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Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years . 1997 my own book scans preserved

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

PRIVATE 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

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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.