...How did guns germs and steel impact civilizations? What impacted the development of civilizations the most? Why did some civilizations develop faster than others? Is there a simple answer? There is a very simple answer. That answer is guns, germs, and steel. So how exactly did guns, germs, and steel affect the course of history? Guns had a major part in our history and are part of the reason why some civilizations were superior to others. "You know, the flintlock rifle, it was, you know, I shouldn’t really say this but it was nearly like as important as a cellphone is today. You can’t go without your cellphone; in those days you couldn’t go without your flintlock rifle.” (ggs) This passage shows how important guns were and how much it was necessary to have one to survive. “They would shoot, hand the gun over, take the next gun, fire, hand the gun over. So every five or six seconds you could fire a shot. See that, that was the important thing.” (ggs) This shows how easy it was to kill somebody and how effective it was because it takes longer to kill somebody with a sword or arrow and you are more guaranteed to kill your enemy with a gun. ”This is a Maxim gun. What made this weapon such a great weapon, as opposed to the old single-shot weapons that had been used in years before, is this gun could fire continuously for up to 500 rounds a minute. It had the equivalent firepower of probably 100 men in a company with single shot weapons.”(ggs) This passagfe is more proof as...
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...Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond’s theory of advantages geography can explain how power came to certain groups of people. For mighty weapons such as rapiers made of fine steel, populations need specialists. In order for a population to have specialists, there needs to be a large supply of food. In order to produce a large quantity of food, powerful animals are needed to help plow the land. These people need to live in a region where the climate allows for calorie rich foods. They also need to be in a region where there are powerful animals that can be domesticated. Through contact with farm animals, people begin developing immunities to deadly diseases. And so these civilizations have the chance to rapidly develop and evolve into dominating states and countries. The first people were known as Hunters and Gathers. These people were nomadic, following game from place to place in seasonal trends. The groups were rather small due to the limited food supply. Hunting has never been a productive way of finding food. Game needs to be tracked down which requires stealth and endurance. Gathering of food though is generally more productive. The problem is that it is much more physically intensive and does not provide enough calories to sustain large populations. In order for large populations to flourish, people need to farm. Farming is what set humanity on its course to modern civilization. The first place that shows signs of early farming is in the Fertile Crescent which is the modern...
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... [pic] An Overview of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel Why do some nations have so much material wealth while so many others have so little? This was the question Jared Diamond posed in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. After identifying a point in time when all societies were roughly equal (over 13,000 years ago), Diamond identified the key variables that allowed some societies to develop highly complex, material-rich societies, while others developed at much slower rates. Guns, Germs, and Steel uncovers how Europeans came to dominate every other group on the planet by virtue of their access to what Diamond terms the “Agents of Conquest”: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua, New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo (material goods), but we black people had little cargo (material goods) of our own?" Diamond realized that Yali's question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history -- the roots of global inequality. Why were Europeans the ones with all the cargo? Why had they taken over so much of the world, instead of the native people of New Guinea? How did Europeans end up with what Diamond terms the Agents of Conquest: Guns, Germs and Steel? It was these agents of conquest that allowed 168 Spanish conquistadors to defeat...
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...In Guns, germs and steel, the Professor Jared Diamond asserts that inequality was brought up by the development of crops like wheat and barley. As a fact, agriculture gave a reliable source of food and triggered specialization. Firstly, the domestication of wheat and barley gave a huge head start to the Middle East because it supplied them with a sufficiency of nutritious crops. As an illustration, the archaeologist, Ian Kuijt mentions “they interrupted the normal environmental cycle and started to select these individual plants and basically rewarding those that were going to be most profitable to them. Once that whole process started, people were starting to control nature”. This quote shows that the people in the Middle East established...
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...During the New World Encounters, the Spanish conquistadors both Cortes and Pizarro were able to take over the cities of the native people of the Americas. The advantage they had were their cannons, firearms, steel sword, armor and horses; but their potent weapon turn out to be their own germs. Since the native people of the Americas didn’t know what all of these advantages were, their population weakened. In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond shows how the common cold and other germs played as much a role as anything else. In the article “World History for Behavior Analysts: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Stuart A Vyse explains more about the struggles the native people went through and how they were defeated. Peoples of Eurasian origin, plus those...
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...Guns, Germs, and Steel 1. Yali’s question was, “How come the rate of technology development differs with people in different races and levels of intelligence?” 2. One of the three objections to answering Yali’s question is if you did answer it, it would seem like you’re justifying world domination instead of understanding it. Another reason is that it may seem like you glorify the Eurocentric view of everything. The third is by answering this question you’ll come across saying that civilization is better and makes life better than the tribal ways of life. 3. A Eurocentric approach to history is focusing on Europe. 4. Jared Diamond doesn’t agree with the argument that Europeans are more innately intelligent than the New Guineans. H believes this because the survival of the fittest. In New Guinea people who aren’t smart wouldn’t be able to survive where they are, therefore unable to pass down their genes. While Europeans...
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...Information about the Book: Guns, Germs, and Steel was written by author, anthropologist, ecologist, geographer, and physiologist Jared Diamond and published in 1997 by W. W. Norton & Company. It has 480 pages, and has won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in 1997 for Science and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for General Nonfiction. Later in 2005, a documentary based off the book was produced by the National Geographic Society and was broadcast on PBS. What is the book about? Guns, Germs, and Steel starts off with a simple question asked by Jared’s friend, a local New Guinea politician named Yali: “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?”[p.14]....
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...Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond had been having a conversation with a New Guinean politician, Yali, when he asked a strange question. “Why do you white men have so much cargo, and we New Guineans have so little?” Diamond was confused by the question at first, and had no idea how to answer it. Why had European civilization developed at such a fast rate, compared to other peoples around the world? Diamond set himself to the task of finding out, and spent years answering this question. Yali’s question is a hard one to answer. Diamond travelled around the world to try to answer it. Why did some civilizations grow faster? After years of research, he found his answer. His answer was geography. Natural resources are key in building and development, food and water especially. Without the necessary resources to survive, civilization cannot develop. For groups of people to develop and create new things, there need to be people within those groups who are not focused solely on feeding themselves. This requires a surplus of food, which requires farming at least to some extent. When food is less of an issue, some people can focus on other things, like building better houses, creating better tools, and coming up with better solutions to a multitude of problems. These people, specialists, are what allows the group to...
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...Guns, Germs, and Steel Assignment A. Yali's question is "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we block people had little cargo of our own?" The Americans brought over lots of material goods in their ships. Yali asks why there is such a difference in between him (and people like him) and the Americans, especially why there's a great difference in wealth and power. And how race may play a role in how advanced people are. B. Pizarro successfully captured King Atahualpa, they had bigger, better weapons and strong armor. The Europeans also had horses and a helpful writing communication system. The Spaniards suffered from the diseases (mainly smallpox) the Europeans brought over killing many...
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...Throughout the course of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond has told his readers again and again that the environments people are placed in have more of an affect on people than the individual people do. There are four factors that make the biggest differences in how history all played out. The first is how many domesticable plants and animals were around for the ancient people to work with. Next is the rate of diffusion and migration of people within each continent, and inversely the rate of diffusion and migration between continents. Finally, the differences in area and population make a difference in how history took its course. However, just because a place was powerful does not mean they will always be. The Fertile Crescent is now...
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...Jared Diamond had a question that was asked to him by Yali, a New Guinean native, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo?” he had a hard time giving him an answer but after twenty-five years he finally had an answer to it. The reason is Indo-Europeans became so much more accessible to their resources unlike the New Guineans. The people of New Guinea were set aside from the world with many people not bothering with what the have as opposed to was Indo-Europeans have. While the world around them was developing, the New Guineans were completing tasks the same as their ancestors did many years before them. The reasons the New Guineans are frozen in time is because mainly of its geography. In “Guns, Germs, and Steel” Diamond...
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...In Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, the author proves a point that the formation of human history developed differently all over the globe because of science. Jared Diamond explained how this is true using facts from science. The author wrote that, “The fourth and last set of factors consists of continental differences in area or total population size. A larger area or population means more potential inventors, more competing societies, more innovations available to adopt- and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies. That fate befell African pygmies and many other hunter-gatherer populations displaced by farmers. Conversely, it also befell...
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...In the documentary "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared sought to determine the roots of inequality in the world when one of the natives from New Guinea, Yali, once asked him how "the white folk had more cargo and us New Guineans have nothing." This question would spark Diamond's journey on discovering the reason that some people were more privileged than others and where that privilege came from. Diamond would later come to the conclusion that geography played a major role in some civilizations progressing faster than others, as the availability of stable land and nutritious crops enabled societies to fulfill their primary needs, allowing for specialization which led to technological advancement. This technological advancement in a sense then became the determining force for development of societal of cultural values. On another hand, Diamond's work also reveal that Europeans have also derived their innovation from other nations, suggesting that groups construct knowledge for each other, allowing for a...
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...In Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, the author talks about how the continent of Africa became what it is now through the migrations of the Bantu people. Africa had many types of languages and one of the most important ones to this day is Bantu. The people who spoke Bantu had traveled around the continent impacting the rest of the people to convert to their language. After others joined the bandwagon, the other languages began to fade. The author talks about this when he writes, “Only gradually, as the Bantu multiplied and incorporated cattle and dry-climate cereals into their economy, did they fill in the leap-frogged areas. But the eventual result was still the same: Bantu farmers occupying most of the former Khoisan realm; the...
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...In this chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, he talks about how Eurasians invented firearms and steel equipment instead of the Sub –Saharan Africans. Diamond also talks about how most inventions that were made took a long time until it became widespread and popular. His opinion is that inventions are only made because something in the society isn’t “clicking”. Diamond talks about how an invention is made and after it is made, the inventor actually has to find a purpose for it, and how its because of curiosity and tinkering that it is made. Only after a long period of time passed when the society actually considered the invention needed. Rare geniuses like Watt and Edison were very important according to Diamond, because of the “heroic theory of invention”, and how an inventor must prove that the idea came from them to begin with. Many inventors fed off of other inventors inventions and made their own, very similar to the original invention. This was like a train, each inventor would feed off of the other inventions to make their own. Diamond argues that ideas and inventions depend on the type of society and how well the society is doing or will be doing over a long period of time. Diamond also argues that...
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