Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel” has many great points, such as the number of cultivatable plants and domestic-able animals animals giving us reasons why civilization did and did not arise in many places. South east Australia and northern California are major farming regions today, but had no local potential crops, so civilization waited until Europeans arrived.
The Eurasian civilizations dominated the world because, to borrow John Stossel’s quote, “ideas had sex”. Asian inventions spread to India and the Middle East and on to Europe. It took hundreds of years, but it happened. Animal domestication and crops also spread, along the east-west axis, albeit often slowly.
In contrast, the Maya and the Inca were nearly isolated, despite relative proximity. The lack of an east-west climate axis is also why the Mississippi mound builders, Anasazi, Aztec and Maya never spread across the rest of the continent.
The downside of “Gun, Germs and Steel” is that, frankly, Jared Diamond is a racist. Ironically, he thinks the hunter-gatherers of Papua New Guinea are smarter than “civilized” folk and plainly states it in the book.
“Ironically, he thinks the hunter-gatherers of Papua New Guinea are smarter than “civilized” folk and plainly states it in the book.”
And he is correct. Note that we installed in the White Hut a “Hunter” of our Constitution guaranteed rights, and he proved quite adept at “gathering” funds from our enemies.
“Hunter/gatherer”, indeed.
And his whole tribe moved in with him from Chicago and academia.
The downside is that I got so sick of the racial emphasis, and the clear antagonism toward western culture, that I trashed the book and apparently missed a couple of salient points.