What is Guns Germs and steel about?
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (also titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
When did Guns Germs and steel win the Pulitzer Prize?
In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.
What is geographic determinism in Guns Germs and steel?
The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive." In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the differences between societies and societal development arise primarily from geographical causes.
See more
Is Guns, Germs, and Steel a history book?
Guns, Germs and Steel was one of the first history books I read that I actually enjoyed! This book gives a global history over the last 13,000 years, so after reading it you gain a broad understanding across a lot of history.
Where did farming first develop and why Guns, Germs, and Steel?
Along with the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, independent domestication of wild plants is believed to have occurred in Ancient China, in Central and Southern America, in sub-Tropical Africa, and in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
What is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel theory?
Backgrounder for Teachers: Jared Diamond's basic theory is that some countries developed more rapidly than others and were able to expand and conquer much of the world because of geographic luck.
What is Guns, Germs, and Steel based on?
Based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity's journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Why is it called Guns, Germs, and Steel?
Title. The book's title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations and maintained dominance though sometimes being vastly outnumbered, so that imperialism was enabled by guns, germs, and steel.
What is the major conclusion of Guns, Germs, and Steel?
'My main conclusion (of Guns, Germs, and Steel) was that societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments, not in human biology. ' Ah, so crisply well put.
What is Diamond's answer to Yali's question?
Diamond's book-long answer to Yali's question is, put simply--geography and food production.
What is Jared Diamond's explanation for why the Spanish?
What is Jared Diamond's explanation for why the Spanish had advanced to steel swords while Inca's were still making tools and weapons from bronze? Answer: Because Europe was geographically close to the Fertile Crescent, they inherited the 7,000 years of metal technology that had been developed there.
Why is the climate of South Africa and Europe almost exactly the same?
Because the Cape and Europe lie at a similar latitude, or distance from the equator, and this means that the temperature and climate of these widely separated regions are almost exactly the same.
How do societies fail?
Collapses of past societies Diamond identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbours, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and the society's response to the foregoing four factors.
Why did the Spanish have guns but the Inca did not?
Pizarro's conquistadors were armed with the latest and greatest in weapons technology – guns, and swords. The Inca, by comparison, had never worked iron or discovered the uses of gunpowder. Geography had not endowed them with these resources.
What 3 things have all great civilizations had in common?
Jared Diamond: All great civilizations have had some things in common – advanced technology, large populations, and well-organized workforce.
Why did the Spanish have guns but the Inca did not?
Pizarro's conquistadors were armed with the latest and greatest in weapons technology – guns, and swords. The Inca, by comparison, had never worked iron or discovered the uses of gunpowder. Geography had not endowed them with these resources.
Which part of the world was probably the first place where the Neolithic Revolution occurred?
The Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, specifically the site of a realm known as Sumer, which dates back to about 4000 B.C.E.
What is Jared Diamonds explanation for why the Spanish had advanced to steel swords while Incas were still making tools and weapons from bronze?
What is Jared Diamond's explanation for why the Spanish had advanced to steel swords while Inca's were still making tools and weapons from bronze? Answer: Because Europe was geographically close to the Fertile Crescent, they inherited the 7,000 years of metal technology that had been developed there.
Why are guns, germs, and steel important?
Guns, Germs, and Steel seek to answer the biggest question of post-Ice-Age human history: why Eurasian peoples , rather than peoples of other continents, became the ones to develop the ingredients of power (guns, germs, and steel) and to expand around the world. An extraterrestrial being visiting the Earth 14,000 years ago could have been forgiven for failing to predict this outcome, because the human populations of other
What would happen if food production had arisen?
One might still wonder: if food production had arisen simultaneously all around the world, then peoples everywhere would have developed complex societies simultaneously, and the subsequent world dominance of Eurasian societies would remain unexplained. Here, the bodies of information in the fields of botany and zoology become relevant. Food production didn’t arise simultaneously around the world: in most of the world it never arose independently at all; it did arise independently in just nine small regions, from which it diffused to other regions; and, among those nine regions, it arose more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and possibly in China, but only as recently as 2500 BC in the eastern United States. The value of the domesticated plants and animals also varied among regions: the most numerous and productive suites of domesticated species arose in the Fertile Crescent, followed by China, Mexico, and the Andes, while the least numerous and least productive suites arose in the eastern U.S., New Guinea, and Ethiopia.
Why was an extraterrestrial being visiting Earth 14,000 years ago could have been forgiven for failing to predict this?
An extraterrestrial being visiting the Earth 14,000 years ago could have been forgiven for failing to predict this outcome, because the human populations of other. Buy Guns, germs, and steel. continents apparently also possessed advantages.
Introduction
In the introduction, Diamond writes about the time he met Yali, a man from New Guinea, in 1972. Yali asked "Why is it that you white people [made] so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" By "cargo", Yali meant inventions and objects that are made in a factory.
Farming by region
Diamond writes about what each region was like before European explorers started travelling around the world:
You Recommend Freshmen 'Common Reads'
Freshmen "common reads" are becoming increasingly popular at American colleges and universities. Incoming freshmen are assigned the same book over the summer and are asked to come prepared to discuss the book in their first week on campus.
Interview Highlights
"It has to offer freshmen what it had to offer me when I decided to write the book. It starts out with a familiar observation, mainly that different people have fared very differently in history — some people conquering other people. ...
More On Common Reads From NPR
"My basic living comes from teaching undergrads at the University of California, and they're also the people who ask me questions that show me that I don't really understand something that I'm lecturing to them about.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Background
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a historical book written by Jared Diamond, published in 1997, winning the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction just one year later.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Synopsis
As the title Guns, Germs, and Steel implies, the author explains that the Europeans were able to colonize and dominate much of the world due to their advanced technology. This technology of guns and steel allowed the Europeans to fight with steel swords, and eventually guns, conquering their opponents with relative ease.
Agricultural Revolution
At first, all humans were hunters and gatherers, which means they searched the land for food without staying in one specific place. The bands of individuals that traveled around the world had to remain small, less than 100 people, so that they would have enough food.
Where did bronze tools come from?
Thus behind the proximate explanation of the dominance of Old World societies and technologies over the last two thousand years (guns, germs and steel) lurks an ultimate explanation - why bronze tools appeared early in parts of Eurasia, late and only locally in the New World, and never, before European settlement, in Australasia.
What is the result of the Pleistocene age?
The result is an exciting and absorbing account of human history since the Pleistocene age, which culminates in a sketch of a future scientific basis for studying the history of humans that will command the same intellectual respect as current scientific studies of the history of other natural phenomena such as dinosaurs, nebulas and glaciers.
What is the spread of technology?
The spread of technology, and of the military conquests and economic changes that it has wrought over the past thousand years, is dismissed as largely a question of historical accident. For Diamond, technology is about inventiveness, and all peoples are equally inventive given the right circumstances.
How did the development of surplus food-producing societies with high population densities contribute to the development of other technological changes?
The development of surplus food-producing societies with high population densities provided humans with resistance to the diseases carried by their domesticated flocks , and facilitated other technological changes - especially the development of systems of specialised knowledge that led to advances in metallurgy, literacy and socio-economic organisation - primarily within the Eurasian supercontinent, and its outlying regions in the western Pacific and northern Africa, where the environment, and the geographical networks of migration, trade and communication, most favoured their spread. Diffusion is the key concept here - some continents and regions were more favourable than others, because of internal or external connections. As a result, when the scattered branches of the human species were reunited by trans-oceanic voyages and mercantile capitalism after 1500, Old World invaders had a decisive advantage over their New World cousins - the development of guns, germs and steel ensured that Europeans settled the Americas, Oceania and Southern Africa, eliminating or subduing local populations unable to resist them.
What were the major developments in the history of agricultural societies?
Another important development in the history of agricultural societies was the invention of written language.
Why did agriculture spread?
Due to environmental qualities like soil fertility, availability of domesticable animals, and availability of edible crops, however, it took a longer time for agriculture to supplant hunter-gatherer culture in most other regions. Once agriculture had arisen around the world, it spread or diffused to neighboring regions. By and large, Diamond argues, it is easier for ideas, goods, and foods to spread from east to west than it is for them to spread north and south—this is because the Earth spins east-west, meaning that areas with the same latitude share a similar climate and environment. Archaeological data indicates that agricultural innovations diffused east and west far sooner than they diffused north and south.
Why did the structure of agricultural societies favor the invention of new technologies?
This is true for a number of reasons. Agricultural societies lead to the creation of leisure time, since crops can be stored for long periods —in their leisure time, citizens of early agricultural societies experimented with the resources and raw materials around them. Additionally, agricultural societies were denser than hunter-gatherer societies, increasing the velocity with which people exchanged ideas. As a result, agricultural societies developed more new technologies than hunter-gatherer societies, and passed on their innovations to neighboring agricultural societies.
Why did people start farming?
In certain parts of the world, humans began pursuing agriculture because the fertile soil and temperate climate made agriculture a good use ...
When did humans first come to the world?
Beginning about half a million years ago, the first human beings emerged in Africa, and eventually migrated around the rest of the world in search of game and other sources of food. About 11,000 years ago, certain human beings developed agriculture—a major milestone in human history.
How did ancient societies develop?
Ancient agricultural societies tend to develop into large, complex states. While the earliest agricultural societies were “bands” and small tribes, these small tribes gradually merged into larger and larger societies, either through conquering or mutual agreement. As societies became larger and denser, they tended to develop centralized structures of power—in other words, a central leadership that commanded a set of subordinate leaders, who in turn commanded local groups of people. States ruled through a balance of kleptocracy—i.e., leaders ordering their subjects to give up a portion of their possessions—and religion or patriotic fervor. By the 16th century—not coincidentally, the time when Europe was beginning its conquest of the New World—the state had become the dominant mode of society.