Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, explains how he went from being a biologist, studying birds in New Guinea, to developing an entirely new theory on the evolution of human societies. It began in 1972, when a native New Guinean asked him "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" (Diamond, 1997, p.14) "Cargo" was what the New Guineans called all the products and technologies that the modern world exports. After 25 years of studying the development of human societies across the planet, his answer, as well as the premise of his book, can be summed up in one sentence, "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among...
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