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| Genre/Form: | History |
|---|---|
| Document Type: | Book |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Jared M Diamond |
| ISBN: | 0393038912 9780393038910 0393317552 9780393317558 9780613181143 061318114X |
| OCLC Number: | 35792200 |
| Performer(s): | Read by Grover Gardner. |
| Awards: | Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 1998. Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, 1998. |
| Description: | 480 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm |
| Contents: | Prologue: Yali's question : the regionally differing courses of history ; Part 1: From Eden to Cajamarca. Up to the starting line : What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.? ; A natural experiment of history : how geography molded societies on the Polynesian islands ; Collision at Cajamarca : why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain -- Part 2: The rise and spread of food production. Farmer power : the roots of guns, germs, and steel ; History's haves and have-nots : geographic differences in the onset of food production ; To farm or not to farm : causes of the spread of food production ; How to make an almond : the unconscious development of ancient crops ; Apples or Indians : why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants? ; Zebras, unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina principle : Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated? ; Spacious skies and tilted axes : Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents? -- Part 3: From food to guns, germs, and steel. Lethal gift of livestock : the evolution of germs ; Blueprints and borrowed letters : the evolution of writing ; Necessity's mother : the evolution of technology ; From egalitarianism to kleptocracy : the evolution of government and religion -- Part 4: Around the world in five chapters. Yali's people : the histories of Australia and New Guinea ; How China became Chinese : the history of East Asia ; Speedboat to Polynesia : the history of Austronesian expansion ; Hemispheres colliding : the histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared ; How Africa became black : the history of Africa -- Epilogue: The future of human history as a science. |
| Responsibility: | Jared Diamond. |
| More information: |
Abstract:
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be. It is a work rich in dramatic revelations that will fascinate readers even as it challenges conventional wisdom.
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Sits on my "Ten Best Books I've Ever Read" shelf & likely to stay.
Jared Diamond takes on the ambitious project of explaining why it is that some continents' civilizations could conquer others, and finds the answer in people's ability to form domestic relationships with plant and animal species. To summarize: more "domesticated" (agricultural, harvested) plants leads...
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Jared Diamond takes on the ambitious project of explaining why it is that some continents' civilizations could conquer others, and finds the answer in people's ability to form domestic relationships with plant and animal species. To summarize: more "domesticated" (agricultural, harvested) plants leads to sedentary and eventually specialist-producing civilizations that can develop good weapons and other technology (guns, steel). More domesticated animals living closely a non-nomadic human society, in close proximity to humans, means more human diseases when germs come to move between animal and human hosts. That leads to awful plagues but also to germ resistance in the human survivors...germ resistance that other peoples whose immune systems and internal bacteria etc. have not coevolved with the domesticated animals lack. Explorers from disease-resistant populations carry with them germs that can kill off non-resistant populations to devastating effect, often before the conquerers even arrive in large numbers at all. That is the "germs" part of Diamond's equation.But why is it that some civilizations seem to find it easier than others to domesticate plants and animals, and bring their domesticated plants and animals with them to new lands? Diamond argues that it's partly the luck of the geographical draw: some regions simply have more easily "domesticable" plants and animals than others (for more on what makes a plant or animal "domesticable," see the book. Once one has some plants and animals domesticated, though, mobility becomes an issue, especially for the plants. Plants, with life cycles tied closely to length of day and growing season, move much more easily east (or west) than north (or south). Therefore, people living on the huge, east-west oriented landmass of Eurasia can more easily expand their civilizations across the continent than people living in a north-south oriented continent like Africa or South America; the crops they're used to can thrive. Had the east-west continent of North America been peopled earlier, or contained more domesticable species, European explorers would have had a much harder time conquering North America than they did.The above is the merest, grossest sketch of the sorts of arguments Diamond makes. For evidence to support them, he draws on studies in many different areas, as indeed he needs to if he is to support his broad claims.Some reviewers dislike Diamond's arguments because they leave out major personalities and cultural achievements of rulers and churches or other institutions. In my view, these factors operate at a different level than what Diamond is talking about. Such individuals and institutions do come to exert independent influence on their social and material worlds, but what Diamond is saying is that such entities require some basic conditons in order to flower, and Diamond has taken on the job of naming and explaining those necessary conditions.
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Related Subjects:(28)
- Social evolution.
- Civilization -- History.
- Ethnology.
- Human beings -- Effect of environment on.
- Culture diffusion.
- Civilization -- history.
- Social Environment.
- Biological Evolution.
- Cultural Evolution.
- Sociology, Medical -- methods.
- Évolution sociale.
- Civilisation -- Histoire.
- Ethnologie.
- Homme -- Influence de l'environnement.
- Diffusion culturelle.
- Homme -- Influence sur la nature.
- 15.50 general world history; history of great parts of the world, peoples, civilizations: general.
- Civilization.
- Zivilisation
- Geschichte
- Soziale Evolution
- Wereldgeschiedenis.
- Culturele verschillen.
- Natuurlijke hulpbronnen.
- Zivilisation.
- Geschichte.
- Soziale Evolution.
- Book group discussion kits.
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