Analysis Of Guns, Germs, And Steel By Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel was written to answer one man’s question: ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”. The man who asked this was a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali, who Diamond met while he was walking down a beach in Papua New Guinea 25 years before he wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yali was asking why Europeans (“white men “) have so many manufactured goods (“cargo”, such as umbrellas, clothing, medicine, soft drinks, etc.), while Yali’s people (“ black people”) have so little, and why does what they have comes from “white men”. He wanted to know what had happened to cause Europeans to dominate over other cultures with

This essay will explain some of the reasons why the Middle East has developed so much better than Papua New Guinea through the evidence in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. In chapter 4 of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond discusses the benefits of animal domestication and herding over a hunter-gatherer society. The 4 most, and best, domesticated animals are cows, sheep, goats, and pigs. Cows, sheeps, and goats all produce milk, and all 4 produce meat. Also, leather can be made from certain pelts. Manure from the animals can be used on plants to increase quality and quantity of food production. The increased availability in calories allows for lower hunger and the ability to support a larger population. Also, exposure to animal-based germs allows for a build up in the immune system, which later helps prevent

In order to even be able to switch, there has to be proper conditions: animals to domesticate, and the right crops that can be farmed. The Middle East had the best crops such as wheat and barley, which allowed them to grow much more food. This enabled them to become a farming based society, which allowed for specialists to advance in technology, science, medicine, gov’t, etc. The crops in Papua New Guinea are poor in nutrition and difficult to harvest, preventing them from being able to farm enough food to sustain themselves, let alone the excess food needed for specialists. This keeps them at the hunter-gatherer stage, preventing them from advancing into a global powerhouse. However, sometimes switching isn’t necessarily a choice, based on the want to advance. It can be forced by lack of wild animals to hunt or food to be foraged. If the population grows too big for what is naturally growing around them , then one of two things has to happen; either the society has to start domesticating its own food, or the population has to die down. In Papua New Guinea, there isn’t enough food around to support any larger amount of population, but they don’t have the right crops for domestication to grow the amount of food needed either. So they’re stuck at the population they’re