Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.

Diamond, Jared,  

Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.  

1997

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond argues that 

both geography and the environment played major roles in 

determining the shape of the modern world. This argument runs 

counter to the usual theories that cite biology as the crucial factor. 

Diamond claims that the cultures that were first able to domesticate 

plants and animals were then able to develop writing skills, as well as 

make advances in the creation of government, technology, weaponry, 

and immunity to disease.

Prologue: Yali's Question: The regionally 

differing courses of history 13

Ch. 1 Up to the Starting Line: What happened on all 

the continents before 11,000 B.C.? 35

Ch. 2 A Natural Experiment of History: How 

geography molded societies on Polynesian islands 53

Ch. 3 Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor 

Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain 67

Ch. 4 Farmer Power: The roots of guns, germs, and 

steel 85

Ch. 5 History's Haves and Have-Nots: Geographic 

differences in the onset of food production 93

Ch. 6 To Farm or Not to Farm: Causes of the spread 

of food production 104

Ch. 7 How to Make an Almond: The unconscious 

development of ancient crops 114

Ch. 8 Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some 

regions fail to domesticate plants? 131

Ch. 9 Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna 

Karenina Principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never 

domesticated? 157

Ch. 10 Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes: Why did 

food production spread at different rates on different continents? 

176

Ch. 11 Lethal Gift of Livestock: The evolution of 

germs 195

Ch. 12 Blueprints and Borrowed Letters: The 

evolution of writing 215

Ch. 13 Necessity's Mother: The evolution of 

technology 239

Ch. 14 From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy: The 

evolution of government and religion 265

Ch. 15 Yali's People: The histories of Australia and 

New Guinea 295 

Ch. 16 How China became Chinese: The history of 

East Asia 322

Ch. 17 Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of the 

Austronesian expansion 334

Ch. 18 Hemispheres Colliding: The histories of 

Eurasia and the Americas compared 354

Ch. 19 How Africa became Black: The history of 

Africa 376

Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a 

Science 403

Acknowledgments 427

Further Readings 429

Credits 459

Index 461 

 PREFACE

WHY IS WORLD HISTORY LIKE AN ONION?

THIS BOOK ATTEMPTS TO PROVIDE A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERYbody 

for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why 

did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this 

question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are 

about to read a racist treatise, you aren't; as you will see, the answers 

to the question don't involve human racial differences at all. The book's 

emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations, and on pushing back 

the chain of historical causation as far as possible.

Most books that set out to recount world history concentrate on 

histories of literate Eurasia and North African societies. Native societies 

of other parts of the world--sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Island 

Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands--receive 

only brief treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them very 

late in their history, after they were discovered and subjugated by western 

Europeans. Even within Eurasia, much more space gets devoted to the 

history of western Eurasia than of China, India, Japan, tropical 

Southeast Asia, and other eastern Eurasian societies. History before 

the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. also receives brief treatment, 

although it constitutes 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the 

human species. 

 10 · PREFACE

Such narrowly focused accounts of world history suffer from three 

disadvantages. First, increasing numbers of people today are, quite 

understandably, interested in other societies besides those of western