Guns Germs And Steel Summary

Words: 534
Pages: 3

Prologue: Yali’s Question
Diamond was asked the question by Yali: why whites who came to New Guinea had so many goods and so much technology, when the people already there had so little.Diamond tries to show this in the rest of the book by going over thousands of years worth of history.
Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Line
Explains the use of carbon dating a little bit.Goes over the last 13,000 years at which time humans had colonized all the continents except Antarctica, and all human beings cultures were still hunter/gatherers. After this point, the environment of the continents affected how those hunter-gatherer societies would be further developed. After date domestication began, and people that did so began to farm.
Chapter 2: A Natural
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The Maori and Moriori cultures developed from the same ancestral culture, but the Moriori became isolated and because of the resources on their islands, developing towards a simpler social structure and technology than their ancestors had.
The Maori, became more complex when they came in contact with Europeans, they quickly adopted firearms,and overwhelmed their slower-to-adopt neighbours.
Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca
The Spanish had the advantage of virulent germs—earlier European contact had spread diseases like smallpox, which killed the Inca emperor and his heir, leading to a civil war that destabilized the Inca politically. Spanish firearms, and Spanish horses terrified their opponents, and with the heavy armour meant they were better able to kill.
Not one factor meant the Spanish were able to conquer the Inca, but many working together to make them who they are.
Chapter 4: Farmer Power
A good amount of the food in the wild people can’t eat.With the rise of farming made it possible for people to stay in one given area and live off the land.The more land you have the more people you can feed compared to the hunter/gather method.By this some civilization were able to speed up their technology with further avasenes in building materials such as