Summary

Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond begins with a question that Yale, an indigenous New Guinean politician, asks him years before the book was written.  Yale wanted to know why whites were so successful and arrived with so much cargo compared to the locals. This book is basically a very long answer to Yale's question.  It is a summary of why societies evolved the way they did and the geological and ecological factors that contributed to their success or lack of success.  This book covers everything from the beginning of humans, starting with the first African peoples to move north, and continuing to the first civilizations to venture to islands by sea travel.  The author talks about the first signs of agriculture and domestication of animals and how these affected the societies that discovered them.  The book follows human development for a few thousand more years until the evolution of writing, beginning with simple cuneiform, and transforming into full alphabets. Eventually, the small civilizations that formed around the globe met each other and traded goods, information and culture.  This resulted in specialization and sometimes war.  From the start of man in Africa to the exploration of the Artic thousands of years later, Jared Diamond gives the reader examples of how various societies formed and the role that guns, germs and steel played in their creation and demise.