Essay about Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

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Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, in the book Diamonds is asked a question of his friend Yali, “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 believed that the gaps in power and technology between human societies started in environmental differences. Geography shaped human locations, by how climates affect where domesticated animals can easily travel and where crops can grow. Seasonally variable climate at high latitude poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing.

In the book the first step towards civilization is the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture with the domestication and farming of wild crops and animals. Agricultural production leads to food surpluses and this in turn supports sedentary societies, rapid population growth, and specialization of labor. Large societies tend to develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which leads in turn to the organization of empires.

Jared Diamond believed that farmers had to develop more advanced tools for producing more amounts of food and had the opportunity to support people that did not work in the fields, such as politicians, warriors, priests and so on. As a result of that, farmers became materialistically richer than hunter-gatherers who stayed in relatively small groups

"Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earlier in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents." Jared Diamond sees food production, or the domestication of plants and animals, as the central key to human history. Diamond goes on to explain the types of crops around the world, and a thorough description why the large seeded wild plants in Eurasia were easy to
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