Analysis Of Guns, Germs, And Steel By Jared Diamond

In Jared Diamond’s excerpt from his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, he puts forward the historical narrative of how human evolution progresses at different rates for different people due solely to the particular geographic region that we are placed on. Diamond supports this thesis with specific evidence on the importance of food production, and emphasizes that food is the main ingredient needed for a population to experience progress and growth, and expand around the world. I agree with Diamond’s dissertation and find it compelling due to his logical evidence and ethos on the topic.
Diamond begins addressing his argument by explaining the general overview on why the rise of food production had such a significant impact on the development of

In an article from his website, Diamond breaks his main points down into a simplistic manner. He writes, “The conclusion of social scientists is that all of these developments required sedentary populous societies producing storable food surpluses capable of feeding not only the food producers themselves, but also capable of feeding full-time political leaders, merchants, scribes, and technology specialists” (Citation). This speaks volumes in showing how crucial food production was in making a population evolve from simply surviving, to thriving. If the main concern of those in a hunter-gatherer society is having enough food to survive the day, they don’t have the time to worry about developing

In his book, Diamond ponders, “Why did food production develop first in these seemingly rather marginal lands, and only later in today’s most fertile farmlands and pastures” (Diamond 94)? This presents a very important step in understanding why countries within Eurasia are now mass-producing surpluses food, while many parts of Africa are still not harvesting enough food to make it through the day. Diamond answers this question by stating the following: “At one extreme are areas in which food production arose altogether independently, with the domestication of many indigenous crops (and, in some cases animals) before the arrival of any crops from other areas” (Diamond 98). He then says, “Those imported domesticates may be thought of as ‘founder’ crops and animals, because they founded local food production. The arrival of founder domesticates enabled local people to become sedentary, and thereby increased the likelihood of local crops’ evolving from wild plants that were gathered, brought home and planted accidentally, and later planted intentionally” (Diamond 100). This is significant because while regions within Africa cultivated their own indigenous crops and animals, they never acquired founder crops. Without the ease of these crops, those populations never evolved to become sedentary. This allowed areas in Eurasia to put in substantially less effort to yield the same