In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond elaborates the hypothesis of geographic determinism, the belief that the distinctions between society and social development come mainly from geographical causes. This book was framed as an answer to a question that Diamond has heard from Yali, a charismatic politician from New Guinea. Yali wanted to know: "Because their goals have developed so much load […] blacks have little responsibility?" In other words, why have European companies been so successful militarily, economically and technologically over the last 500 years, while other companies have not achieved this level of success?
In the first part of the book, Diamond describes the course of recent human history, emphasizing the differences between civilizations. Beginning half a million years ago, the first human beings emerged in Africa and eventually emigrated to the rest of the world in search of game and other food sources. About 11,000 years ago, some humans developed agriculture, an essential milestone in the history of humanity. In the fifteenth century a. C., huge differences had emerged between the cities. For example, when Francisco Pizarro led a Spanish fleet to the Inca Empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century, he quickly defeated the Inca emperor, Atahuallpa. Why did Europeans colonize the New World and not the other way around?
In the second part, Diamond talks about the dawn of agriculture and explains why it has emerged in some parts of the world, but not in others. Using carbon dating technology, archaeologists have determined that the first agricultural sites were Mesopotamia (in the Middle East), followed by Mesoamerica and China. Agriculture has emerged in these areas for some reasons. Most of the humans on the planet at the time were hunter-gatherers, which meant they hunted meat and plucked nuts and berries for their food. But in the parts of the world that have developed agriculture for the first time, gambling and fruit are increasingly scarce, which has motivated experimentation with new forms of food production. In Mesopotamia, ancient humans used tests and errors to learn how to plant some large seeds on the earth, which led to crops that could be harvested and become highly nutritious foods. These primitive peoples have also learned to tame wild animals by breeding modern and familiar animals such as dogs, cows, and horses. Humans used their pets to help with agricultural work, they also learned how to tame some wild crops and cultivated most of the modern family crops in the world.
Agriculture has emerged in Mesoamerica and China. However, due to environmental quality, such as soil fertility, the availability of pets and the availability of edible crops, agriculture has taken longer to supplant hunter-gatherer culture in most other regions. Once agriculture has emerged worldwide, it has extended or extended to neighboring areas. In general, Diamond says, it's easier for ideas, goods, and food to spread from east to west than those that expand north and south; This is because the Earth rotates from this to the direction, which means that the areas with the same latitude share a similar climate and environment. Archaeological data indicate that agricultural innovations extended east and west long before those of the north and south.
In the third part, Diamond shows how the fundamental agricultural differences among the first companies have expanded over time, leading to significant differences between health, technology and social structure of companies. First, it shows that agricultural organizations have developed immunity against deadly diseases such as smallpox. The constant proximity to domestic animals, combined with a higher population density, has led to new germs constantly circulating in agricultural societies. As a result, these societies became resistant to many epidemics: those that could not survive died, while those with immunity survived and passed their immunities to their descendants.
Another significant development in the history of agricultural societies was the invention of written language. While it is difficult to show precisely why writing emerged in some agrarian societies, but not in others, it is clear that the structure of agricultural society (which requires many records for crops) attaches great importance to a writing system. Furthermore, the dissemination models from east to west ensured that, once a language has become fully developed, the company would spread the word.