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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of antropology at UCLA. It won the Pulitzer Prize for 1998.

"An alternate title would be: A short history about everyone for the last 13,000 years." - Jared Diamond

With Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond says, he attempts to answer a simple assumption which is still pervasive in western culture, namely: Western civilisation, as a whole, has survived and conquered others, because it is inherently superior. The implication of this line of thinking usually explains differences in cultural development as evidence of race being a valid distinction.

Diamond disagrees with this, and in common language, argues that the power and technology gaps dividing human societies developed not from cultural or racial differences, but from differing advantages present in different geography and resources.

Synopsis

Before anyone developed agriculture, people lived as hunter-gatherers, as some to this day still do.

Diamond argues that European civilisation and its people are distinct from other people in the world only in that Europe has a cultivated civilization. Civilization, he explains, is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity.

The key to civilization is agriculture. The keys to agriculture are domesticable animals for work, and temperate climate. The domesticability of an animal species requires that six criteria are met.

Diamond clearly argues that civilization is not created out of sheer will or intelligence, but is more like a stack of cards, each level dependent upon the levels below it.

Transition

GGS explains that cities are based on agriculture - to provide an ample supply of food. As farmers do the work of providing food, others are free to pursue other functions, such as mining, and literacy.

Making the change from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies depended entirely on the presence of domesticable animals, of which, 13 come from the Eurasian continent region.

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

Diamond also 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.

Modern humans are believed to have developed in the southern region of the African continent, at one time or another. This is sometimes referred to as the Out of Africa theory. It was the Saharan desert that is believed to have kept people from migrating north to the fertile crescent, until later when the Nile river valley became accommodating.

Some peoples, such as the Aborigines of Australia, are believed to have been early emmigrants from Africa, leaving by boat.

Diamond continues to explain the story of human development up to the modern era, through the rapid development of technology, and its dire conseequences on hunter-gathering cultures around the world.

Germs

In the later context of the European-American conquest of the Americas, 90 percent of the indigenous populations are believed to have been killed-off by diseases brought by the Europeans.

How was it then that diseases native to the American continents did not kill off Europeans? Diamond points out that the domestication of animals allowed Europeans close contact with animals and their native diseases, developing an immunity, while the Native American hunter-gatherers, did not.

Criticisms

This book has been criticized as an example of environmental determinism and Eurocentrism, with racist implications (not because it relies on the language of race, but because it shares elements of the logic of 19th century European racist discource). The charge is not that the book claims superiority of European Civilization in the modern era, but that:

• It suggests that European civilization has "won" some competition. Human history is far from over, therefore it is impossible to say that one form of social organization has "won" over another form. To put it another way, Diamond suggests that history provides us with a natural experiment, but he is mistaken because experiments must have clear endings and the human "experiment" never ends.
• It suggests the inevitability of European ascendency.
• It overlooks or obscures the importance of non-European knowledge, technologies, and labor in European development, and the fact that Europeans forcibly appropriated much of this knowledge, technology, and labor. In other words, the "ascendency" in question is one that has primarily benefited Europeans, but is not specifically "European" in nature.
• It makes little attempt to explain relatively recent geographic transitions in technology, power and wealth; in particular the rise of Europe and the decline of south-west Asia since about 1500.

For a review of these criticisms, see the geographer James M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians.

Sources:

• Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company, March 1997. ISBN 0393038912
• ABC Radio Transcripts: Why Societies Collapse: Jared Diamond at Princeton University http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s707591.htm
• James M. Blaut: Eight Eurocentric Historians. The Guilford Press, New York, 2000. ISBN 1572305916