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  • Essay / Upvoted by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies takes readers on a whirlwind tour of human history from origins in Africa until today. The book attempts to explain why such socio-economic disparities exist today among people around the world and why European people conquered Africans, South Americans, Australians, Asians and Native Americans, and not the 'reverse. In the book, Diamond explains that factors such as a great diversity of plants and wildlife, germs, east-west and north-south axes, climate and simply geographic luck contributed to the advancement of some peoples while inhibiting others. Diamond continues to explain that because of these factors, and not because of European biological superiority, European peoples were able to have higher population densities, more disease, more time to develop agriculture, writing and governments, and have more free time to develop. technologies such as steel that they used to subjugate other peoples of the world later in history. Finally, Diamond explains that although other non-European peoples, such as the Sioux Indians of the Midwestern United States, acquired European animals and technologies like the horse, they were not able to conquer European peoples because they were hundreds or thousands of years behind in their way of life and lifestyle. technology and did not have enough time to use their new assets before being conquered. The book is divided into three distinct sections that all build on each other. The first section explains why only a few wild plant and animal species can be domesticated. Then, the second section explains how animal domestication led to the development of agriculture, food production, sedentary lifestyles, disease, and a denser human population. Finally, in the third section, Diamonds compares and contrasts different companies around the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayAfter reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, I learned that the success of a certain people does not depend on the race as some have already asserted, but rather on certain favorable geographical features such as the diversity of domestic flora and fauna which serve as prerequisites for the further advancement of this particular people. I also learned that most advanced societies follow a certain pattern of progress. First, a society needed a large group of potential candidate animals that could be domesticated. Once these animals were discovered and domesticated, societies needed agriculture and food security. Next, they needed larger and denser populations and diseases, and finally, they needed technologies such as steel to subjugate others. Diamond explained that there was always a “survival of the fittest” mentality when a society progressed; grow, improve and spread, repeat. Finally, I discovered that scientists use different types of dating techniques such as radiometric dating and carbon dating. Carbon dating is generally more precise, but scientists prefer to use radiometric dating to get an approximation of when a very ancient event occurred. In the book, Diamond used radiometric dating instead of carbon dating. Diamond did this because he addressed periods of..