Guns, Germs, and SteelGuns, Germs, and Steel
the Fates of Human Societies
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Book, 1999
Current format, Book, 1999, , Available .Book, 1999
Current format, Book, 1999, , Available . Offered in 0 more formatsThe author dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns.
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the author dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns. Reissue.
New York TimesNew York Times)Guns, Germs, and Steel
New York Review of BooksThe story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.Guns, Germs, and Steel
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the author dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns. Reissue.
New York TimesNew York Times)Guns, Germs, and Steel
New York Review of BooksThe story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.Guns, Germs, and Steel
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- New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.
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