000 years ago. Diamond thinks it is remarkable that human beings moved into all habitable
areas of the globe in a few tens of thousands of years without the benefit of modern technology.
Diamond begins his consideration of the fates of human societies around 11,000 B.C., or 13,000 years
ago, because during this period all the habitable continents were populated with hunter-gatherers, and no
society had advanced technologically to become farmers or city dwellers. Diamond asks whether a
modern archaeologist, transported back 13,000 years, could determine which continent’s people would
have the best chances for developing advanced technologies. Considering each continent in turn, he lists
the qualities one might consider to be advantages.
In 11,000 B.C.E., Africa had been populated for the longest time, which would have allowed its people to
develop the most expansive knowledge of their landscape and environment. Africa’s people were also
more genetically diverse than were the people of other continents, which suggests they might have had a
greater range of genetic adaptability.
The Americas had been populated the shortest length of time. The Americas, however, had more space
and environmental diversity than Africa did. Taken together, the Americas were also larger than any
continent except Eurasia. Diamond reasons that both of these factors may have given early Americans an
advantage.
Eurasians had the largest continent and the second largest genetic diversity of all the continents. Eurasia
was the second earliest continent to become populated. Human populations on that continent were already
creating complex art and tools. Diamond hypothesizes that any of these factors may already have been
giving early Eurasians a head start.
Finally, Diamond considers Australians and New Guineans. Their continent was the smallest and, in some
ways, the least accessible continent in the world. However, Australians and New Guineans had the earliest
boats, and the archaeological record shows Australia’s people had developed a level of artistic
achievement similar to that of Europe at the time.
After this review, Diamond concludes that all the continents appeared to have some advantages over all
the others. He feels that a modern archaeologist transported back in time to 11,000 B.C. could not, without
further information, predict which continent’s population would become most successful.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 2 Summary
To defend his theory that environmental factors can determine the fate of a continent, Diamond considers
examples from Polynesia. He claims that Polynesia, which is made up of many islands, provides many
examples of societies that developed in isolation from each other. Also, because islands are smaller than
whole continents are, the environmental factors that affect their inhabitants are somewhat simpler to
explain.
In 1835, 500 Maori warriors sailed to the Chatham Islands, an archipelago inhabited by the Moriori
people. The Maori came from a warlike agricultural society on the large, densely populated island of New
Zealand. They were armed with both modern and traditional weapons. The Moriori were a peaceful and
less organized hunter-gatherer people who occupied a more isolated, less densely populated archipelago.
Over the course of just a few weeks, the Maori warriors slaughtered nearly all the Moriori and took
possession of the islands.
Diamond proposes that the tragic events on the Chatham Islands played out in a predictable way: the
technologically advanced society won. He points out that no genetic differences could have existed
between the Maori and Moriori because the two cultures had diverged from a common source just 1,000
years before. Factors other than genetic superiority had to have determined the differences between the
two peoples. Diamond sets out to examine what those factors were.
According to archaeologists, the Chatham Islands were colonized by ancestral Maori people from New
Zealand about 1,000 years before the massacre. The colonizers who became the Moriori were most likely
farmers when they arrived. However, the crops they brought with them could not grow in the Chathams’
cold climate, so they abandoned farming and turned to hunting and gathering. This left them unable to
produce surplus food to support people who were employed in occupations other than finding food. The
Moriori had little space in which to expand, so they did not develop a large society with a complex
political organization. They were distant from other islands, so they had no need to develop strong,
warlike defenses before the arrival of the Maori.
The Maoris of northern New Zealand, in contrast, had a large area that was suitable for growing the crops
available in Polynesia. Their farmers could grow and store surplus food to support denser populations that
included warriors and craftspeople. Moreover, they had neighbors who sometimes fought with them, so
they needed to organize armies, build forts, and make tools of war. Thus the Maoris became comparatively
technologically advanced because of their environment. This supports Diamond’s belief that
environmental factors can provide strong pressures on a society’s development.
Next Diamond takes a step back to consider Polynesia as a whole. Because Polynesia contains so many
different islands and environmental units, prehistoric and early historic peoples developed into a wide
variety of different cultural groups. The technology levels, economies, politics, and social structures of the
various islands arrayed themselves into one of the most diverse sets of societies in the world.
Diamond argues that the variations between Polynesian societies can be attributed to environmental
factors. He shows how each island’s climate, geology, resources, size, relative fragmentation, and relative
isolation played a role in the type of human society that grew on it. As Diamond has already shown,
warmer climates supported the cultivation of the crops available in the region, such as taro and yams,
whereas colder climates did not. Geologic factors determined the amount of fresh water, the frequency of
rainfall, and the availability of stone and minerals for tools on each island. Some islands had more seafood
and more robust natural game than others did. Some islands could support the available domestic animals
—pigs, chickens, and dogs—whereas others did not. Size, geographical arrangement, and relative
isolation determined a given society’s ability to communicate over long distances as well as its need (or
lack thereof) to interact with other cultures.
All these factors helped determine the population density an island could support, which in turn affected
whether the island needed to develop complex political organizations and economies. Where density
required more complex organizations, societies were more stratified and individual people were more
likely to specialize in particular jobs. All this affected the level of egalitarianism of stratification, the roles
and responsibilities of chiefs and kings, and the types of technologies the societies produced.
Diamond concludes that environmental factors created a huge diversification in the technological
advancement of societies in Polynesia. However, he notes that this only proves that an environment can
have such an effect. He has yet to prove that such factors did affect social development on the world’s
large continents.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 3 Summary
Diamond turns to a subject more familiar to most of his readership: the collision between the Incas and the
Spanish in South America in 1532. In that encounter, Francisco Pizarro and 168 soldiers captured King
Atahuallpa, who was supported by an army of 80,000 men.
Before his encounter with Atahuallpa, Pizarro stationed groups of men with guns and trumpets in strategic
positions around a square. He even put rattles on his men’s horses so they would make more noise. When
Atahuallpa and his entourage arrived, Pizarro presented the king with a Bible and a message about its
contents. Atahuallpa, unable to read Spanish and offended by Pizarro’s manners, threw the Bible to the
ground. The Spaniards attacked, killing Incan soldiers and capturing Atahuallpa while the Incan army,
terrified by the Spaniards’ weapons and surprised into disorganization, failed to fight back.
After describing this scene, Diamond sets out to determine why the Spaniards were able to capture
Atahuallpa. Pizarro’s soldiers’ weaponry was, by South American standards at the time, unimaginably
effective. Horses had never been seen in South America before, and sixty-two of Pizarro’s soldiers were
mounted on horses, giving them an enormous advantage of speed and force. Pizarro’s soldiers also had
guns, steel swords, and steel armor, none of which existed among the Incas. These weapons were so much
stronger than the weapons previously used in the Americas that Spanish armies of dozens or hundreds of
men routinely slaughtered thousands of Indians in battle.
In addition to superior weaponry, the Spanish conquest was aided by disease. The arrival of Spanish in the
Americas brought about a smallpox outbreak among populations that had never before been exposed to
the disease. Whereas European communities had developed a resistance to smallpox over the course of
centuries, the Indians in South America had no such defenses. Whole communities died. Smallpox spread
through the Incan empire more quickly than the Spanish could advance. Just a few years prior to Pizarro’s
arrival in the area, an Incan emperor and his immediate heir had been killed. This brought about a civil
war between Atahuallpa and his brother, who both claimed the Incan throne. Their conflict and the great
loss of life it caused weakened the Incan civilization.
Smallpox was not the only disease that ravaged and destabilized Indian populations after Europeans
arrived in the Americas. Measles, flu, typhoid fever, and plague all took their turns devastating
populations around the world. Diseases sometimes harmed European explorers as well, creating problems
for those who entered new territories and encountered new illnesses. In general, however, Europeans
brought more diseases overseas than they found when they arrived.
Both the Incas—who had the most developed society in the New World at the time—and the Spanish had
centralized, highly organized government systems. However, it was the Spanish and not the Incas who
crossed seas and conquered other nations. The Spanish had developed maritime technology the Incas did
not possess, and the Spanish had a written language, which allowed for better transfer of information over
long distances.
Perhaps partly because of the lack of an Incan writing system, Atahuallpa had almost no prior knowledge
of the Spanish before he encountered them. Therefore, he had no reason to suspect that the small Spanish
force was a threat. If he had received information from the Native American groups that were conquered
before the Incas, he might have suspected that the Spanish were likely to deceive him. He had no such
information, however. He ordered his people to pay an enormous ransom to secure his release. Pizarro’s
men collected this ransom and then killed Atahuallpa.
The next section discusses why the Spanish possessed advantages such as horses, steel weapons, maritime
technology, writing, and the resistance to infectious diseases when the Incas did not.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 4 Summary
In Part Two of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond argues that superior food production was the root cause
beneath the ability of Eurasia’s people to develop the guns, germs, and steel that conquered the rest of the
world. He promises to discuss in a future section the particular ways food production techniques had this
effect around the world, but first he devotes Chapter 4 to explaining why food production had this effect at
all.
First, a population that can produce more food can also produce more people. Of the plant and animal
matter our planet produces naturally, the vast majority is inedible, poisonous, or too inefficient for humans
to bother eating. When people control what the land produces, they can choose to raise the plants and
animals that are the best available sources of food. Some farm animals produce fertilizer, do farm work,
and provide fuel for fires in addition to providing meat and milk. Consequently, herding and farming
societies can usually feed 10 to 100 times the number of people hunter-gatherer societies can feed.
In addition to these advantages, farming replaces a nomadic lifestyle with a sedentary one. This allows
farming cultures to bear and raise more children and store and use food surpluses. Farming societies are in
a better position to support full-time leaders, shamans, artisans, and scribes.
After human societies domesticated large mammals, they quickly developed the ability to transport people
and trade goods over longer distances. In Eurasia, horses became deadly tools of warfare by 4000 B.C.
Later, when people invented stirrups and saddles, they became even more effective.
In Eurasian farming societies, domesticated mammals lived in close proximity to humans and gave rise to
most of the infectious diseases that devastated the populations visited by Europeans in the 1500s and later.
Smallpox, measles, and flu all evolved from similar diseases in farm animals. The people who
domesticated the animals quickly evolved at least partial resistance to these diseases. However, the same
diseases wreaked havoc every time they were introduced to populations that had not previously been
exposed to them.
Near the end of the chapter, Diamond pauses to note some possible objections to the points he has made so
far. He admits that, over the course of history, a few hunter-gatherer societies have developed sedentary
lifestyles, specialist workers, and the like. However, he says that only agricultural societies have ever
achieved the population density and number of specialists necessary to develop widespread, politically
centralized cultures. Moreover, only food-producing societies have achieved significant technological
advancement. Diamond concludes, therefore, that a culture’s ability to advance is ultimately dependant on
food production and on the availability of domesticable plants and animals.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 5 Summary
In prehistoric times, agriculture developed spontaneously in several different parts of the world, then it
spread outward from there to many other regions. The places that developed agriculture are not the most
fertile; indeed, some extremely fertile areas like California never encountered farming or herding until
after Europe’s colonialist period began.
After noting these facts, Diamond asks a series of questions: Why did farming and herding techniques
arise at different times in different places? Why did they take longer to spread to some areas than to
others? Why did the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies sometimes involve the
violent replacement of one group of people by another?
Diamond explains that archaeologists can discover when and where agriculture arose by dating evidence
of domesticated plants and animals and then comparing this evidence to the archaeological record of the
domesticated species’ wild cousins. He explains that this process yields plausible but inexact information,
which is particularly complicated when people appear to have domesticated the same species more than
once in different places.
There are five places where people certainly invented agriculture independently without first having
encountered farmers or herders from elsewhere: Southwest Asia’s Fertile Crescent, China, Mexico, the
South American Andes, and Eastern North America. In four additional places, agriculture may have arisen
independently but the archaeological record is uncertain. These places are the African Sahel, West Africa,
Ethiopia, and New Guinea. With his discussion of these places, Diamond provides lists (see Table 5.1 in
the book) of the early sets of plants and animals domesticated in each area.
Next Diamond examines evidence from archaeological sites, including Egypt, Western Europe, and the
Indus Valley, where food production techniques appear to have been imported and where people also
domesticated new plants. In Egypt, hunter-gatherers apparently adopted farming and herding gradually,
phasing out their use of wild foods over time. Diamond believes this is evidence that the local population
adopted farming techniques from their neighbors rather than inventing it on their own. He states that this
kind of shift happened in several other archaeological sites around the world at various times.
Western Europe seems to have adopted agriculture in a different way than Egypt did. Although the
archaeological evidence for Europe is incomplete, it seems to suggest a sudden shift from wild foods to an
entirely new diet. Diamond thinks this means the land was conquered by invaders from southwest Asia
who did not know much about Europe’s wild plant species. He claims that recorded history shows
numerous examples of similar land takeovers by invading food-producing societies.
Diamond has now explained where agriculture arose and shown that it spread to new places in different
ways. The next chapter will answer his questions about why the techniques arose and spread as they did.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 6 Summary
To begin his discussion about why agriculture took longer to arise in some places than in others, Diamond
compares the five areas of the world that have particularly fertile climates: southwest Asia’s Fertile
Crescent, southwestern Europe, California, southwestern Australia, and South Africa’s Cape. Agriculture
arose independently in the Fertile Crescent in 8500 B.C. and spread to southwestern Europe around 5500
B.C. In the other three places, agriculture was absent until after 1500 A.D., when colonists from Europe
began carrying their crops and food-production techniques to other continents.
Diamond explains that food production techniques evolved slowly over time. The lives of early farmers
were not much different from the lives of hunter-gatherers; indeed, the first farmers had to work so hard to
produce food that they tended to live shorter, less healthy lives than did their hunter-gatherer neighbors.
Hunting and gathering cultures often existed side by side and traded with agricultural societies without
adopting farming techniques. Some groups lived and still live in ways that blur the distinction between the
two lifestyles.
A culture’s shift from eating all wild foods to eating mostly domesticated foods typically took thousands
of years. In the intervening period, people constantly had to make choices about how to divide their time
between their various food-producing and food-finding activities. Their choices would have been affected
by their need for certain types of foods at certain times, their preferences for some foods over others, the
amount of effort it took to get each kind of food, the chances that their effort to get food would be
successful, and their cultural beliefs.
The first farmers on any continent could not have consciously chosen to become farmers because they had
no prior knowledge of a farming lifestyle. After food production evolved, however, their neighbors did
have a chance to compare the lifestyles. These neighbors could choose to adopt food-production
techniques wholly or partially or to ignore them completely. It is not surprising that those who lived in
areas where hunting and gathering was more difficult adopted food production faster than did those who
lived in areas where hunting and gathering was relatively easy. Some cultures adopted food production
piece by piece, and some adopted it for a while and then abandoned it again to return to a hunter-gatherer
lifestyle.
Although the switch between lifestyles was not quick or simple, food production clearly had a competitive
advantage over hunting and gathering. Over the past 10,000 years, nearly the entire world has shifted to
food production. Although archaeologists and anthropologists do not agree on the exact reasons for this
shift, several factors probably played a role. First, wild game and plant species became less available
because of depletion by hunter-gatherers and because of climate changes on Earth. Also, the growth of
technology made farming more advantageous over time. Increasing human population densities may have
resulted from farming techniques, but they also created a pressure to produce more food within a given
area, thus boosting the reward for creating better farming techniques.
All these factors probably played a role in the transition to farming in the Fertile Crescent in 8500 B.C. At
that time in that climate, wild mammals were not as abundant as they had been previously, but wild
cereals were becoming more abundant. People developed better techniques for harvesting and processing
those cereals, and virtually all of those tools were useful for them after the transition to farming. Also,
human population densities reached a point at which they needed the land to produce more food per acre
than it was producing on its own. Ten or twenty thousand years before, the same possibilities and
pressures were not present, so farming techniques did not arise.
Another reason populations tended to shift from hunting and gathering to food production was that food
producers became more numerous. Larger populations gave them a competitive advantage if they tried to
kill or displace their neighbors.
Even where the land was good for food production, as in California, deserts and mountains sometimes
insulated hunter-gatherer groups and allowed their societies to last longer than their counterparts
elsewhere. Farmers and herders have never displaced hunter-gatherers from a few areas that are too
marginal for food production, but Diamond believes the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups on Earth
will not maintain this lifestyle much longer.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Chapter 7 Summary
All domestic plants today are descended from plants that were once wild. Some domestic plants are

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