Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies

• Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
• 
  
• Written by: Jared Diamond
• Narrated by: Doug Ordunio
• Length: 16 hrs and 20 mins 
• Unabridged Audiobook

This was a fascinating book on the history of civilizations.  If someone holds a prejudice about certain races or people being superior based on the fact that their culture dominated the world, then this book will put a major dent into that thinking.  Jared Diamond makes a compelling case that the societies which came to dominate the modern world did so by advantages in their environment.  

This book highlights geography as a main driver of progress within civilizations.  First, Mr. Diamond establishes the premise that for civilizations to rise, there needs to be a move from hunter-gatherer society to a more sedentary farming society.  Once people are able to make excess food to survive, they will be able to support specialists that do more than just look for food.  These specialists can be a chief to allow society to establish order.  They can also be people that make tools, containers, or many other elements that help a people become more efficient at producing and distributing food.  

In order for people to make the leap from hunter-gatherers to farmers, they need domesticable plants and animals.  The book goes into detail about how these types of plants and animals are available in certain areas and not others.  Some plants and animals will make an easy transition to being farmed while others will require experience in farming to make them able to be farmed.  He also covers how when man arrived on the Americas, he hunted most of the native animals to extinction, thus robbing future generations of the chance to domesticate those animals.

Having established that societies rise from the move away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Mr. Diamond goes on to explain what happens to those societies.  By coming into closer contact with those animals, those societies gets diseases from the animals.  Over time, they develop a resistance to the diseases, but they do persist.  With a food producing society, people are now able to take up work that is not directly tied to gathering and hunting.  This allows the society to begin to advance.  People can now specialize in law, tool and material production, language, etc.

People located in the "cradle of civilization" are benefited by their environment.  Many species of plants and animals were easier to domesticate than elsewhere.  This aided in their development and the rise of their societies.  Eurasia also has a long east-west area.  This allowed their advancements to travel long distances and to be shared with other societies.  Whereas in the Americas, the long north-south area meant that plants that were successful in one area were not going to be successful as they traveled across latitudes.   Certain innovations in plant domestication in North America were not able to be transferred to South America since the land in between would not support them.

The book goes into many examples of how the Americas, Australia, and Africa were held in check by having long north-south land areas.  Eurasia on the other hand allowed domesticated plants to travel across many societies since its east-west land routes allowed a species to survive across its main travel route.  

As the food producing societies spread out, they had major advantages.  That is where the book gets its title.  Advanced societies had the means of war and the population to overwhelm the less developed societies they encountered.  The Spaniards had steel swords to defeat the Incas wielding clubs.   Other native American groups were decimated by the diseases that the Europeans brought to America.  The ones that survived adapted quickly to the new innovations, but their populations and society were not able to handle the crush of Europeans.  

Later in the book, Mr. Diamond spends quite a bit of time on the Pacific cultures and their development.  The book slows down considerably here, but for the interested reader there is more backup to the earlier assumptions on civilizations and how they progress.  Less time is spent on the end about Africa and for me this did not shed much light on the great work done at the beginning.

Overall, this book helped explain why some societies came to dominate others.  It was not due to an innate advantage in intelligence from one population to another.  Instead, certain areas of the world were easier to civilize than others.  Once a society had the means of producing excess food, civilization could advance.  Some people were conquered, while others adapted to new technologies and advanced it themselves.  

I would definitely recommend this book to any reader interested in how today's societies came about.  It will help debating racists that claim that one race's conquering another means they are innately superior.  For me, this book gave a foundation in early civilizations that is lacking when studying them independently.