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Synopsis of Jared Diamonds book Guns, Germs and Steel, which won a pulitzer prize for 1998.

Premise

The premise for Guns Germs and Steel was to answer the question why did European civilization win out over other competing civilizations. The answer it turns out is simple and has nothing to do with so-called racial differences that have been commonly believed, though ill-supported.

People clearly came from Africa, at one time or another, and the reason large civilizations never began until humans could reach north to Egypt, and Mesopotamia was due to climate, and animals.

Cities

Diamond explains that cities allow people to have free time to devise different tools and methods for better survival. In order to be able to stay put instead of roaming, people needed food, hence agriculture. And making the change from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies depended entirely on the presence of domesticable animals. --

Domesticability

If an animal is not domesticable, it cannot be used for work in agriculture. There are six criteria for domesticability. The animal must not be too dangerous. It must allow man to replace one of the group as head animal, many animals are too independent to be domesticated. The animal must be able to survive in captivity, and so on.

Of all the domesticable species in the world, only one comes from outside the temperate region of Eurasia, which extends nearly uninterrupted from eastern Europe to Asia. Only the Llama of South America is indigenous to lands outside of the temperate region of Eurasia. There are no domesticable animals native to Africa.

Geography

Lastly, Diamond explains how geography shapes human migration, not simply by making travel difficult, (particularly by longitude), but by how climates affect where domesticable animals can easily travel and where crops can ideally grow. Thus civilization developed in the fertile crescent quite naturally because the conditions were right for it.