Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition)

Within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. That sequence strongly suggests that the modern Cro-Magnons somehow used their far superior technology, and their language skills or brains, to infect, kill, or displace the Neanderthals, leaving beh

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”

natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself. Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.

why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.

Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?

“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?”

even for people specifically interested in the shaping of the modern world, a history limited to developments since the emergence of writing cannot provide deep understanding.