Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Author: Jared Diamond
Paperback: 0393317552
Hardcover: 1879557541
Subjects: World History, Social Evolution, Civilisation, Ethnology, Human Beings.
In this book, Jared Diamond discusses how factors in the ancient environment gave rise to human culture. Topics discussed include social interaction, the formation of hierarchy including religion, the benefits and pitfalls of the domestication of plants and animals, the direction of movement of those plants and animals, development of written languages, and the growth of society.
Diamond discards Eurocentric anthropological assumptions, focusing on why certain societies developed faster than others did and why their ideas and inventions spread quickly or slowly. Ultimately he tells what factors influenced the European assertion of dominance over other cultures.
With many examples from African, Native American, Aboriginal, and Polynesian history, Diamond expresses how these cultures failed to produce the guns, the germs, and the steel that Europeans did.
