Guns, Germs, and Steel

I must have originally heard about the Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond on the radio or in a podcast, I can't remember. It was published in 1997 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

This is a book about how humans colonized the planet, with particular emphasis on discoveries and inventions - how we developed.

There are many aspects of the book which I was already familiar with, in the broad strokes. I knew roughly how we came out of Africa and swept across Europe and Asia, and how we domesticated plants and animals and settled into more and more civilized cities with more and more specialized technology and pursuits.

So you might wonder how much more you can learn from 440 pages of heavily footnoted text. The short answer is not a lot of basic broad historical strokes, but a lot of nuance. Some surprises on human migration, like the colonization of Madagascar from southeast Asia were completely unexpected and fun to learn. The isolation of Australia after it's initial colonization and the self-enforced isolation of China were two things that I had never heard about before, and were fascinating.

There were some very interesting broad concepts, like the wide stretch over the same lattitude of Eurasia being the perfect developing ground for the spread of domesticated plants, while the north south axis of the Americas were a hinderance to spreading of advances.


It was interesting to see how scholars and scientists have shed light on the spread of humanity by analyzing language similarities and by tracking genetic studies of populations. While these were not particularly surprising methods, it was fascinating to see how some details they illuminated were unexpected. For example, we think of Africa as this melting pot where humanity emerged and then changed as they spread out, but Africa used to have more diversity, and studies have shown that other groups of humans with other cultures and languages had been subjugated and absorbed in some migration that occurred after humans had already spread out of Africa.

Since reading the book, I have heard the results of some recent studies that touch on the same subjects that Jared Diamond touched on in his book. He stated that he thought that the megafauna extinctions, particularly of Australia, but of North and South America, too, were the result of overhunting by humans. The megafauna were large mammals that existed on those continents up to the time man migrated in, and then were extinct shortly after the appearance of man. Many people are familiar with the woolly mammoth and the saber toothed tiger, but there were all kinds of other large mammals that used to exist that became extinct right around the time man showed up. Recent studies have drawn the opposite conclusion, stating that the extinctions had climatic or other reasons, but could not have been by overhunting given the time frame that they occurred. Scientists currently disagree on this point.

The other theory that I have heard was that the migrations of humans out of Africa did not originate from the area around Kenya, but from North Africa. The Sahara Desert was a jungle not too long ago, and humans inhabited it. There is evidence that suggests that these are the groups that first migrated off the continent into what is now the area around Israel. Each year brings on new discoveries to flesh out our understanding of this time period.

The main question he is addressing in the book is why some bands of humans were able to out-compete others. The main answer is right in his title. They had guns (superior warfare tactics), they had diseases which they were more resistant to, and they had steel (better developed technology).

The interesting thing that came out of my version of the book, which has an afterword added some years after the original book was released, was that many large corporations were looking at the book and seeing if it applied to corporations and companies. What makes one company out-compete another.

While dense with information and difficult to plow through, the book is also rich with interesting details and well worth the time to work through it.