Guns, Germs and Steel
Ever wonder why the world ended up the way it is?
More precisely, why humanity unfolded the way it did.
Why did Europe for so long dominate ‘New Worlds’ making the natives subservient, imposing their way of live among millions? Why did some continents develop sophisticated technologies whilst others remained hunter-gatherers?
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jarred Diamond (Vintage –Random House Publishing), offers an extraordinary view into the 13,000 years of humanity. Following disciplines of evolution, history, biology, ecology and linguistics this book falls under popular science, though is not too out of reach for the average ‘non-science’ reader.
A highly recommended read for those wanting to better understand many historical events from Darwinian-omnipotent view; From the many issues still plaguing Africa and developing nations, right down to the misinterpretation then maltreatment of our own Indigenous Australians. This is an excellent book to lift the veil on some of history’s most difficult questions.
Tags: Aisa, Biology, Developing Nations, Ecology, Europe, Evolution, History, Humanity, Linguistics, New World, Old World, Read
May 29th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
You should have borrowed my copy. It’s an interesting book and certainly changed my perspective on a few things. Easy reading for those without a science background. I’d recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in anthropology.
January 20th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Diamond was not the first to argue that environmental factors had a decisive influence on human history. In the late 1850s Henry Thomas Buckle sought to discover laws that governed history, and wrote that favorable climate and soils, and the plentiful food they produced, were important contributors to a population’s accumulation of wealth. He believed that freedom from natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods made people less prone to superstition and therefore more likely to make rapid intellectual progress.
In the 1930s, the Annales School in France undertook the study of long-term historical structures by using a synthesis of geography, history, and sociology. Scholars examined the impact of geography, climate and land use. Although geography had been nearly eliminated as an academic discipline in the USA after the 1960s, several geographically-based historical theories were published in the 1990s. In addition, environmental history has arisen as a field taking account of man’s activities in nature.