Guns, germs and steel summary

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Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond Jared Diamond reveals how geographic and environmental factors, rather than biological differences, shaped the unequal development of human societies. Why did Eurasians conquer the Americas and Africa, and not the other way around? Is it really due to biological differences, or is geography the ultimate decider of human destiny, In Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, we unravel the environmental forces that shaped modern global inequalities.

Population Density and Organisation

The root of all human technological and organisational complexity, is the switch from foraging for food to producing it. For most of the species' history, humans have been hunter-gatherers. But around 8500 BC, a group of hunter-gatherers in the Middle East discovered the technique of actively sowing and caring for the plants they wanted to gather. Thus agriculture, the deliberate production of food, was born.

Agriculture made the land vastly more productive. On average, about 0. 1% of the biological material in a wild environment is edible to humans. But by cultivating that environment to grow only plants useful as food, humans can consume up to 90% of the biomass produced.

This food production resulted in a food surplus, which in turn impacted human societies in two very important ways. It fuelled population growth, and allowed some members of the society to focus on things apart from the constant search for food. These effects are the direct progenitors of centralised organisation and technological advancement. First, enlarging populations put the simple organisation of hunter-gatherer groups under pressure, forcing them towards the solution of political centralisation.

Second, the members of society who no longer needed to constantly search for food began to build specialised knowledge, becoming political leaders, priests, military commanders, crafts people, philosophers and inventors, and fuelled technological advancement. Finally, the food surpluses created a feedback loop by allowing more children to be born, which in turn put even more pressure on the food production system to feed them as they matured. The response was to intensify food production, resulting in larger surpluses, further cycles of population growth, and eventually, today's population of billions.