Summary
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until... Full description
- Yali's question: The regionally differing courses of history
- From Eden to Cajamarca. Up to the starting line: What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.?
- A natural experiment of history: How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands
- Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain
- The rise and spread of food production. Farmer power: The roots of guns, germs, and steel
- History's haves and have-nots: Geographic differences in the onset of food production
- To farm or not to farm: Causes of the spread of food production
- How to make an almond: The unconscious development of ancient crops
- Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?
- Zebras, unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?
- Spacious skies and tilted axes: Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents?
- From food to guns, germs, and steel. Lethal gift of livestock: The evolution of germs
- Blueprints and borrowed letters: The evolution of writing
- Necessity's mother: The evolution of technology
- From egalitarianism to kleptocracy: The evolution of government and religion
- Around the world in five chapters. Yali's people: The histories of Australia and New Guinea
- How China became Chinese: The history of East Asia
- Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of Austronesian expansion
- Hemispheres colliding: The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared
- How Africa became black: The history of Africa
- The future of human history as a science
- Who are the Japanese? 2003 afterword: Guns, germs, and steel today.