"Serious, groundbreaking biological studies of human history only seem to come along once every generation or so. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition." "No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. "The scope and the explanatory power of this book are astounding." - The New Yorker One of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years." - Colin Renfrew, Nature "A book of remarkable scope, a history of the world in less than 500 pages which succeeds admirably, where so many others have failed, in analyzing some of the basic workings of culture process. "An ambitious, highly important book." - James Shreeve, New York Times Book Review There is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond has done." - William H. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.Ī major landmark in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way in which the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns. Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H.
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