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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. The
story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the
entire human population. Around that time, paths of development of human societies
on different continents began to diverge gently. Early domestication of wild plants
and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the south-eastern United
States, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start. Why wheat
and corn, cattle and pigs, and the modern world's other "blockbuster"
crops and livestock arose in those particular regions and not elsewhere was, until
now, but faintly understood. The localized origins of
farming and herding, prove to be only part of the explanation for the differing
fates of different peoples. The very unequal rates at which food production spread
from those initial centers had much to do with other features of climate and geography
-- such as the differing sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents.
Societies that advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage were more likely to develop
writing, technology, government, organized religions -- as well as nasty germs,
and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring
on sea and land, that expanded to new homelands at the expense of other peoples.
The most familiar examples involve the conquest of non-European peoples by Europeans
in the last 500 years, beginning with voyages in search of precious metals and
spices and often leading to invasion of native lands and decimation of native
inhabitants through slaughter and introduced diseases. Similar population replacements,
less familiar to American readers, unfolded earlier within Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan
Africa, and other parts of the world. 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. Jared Diamond, professor of physiology
at the UCLA School of Medicine, is the author of the best-selling and award-winning
The Third Chimpanzee, about which Diane Ackerman has written: "Wonderful,…Through
insight and illumination, Jared Diamond conducts his fascinating study of our
behavior and origins with a naturalist's eye and a philosopher's cunning." Jared
Diamond began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary
biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical
Society, and has received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Burr Award
of the National Geographic Society. He has published over 200 articles in Discover,
Natural History, Nature
and Geo magazines. |
