Guns Germs And Steel Summary

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In Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond explains how Europeans came to dominate the land through multiple ecological factors while discrediting the theory that Europeans were genealogical superior. He does this efficiently by using many examples and evidence throughout history. Diamond explains that the ecologic factors of Eurasia allowed the early settlers of Mesopotamia in the the Fertile Crescent to flourish while the environment of other early civilizations such as the Incas of the Andes or the peoples of New Guinea did not. He starts off by explaining that farming originated in five different centers which all appeared independently of each other and at different times. Diamond claims that farming was not a discovery or an invention but instead evolved as a by-product of choice without awareness of the consequences. Hunter-gatherers could not have know about farming or the benefits it could reep. Farming came about…show more content…
The ability to farm and domesticate animals led the civilizations in Eurasia to further increase the population density. This increase in population density led to the creation of technologies such as writing and administrative bodies. The first writing system was cuneiform, invented in before 3000 B.C. in Sumer in the Mesopotamian area. Writing was invented as a way to keep track of records or transactions. Since you only need to keep track of records in a large, sediment civilization writing was developed in Sumer first. There is debate about how administrative bodies came about. Aristotle claimed that it is a natural condition of human societies. Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims that states are formed by social contract, a rational decision formed by when people calculated their self-interest and did away with simpler societies. Another theory is that when large scale irrigation was being constructed a centralized body had to maintain and construct

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