Checkpoint #3: Theme/Summary

Guns, Germs and Steel
The Fates of Human Societies
                 By: Jared Diamond


Today I am going to discuss the theme and summary of the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. The theme of this book is as follows; Advances in society and technology develop based off of the environment, not because of race or IQ.

Jared Diamond supports this theme in many different ways.  He starts by talking about the original location of humans, and their spread from that point in Chapter One- Up To The Starting Line. It describes when we should start comparing histories with this quote, 'A suitable starting point from which to compare historical developments on the different continents is around 11,000 B.C. This date corresponds approximately to the beginnings of village life in a few parts of the world, the first undisputed peopling of the Americas, the end of the Pleistocene Era and last Ice Age, and the start of what geologists term the Recent Era.' (Diamond 35) This provides a starting point so that people can make their own comparisons. It supports the theme because it proves that people around the world were not so completely backwards that they could not be compared.

 In Chapter Two- A Natural Experiment of History, he describes how geography can mold societies using Polynesian societies as an example. This is described by, 'As a result of all this environmentally related variation in subsistence, human population densities (measured in people per square mile of arable land) varied greatly over Polynesia.' (Diamond 61) It states that population density is determined by food production and not intelligence. The population densities did not differ because of intelligence but rather because of food supply in these areas.

 Chapter Four- Farmer Power, explains why sedentary food production was important to the discoveries of other technologies. This is supported by the quote, 'In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations.' (Diamond 92) It was the amount of food supply and population that advanced society, not IQ levels in early humans.

 Chapters Six and Seven; To Farm Or Not To Farm and  How To Make An Almond describe why certain crops have or have not developed in specific areas. Chapter Six mostly describes why people would choose to farm, or why they would choose to be hunter-gatherers. 'Only where especially potent geographic or ecological barriers made immigration of food producers or diffusion of locally appropriate food-producing techniques were hunter-gatherers able to persist until modern times in areas suitable for food production.' (Diamond 112) People were not too stupid to farm, they just didn't receive the opportunity, or their land was not very well suited to farming,

Chapter Seven talks about which plants were domesticated and why. 'Some of it, such as variation in berry size or in nut bitterness, would have been readily noticed by ancient farmers. Other variation, such as that in seed dispersal mechanisms or seed dormancy, would have gone unrecognized by humans before the rise of modern botany. But whether the selection of wild edible plants by ancient hikers relied on conscious or unconscious criteria, the resulting evolution of wild plants into crops was at first an unconscious process.' (Diamond 130) People weren't smarter than others to choose certain foods to eat, it was based on the size or availability of that food source.

So far, I am on Chapter Nine- Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, And The Anna Karenina Principle is about why certain animals are or are not domesticated based on their characteristics and general usefulness. The animals that have been domesticated are very similar. 'The Anna Karenina principle explains a feature of animal domestication that had heavy consequences for human history- namely, that so many seemingly suitable big wild mammal species, such as zebras and peccaries, have never been domesticated and that the successful domesticates were almost entirely Eurasian.' (Diamond 157) Some animals were impossible to domesticate, not because people were stupid, just because they were not breed able, or could not be placed together in groups without attacking each other.

I especially enjoyed the prologue of this book, Yali's Question. The question of why New Guinea didn't have developments such as steel and farming was raised to Jared Diamond by a native New Guinean politician named Yali. That is the question that kick-started the book and it is a real question to make you think. 'All those things must have been on Yali's mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"' (Diamond 14)  I believe this question has two major answers, time and geography. If there had been more time, the New Guineans might have developed farming. Without cereal crops (major grains) in their geography it made it impossible to experience massive population growth.

If you like history, I would recommend this book to you.