Book Review Of Guns, Germs, And Steel Essay

In his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, the author Jared Diamond tried to explain why history evolved differently for peoples from various geographical areas. Diamond believes that environmental factors, like plant and animal domestication, gave some civilizations benefits over others.

    In Chapter 1, Diamond discusses human evolution and migrations across the planet. He mentions that the history of humanity started approximately 7 million years ago, when a population of African apes diverged into three separate populations, one of which evolved into modern humans. For the first 5 or 6 million years after this separation, humans were confined to Africa. The earliest human ancestor to expand beyond Africa was Homo erectus, who moved into Southeast Asia around 1.8 million years ago. Approximately half a million years ago, when human fossils started to become similar to modern Homo sapiens, our race gave birth to an outburst of milestones in technology and the arts, such as standardized stone tools and the earliest preserved jewelry in Eastern Africa. This period, the Great Leap Forward, was associated with the pioneer expansion of human geographical sphere. People started to colonize Australia and Papua New Guinea by approximately 35,000 years ago. This journey was connected with human’s earliest use of watercraft as well as the earliest extermination of large mammals. North and South America were the last continents to become settled by modern humans. The settlement of the Americas required either boats or the conquest of Siberia in order to walk across the Bering land bridge. “The oldest unquestioned human remains in the Americas are at sites in Alaska dated around 12,000 BC, followed by a profusion of sites in the United States south of the Canadian border and in Mexico in the centuries just before 11,000 BC”(page 45). With the invasion of the Americas, most habitable regions of the world supported humans.

    Chapter 2 deals with the ways in which...