Commentary On The Video Guns Germs And Steel

Jared Diamond discusses the reasons why geographical and environmental factors lead to a more rapid progression of certain civilizations throughout history. The book Guns, Germs and Steel portrays an argument that due to some societies’ access to an area witch contains sufficient amounts of wildlife and climates that are easily inhabitable, these societies developed into more advanced ways of living much easier and also earlier than societies who lacked these geographical attributes. These beneficial geographical attributes promoted the growth of technological improvements in weapons, religion, and farming.

Throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the importance of geography in the ways ancient civilizations grew and spread and how some areas were more advanced than others. He began his research when he was asked a question by a Papua New Guinea residence, Yali. Yali had asked Diamond “[w]hy you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?” At that point Diamond had no answer and he was curious to find out why Eurasia had a head start in civilizing people meanwhile the other continents were behind. As a result, several differences were made between countries that did not have the same resources as those who were advanced. Some of the developing countries were poor and they had to rely on whatever was given to them through nature. When Diamond went to Papua New Guinea, he discovered that the residences of the island had the same routine as those in the ancient civilizations of Eurasia. They would often hunt for animals and used stone weapons instead of metal.

Out of the five themes of geography, Guns, Germs and Steel shows place, movement and human/environment interaction. The theme of place in this book has to do with the physical characteristics of a place, the climate, bodies of water, vegetation, land formations, and animal life. These are some of the main focuses of my book, especially with it having a strong emphasis on “geographical luck” the different environments that the book talks about are all based around what’s inside the place of the book. Early man wouldn’t have thrived as greatly if they were in a harsh environment or place. The next theme is movement, another important theme in the book. Movement has to do with people communicating, trading, even sharing ideas. In the book, it

Jared Diamond's bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel (GG&S) is an attempt to explain why some parts of the world are currently powerful and prosperous while others are poor. Diamond is both a physiologist and a linguist who spends a good deal of his time living with hunter gathers in Papua New Guinea. As a researcher and as a human being, he is convinced that all people have the same potential. Hunter gatherers are just as intelligent, resourceful, and diligent as anybody else. Yet material "success" isn't equally distributed across the globe. Civilization sprung up in relatively few places and spread in a defined pattern. I should emphasize that Diamond doesn't equate material

In the video “Guns, Germs and Steel: Episode 3.” The overall summary of the episode is how Europe dominated Africa, how they fought through diseases and land wars with local tribes. During this adventure major diseases spread across Africa, affecting Europeans and Africans, causing thousands to die. The main two diseases were smallpox and Malaria, for example in the video it stated that, “It was believed Smallpox originated in the tropical region of Africa, Africans were certainly similar with the disease, they had even developed methods of immunity for life.” This was the advantage they had over the europeans, they were able to protect themselves from Smallpox; avoiding such a dramatic incline their population. Not only did they develop immunization to Smallpox, they tried to fight off Malaria. For example in the video it says, “Native Africans had also developed antibodies against one of the most virulent diseases on the earth, Malaria.” This was because they settled and live in high or dry locations, away from wet and humid areas, which is where mosquitos are generally found, hence why thousands of Europeans died to this disease due to living by rivers and swamps. However, Malaria isn’t the most common disease in Africa now, the most common disease is “Pneumonia and Other Lower Respiratory Tract Infections….Pneumonia alone is responsible for 90% of all lower respiratory tract infections and is one of the most deadly diseases in

In his work, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (W. W. Norton, New York, NY, 1997) Jared Diamond attempts to explain why human history has carried out the way it has, he often refers to accounts from history to support his argument. Accounts that will be deemed adequate will discuss specific groups of people, at a specified period of time. Diamond suggests that guns, germs, and steel are three contributing factors for why the world is in its current state. It is not difficult to recognize while reading, that the book spends a large amount of time talking about germs and much less text discussing guns and steel. In “Guns, Germs, and Steel” Diamond does adequately account for the historical development of guns and steel, in the way he accounts for the role of germs in the history of human societies. It is no debate that germs played a massive role in many important events in history, but guns came late, were not very effective at first, and steel production was most important militarily.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, attempts to explain why history progressed differently for people from various geographical regions. Diamond introduces his book by pointing out that history followed different courses for different people because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves. Through his convincing explanation for how civilizations were created and evolved throughout the course of history, he argues that environmental factors gave some societies advantages over others, allowing them to conquer the disadvantaged societies. While I agree with Diamond’s argument that the orientation of continental axis, availability of potential

In the book Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond who is a biophysics scientist and a psychologist, set out on a journey to find out the reason behind great achievements and conquest of the Europeans. What is the secret of success of Europeans? His hypothesis was very original and at first looked very simple, it was guns, germs and steel. The journey of Diamond took over 30 years and helped him answer the main questions of human history and what is it that separates humans today from "rich and poor" and from "haves and have not’s." To do this he had to go back when everyone was equal.

When reading the title of Jared Diamond’s, “Guns, Germs, and Steels,” the readers must initially think how do these three connect? After starting the first few chapters they will realize that Diamond is referring to the proximate and ultimate factors in that lead to the advancement of society. When Diamond talks about proximate and ultimate factors, he is explaining the cause of European dominance in the world. The proximate factors are the one that directly led to the European dominance and the ultimate factors are the ones that let to proximate factors. I believe that this book is referring to the Homo sapiens revolutionizing through the years, through the Neolithic Revolution through agriculture and industrialization.

Jared Diamond is a professor of Geography at UCLA and a world traveler. He believes that in the past 13,000 years of human history, agriculture has lead humans to conquer, develop and prosper and therefore cause the rise of civilizations. In 1972 he was in New Guinea when he met a local named Yali who asked him a simple question that took years for Diamond to answer. Yali said “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [goods] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own”. [Work cited 7] Diamond was profoundly puzzled and couldn’t answer right away. In fact it took him many years to come up with what he thinks is the right answer. ‘Yali’s question’ plays a central role in Professor Diamond’s enquiry into ‘a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’, leading him into a wide-ranging discussion of the history of human evolution and diversity through a study of migration, socio-economic and cultural adaptation to environmental conditions, and technological diffusion. (Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 22-23)

The image of a crude homosapien creating the first fire pales in comparison to The Reptilian Elite responsible for every advancement that ever occurred on our mother earth. Reptilians were even though to be present in Sumeria the earliest civilization. “Historian Professor Charles Hapgood squarely faces the issue when he writes that ‘today we find primitive cultures co-existing with advanced modem society on all continents… We shall now assume that 20,000 years ago while Paleolithic peoples held out in Europe, more advanced cultures existed elsewhere on earth.”’

Yes, if there is a lot of resources around it can support a large group of people instead of a small group of gatherers

I first read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in the Fall 2003 based on a recommendation from a friend. Many chapters of the book are truly fascinating, but I had criticisms of the book back then and hold even more now. Chief among these is the preponderance of analysis devoted to Papua New Guinea, as opposed to, say, an explanation of the greatly disparate levels of wealth and development among Eurasian nations. I will therefore attempt to confine this review on the "meat and potatoes" of his book: the dramatic Spanish conquest of the Incas; the impact of continental geography on food production; and finally, the origins of the Eurasian development of guns, germs, and steel. In terms of structure, I will first summarize the

So the lives of at least the survivins hunterFatheresaren't nastyand brutish,even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate.But modern hunter-gatherersocietiesthat have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of vears don't tell us about conditions befor€ the agricultural revolution. The progressivist riers is reallv making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they snitched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that sv!'itchby distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from thoseof domesticatedonesin prehistoricgarbage dumps. Horr' can one deduce the health of the orehistoric garbagemakers.and therebydirectly test the progressi\ist vierv? That question has become answerable onlv in recentvears,in part through the newly emerging techniquesof paleopathology, study of signs of the dirase in the remainsof ancientpeoples. In some lucky situations,the palmpathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist todav For example, archaeologistsin the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditionsat time of death could be determinedby autopsv. And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry cavesin Nevada remain sufficientlywell preserved to be examinedfor hookworm and other parasites. Usually the only human remainsivailable for study are skeletons, they permit a surprising numbut ber of

The emergence of agriculture was a major stepping stone in human history. During this birth of agriculture, also known as the Neolithic revolution, humans began inhabiting permanent settlements, grow their own crops, and domesticate both plants and animals for food (Weisdorf, 2005). Considering humans have been hunter-gatherers for the majority of their approximately 7 million years of existence, the emergence of agriculture in the Old World only occurring 10,000-5,000 years ago, marks a significant transformation in food sustenance techniques (Weisdorf, 2005). However, this turning point in history is associated with both positive and negative implications. There is much controversy over whether or not the introduction of