Guns, Germs and Steel Analysis

In Jared Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel a case is made to demonstrate that human civilization throughout the world didn’t just occur by happenstance to today’s world dynamic, but instead can be explained through logical reasons that in many instances were caused by natural occurrences and in other instances through man made instances. In Diamond’s book, he takes the reader back many centuries to really the beginning times of human existence, and the historical occurrences that took place to make our world what it is today.

Diamond takes us through a logical chain of events that took place with the intent on explaining why what he classifies as Eurasia happened to develop into one of the most advanced and fastest growing continent in human history. Diamond goes into great depth to explain how from the domestication of large game animals, the germs that came from them, and use of these animals to farm in an organized manner, helped spur on other human advances, and at the same why at the same rate other civilizations grew and developed at much slower rates due to the same principles. In some case as Diamond explains the difference between growth and the large gap between civilizations development occurred only hundreds of miles away from one another and not just from a continent apart. He uses the Polynesian culture as one of his primary examples of explaining these principles. Diamond takes two groups of Polynesian cultures, the Moriori and Maori people. These two cultures according to Diamond were ethnically essentially the same people, however, because one happened to early on in history take a ship to what would end up being the Chatham Islands ended up settling there. Diamond explains the vast differences between the two cultures but ties their differences into primarily where the two civilizations settled. When the Moriori people settles on the Chatham Islands there was hardly any inhabitable large game animals and nor the soil to really...