Diamond asks why Eurasians, rather than Native Americans, Africans or Aboriginal Australians, ended up with the guns, germs and steel that decided history. His answer is that environments, not biology, shaped the fates of human societies.
Regions rich in domesticable plants and animals developed farming first, which led to dense populations, epidemic diseases, writing, technology and states. Eurasia’s east to west axis then helped crops and ideas spread faster than anywhere else.
Key ideas
1
Farmer power
Food production created surpluses, bigger populations and full-time specialists, the root of every later advantage.
2
The Anna Karenina principle
A wild animal must pass every test to be domesticated, which is why only 14 big mammals ever were.
3
The lethal gift of livestock
Crowd diseases evolved from farm animals and killed far more Native Americans than swords did.
4
Tilted axes
Crops and inventions spread easily east to west across Eurasia, but slowly north to south in the Americas and Africa.
5
Invention is the mother of necessity
Most technologies are invented first and find their uses later, and they spread fastest among large, connected populations.
Summary by chapter
Guns, Germs, and Steel in 23 chapters, in our own words.
Prologue: Yali’s Question
The book begins on a beach in New Guinea in July 1972. Jared Diamond was there studying bird evolution when a charismatic local politician named Yali asked him a question he could not answer: “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?” Cargo meant the goods Europeans had brought, from steel axes and matches to medicines, clothing and umbrellas. Only two centuries earlier, New Guineans had been living with stone tools in villages without any central government. Diamond stresses that both men knew New Guineans were on average at least as smart as Europeans. So the question was never about ability.
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History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
Jared Diamond
Diamond widens Yali’s question until it covers all of history. Why did peoples of Eurasian origin come to dominate the modern world, while Native Americans, Africans and Aboriginal Australians were conquered, decimated or pushed aside? Why not the reverse? In A.D. 1500 the continents already differed sharply, with metal-equipped states in Eurasia, stone-tool empires among the Aztecs and Incas, and farming tribes or hunter-gatherer bands in much of the rest of the world. Going back to 11,000 B.C., when everyone everywhere lived by hunting and gathering, the question becomes simple: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
He answers three objections before he starts. Explaining how domination happened is not the same as justifying it, just as studying disease is not a defense of disease. The book is not Eurocentric, because most of it deals with non-Europeans, and most basic elements of European civilization were invented elsewhere. And he does not assume that civilization means progress or happiness. His years split between American cities and New Guinea villages have shown him that its blessings are mixed.
The most common answer people give, he says, is some version of biological difference between peoples, and that answer is both loathsome and wrong. Theories based on cold climates or river valley irrigation also fail against the evidence. Guns, germs and steel were the proximate causes of conquest, but they only push the question back: why did Europeans end up with them? Diamond’s one-sentence answer is that history followed different courses because of differences in environments. The rest of the book traces that claim through food production, germs, writing, technology and government, then tests it region by region.
Chapter 1
Up to the Starting Line
Diamond sets 11,000 B.C. as the starting line for his comparison. That date roughly marks the beginnings of village life, the first undisputed peopling of the Americas and the end of the last Ice Age. His question is whether, by then, the people of some continents already had a head start that could explain everything that followed.
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If so, perhaps that head start, amplified over the last 13,000 years, provides the answer to Yali’s question.
Jared Diamond
He races through millions of years of prehistory. Humans split from the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa around 7 million years ago, and Homo erectus became the first to spread beyond Africa. Neanderthals buried their dead and had large brains but crude tools. The real turning point came around 50,000 years ago with what Diamond calls the Great Leap Forward: standardized stone tools, jewelry, needles, fishhooks, harpoons, bows, sewn clothing and cave art such as the painted bulls and horses of Lascaux. When Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals disappeared within a few thousand years.
Humans then spread far. Australia and New Guinea, then a single landmass, were colonized between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, which required crossing at least eight water channels and gives the earliest evidence of watercraft anywhere. Soon after, the continent’s giant animals vanished: huge kangaroos, cow-sized diprotodonts, a one-ton lizard. Diamond argues that humans most likely killed them off, because the animals had survived countless earlier droughts and died out in every habitat at once. The Americas were settled last, with Clovis hunters spreading across the continent just before 11,000 B.C. Their arrival coincides with the loss of American elephants, horses, camels and giant ground sloths. Those extinctions removed many animals that might later have been domesticated.
Diamond then imagines an archaeologist touring the world in 11,000 B.C. Africa had millions of years of extra human history. Eurasia had the largest area. Australia had the earliest boats and some of the earliest rock art. A case could be made for any continent. But filling a continent took less than a thousand years, and people learn new environments quickly, so a head start in time explains little. The real reasons Eurasia pulled ahead were not the obvious ones, and finding them is the task of the book.
Chapter 2
A Natural Experiment of History
In December 1835, about 900 Maori from New Zealand arrived by ship on the Chatham Islands, 500 miles to the east. They killed, enslaved and ate the local Moriori people. The Moriori outnumbered the invaders two to one, but after a council they chose not to fight and offered peace and a share of their resources instead. One survivor recalled being killed “like sheep.” A conqueror explained that they had taken possession in accordance with their customs.
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If we could understand the reasons for the disparate development of those two island societies, we might have a model for understanding the broader question of differing developments on the continents.
Jared Diamond
The striking fact is that both peoples descended from the same Polynesian farmers less than a thousand years earlier. The Maori reached New Zealand around A.D. 1000, and some of them went on to the Chathams and became the Moriori. The Chathams were too cold for tropical crops, so the settlers went back to hunting and gathering. With only about 2,000 people and no food surplus, they could not support chiefs, soldiers or craft specialists. They gave up war and even castrated some baby boys to keep numbers down. Meanwhile the North Island Maori farmed intensively, grew past 100,000 people, built forts and fought constantly.
Diamond treats all of Polynesia as a natural experiment. Its peoples shared one ancestral culture, language and set of crops, then spread over islands that differed in climate, geology, sea life, area, terrain and isolation. The results varied enormously. Anuta packed 160 people onto 100 acres. Hawaii had irrigated taro fields, fishponds and eight ranked lineages of chiefs who married only among themselves. Tonga built a sea empire that reached islands 500 miles away. The Marquesas stayed divided among steep-walled valleys. Easter Island, with about 7,000 people, raised stone statues weighing 30 tons.
The pattern is clear. Larger and denser populations produced surpluses, which fed chiefs, priests and specialists, which in turn allowed more complex politics and bigger monuments. Poor raw materials limited what people could make, so Chatham Islanders carved adzes from clamshells while the Maori worked jade. All this diversity arose within about 3,200 years from a single ancestral society, driven by environment alone. The question for the rest of the book is whether the same thing happened on the continents.
Chapter 3
Collision at Cajamarca
On November 16, 1532, the Inca emperor Atahuallpa met Francisco Pizarro at Cajamarca in Peru. Atahuallpa ruled the largest and most advanced state in the Americas and had an army of about 80,000 soldiers nearby. Pizarro led 168 Spaniards, a thousand miles from reinforcements. Within minutes of the meeting, Pizarro had captured the emperor. He held him for eight months, collected the largest ransom in history, enough gold to fill a large room above head height, and then executed him anyway.
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The factors that resulted in Pizarro’s seizing Atahuallpa were essentially the same ones that determined the outcome of many similar collisions between colonizers and native peoples elsewhere in the modern world.
Jared Diamond
Diamond retells the scene through the words of Pizarro’s companions. The Spaniards hid around the square, terrified, and many wet themselves from fear. Atahuallpa arrived on a litter carried by eighty lords. When he threw a Bible to the ground, the friar called for attack. Guns fired, trumpets sounded, horsemen charged, and the unarmed Indians panicked. Six to seven thousand died. Not a single Spaniard was killed.
Why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa, and not the reverse? The first answer is military technology. The Spaniards had steel swords, lances and armor, guns and horses, while the Incas had stone, bronze and wooden clubs and quilted cotton armor. Guns played a small role, but steel blades and horses were decisive, and later Spanish forces of 30 to 110 horsemen beat Inca armies of thousands. The only Native Americans who resisted for centuries were those who acquired horses and guns themselves.
Other factors mattered too. A smallpox epidemic had spread from Spanish settlements, killing the previous emperor and his heir and starting the civil war that brought Atahuallpa to Cajamarca. Ships carried the Spaniards across oceans. A centralized Spanish state funded the expedition. And writing gave Pizarro knowledge of earlier conquests, while Atahuallpa, relying on word of mouth, had no idea that such invaders existed and walked into the trap. Guns, steel, horses, germs, ships, political organization and writing explain the immediate result. Why these advantages arose in Eurasia is the deeper question.
Chapter 4
Farmer Power
As a teenager in 1956, Diamond worked on a Montana farm run by a Swiss immigrant. One day a Blackfoot coworker named Levi, normally gentle and responsible, came in drunk and cursed the farmer and the ship that had brought him from Switzerland. The moment captured the question of this chapter: how did farmers win out over famous warriors like the Blackfeet?
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The most direct contribution of plant and animal domestication to wars of conquest was from Eurasia’s horses, whose military role made them the jeeps and Sherman tanks of ancient warfare on that continent.
Jared Diamond
For most of human history, everyone lived by hunting and gathering. Only in the last 11,000 years did some peoples begin producing food, and they did so at different times or not at all. The first advantage of farming is simple: more calories per acre. Most wild species are inedible, so by filling a field with the few useful ones, farmers can feed 10 to 100 times more people than hunter-gatherers on the same land. Domestic animals add meat, milk, manure and plowing power, which opened heavy soils that digging sticks could not work.
Settled life multiplied these gains. Nomadic mothers can carry only one child, so they space births about four years apart, while farming families can have a baby every two years. Farmers could also store food, and stored food could feed people who did not farm: kings, bureaucrats, priests, craftsmen and full-time soldiers. Only large farming societies have kings. Crops and livestock also supplied fibers, wool and leather.
Animals changed transport and war. Horses made Cortés and Pizarro unstoppable, likely powered the spread of Indo-European languages and carried the Mongols across Asia. Germs such as smallpox, measles and flu evolved from diseases of domestic animals, and the peoples who lived with those animals built up resistance while others died in huge numbers. Food production meant denser populations, surpluses and transport, the foundations of the settled, centralized and technologically innovative societies that eventually conquered the rest.
Chapter 5
History’s Haves and Have-Nots
Food production never arose in places like the Arctic, which is no surprise. The real puzzle is that it never arose on its own in some of today’s richest farmland: California, the Argentine pampas, southwestern and southeastern Australia and South Africa’s Cape. Meanwhile, the earliest farming began in areas now seen as dry or degraded, such as Iraq, Iran, Mexico, the Andes, parts of China and the African Sahel. Why did farming start in these places, at such different times, and why did it spread peacefully in some regions and by violent replacement in others?
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Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots: between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times.
Jared Diamond
Diamond explains how scientists answer these questions. Domesticated plants and animals often look different from their wild ancestors: domestic goats have twisted horns, and domestic peas have thinner seed coats. Radiocarbon dating, improved by methods that can date a single seed and corrected with tree-ring calibration, tells us when. The range of the wild ancestor shows where a crop was first tamed. Chickpeas, for example, are mostly grown in India today but were domesticated in southeastern Turkey.
The result is a map with only five certain centers of independent food production: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes and the eastern United States. Four more are possible: the Sahel, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia and New Guinea. The Fertile Crescent was first, with plants by about 8500 B.C., and China was close behind. The eastern United States lagged by roughly 6,000 years.
Other regions began farming only after crops and animals arrived from elsewhere. Sometimes local hunter-gatherers adopted them, as in Egypt and the U.S. Southwest. Sometimes incoming farmers replaced the locals, as in Indonesia, subequatorial Africa and, in modern times, Australia and California. Peoples who gained an early start on food production thereby gained a head start toward guns, germs and steel.
Chapter 6
To Farm or Not to Farm
It is easy to assume that farming was obviously better than foraging. Diamond disagrees. Farmers often work longer hours than hunter-gatherers, and early farmers in many places were smaller, less well nourished and sicker than the foragers before them. So why did anyone take it up?
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Instead, as we shall see, food production evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences.
Jared Diamond
His answer is that nobody discovered or invented farming. The first farmers had never seen farming and could not have aimed for it. It grew out of many small decisions about how to spend time: tend a garden for vegetables later, gather shellfish for a sure meal today, or hunt deer for a big but uncertain payoff. Early gardens may have been a kind of insurance. The line between the two ways of life was blurry anyway. Some foragers settled in villages, some farmers stayed mobile, and Aboriginal Australians burned land and replanted yam tops in ways close to farming.
Once farming existed nearby, neighbors could choose. Some refused for thousands of years, like Aboriginal Australians who traded with farmers in the Torres Strait. Southeastern Europeans took the whole Southwest Asian package at once. Japan, with its rich seafood, adopted it slowly. Southern Swedes took up farming around 3000 B.C., dropped it for 400 years, then returned to it.
Diamond names five factors that tipped the balance. Wild foods, especially big game, became scarcer. Climate change at the end of the Ice Age spread wild cereals. Tools like sickles, baskets, grinding stones and storage pits made grain easier to use. Rising population and farming fed each other, since farmers had more children who needed more food. And at the frontier, denser farming populations simply displaced or killed hunter-gatherers. Foragers survived into modern times only where deserts, seas or unsuitable climates kept farmers out.
Chapter 7
How to Make an Almond
Wild almonds contain enough cyanide that a few dozen can kill you. So how did early farmers, with no knowledge of genetics, turn such plants into crops? Diamond suggests looking from the plant’s point of view. Plants cannot walk, so they trick animals into spreading their seeds, wrapping them in tasty fruit that ripens only when the seeds are ready. Humans were just another seed-spreading animal. Our latrines, trash heaps and paths home became the first agricultural labs, and the seeds that landed there came from the plants people liked best.
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Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.
Jared Diamond
Some changes were visible. People chose bigger fruits and seeds, so cultivated peas became ten times heavier than wild ones, and corn cobs grew from half an inch to six inches. They chose the rare mutant almond trees that lacked the bitter poison. They picked seedless or fleshy fruits, oily seeds and long fibers like cotton and flax.
Other changes were invisible. Wild wheat and barley stalks shatter to drop their seeds, and wild pea pods explode. Only rare mutants kept their seeds attached, and those were the ones people harvested and planted, so farming reversed natural selection. Farmers also selected against seed dormancy, since only seeds that sprouted right away got harvested. And they favored plants that pollinate themselves or can be grown from cuttings, which kept useful mutations from being diluted.
Crops were domesticated in stages. Wheat, barley and peas came first because they needed few changes. Olives, figs and grapes followed around 4000 B.C. Apples, pears and cherries required grafting, a difficult technique that came much later. Some plants, like acorn-bearing oaks, still resist domestication: they grow slowly, squirrels plant billions of acorns, and bitterness is controlled by many genes. Darwin himself began On the Origin of Species with this kind of unconscious selection by farmers.
Chapter 8
Apples or Indians
Why did farming never start on its own in fertile places like California or temperate Australia? Either the local people were somehow lacking, or the local wild plants were. Of about 200,000 wild flowering plants, only a few hundred have been domesticated, and a dozen crops supply over 80 percent of the world’s crop tonnage. No major food plant has been domesticated in modern times, which suggests ancient peoples found nearly every one worth taming.
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Instead, the reason Native Americans did not domesticate apples lay with the entire suite of wild plant and animal species available to Native Americans.
Jared Diamond
The Fertile Crescent had big advantages. Its Mediterranean climate favors annual plants that put their energy into large edible seeds. Its wild cereals were so productive that foragers could harvest nearly a ton of seed per hectare. Of the world’s 56 largest-seeded wild grasses, about 32 grow there or elsewhere in the Mediterranean zone of western Eurasia, compared with one in California and none in southwestern Australia. Its sharp changes in altitude spread harvests across the year. Its eight founder crops were easy to domesticate, and it was also home to the wild ancestors of goats, sheep, pigs and cows.
Were local people ignorant of their plants? No. Diamond recalls a Foré companion in New Guinea angrily listing 29 kinds of edible mushrooms by name. Villagers at Abu Hureyra in Syria gathered 157 plant species with clear selectivity. In the Jordan Valley, barley and emmer wheat turn out to be the two best choices among 23 local wild grasses.
New Guinea and the eastern United States show what poorer plant kits meant. New Guineans domesticated sugarcane, bananas and taro, but had no cereals and no big domestic animals, and taro has barely 1 percent protein. When the sweet potato arrived, they adopted it at once and their highland population boomed. Eastern U.S. Native Americans domesticated sunflower and a few small-seeded plants around 2500 to 1500 B.C., then dropped most of them for Mexican corn and beans. In both places, the limits lay in the local wild species, not in the people.
Chapter 9
Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle
Diamond borrows the first line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Just as a happy marriage needs many things to go right, a domesticable animal must pass many tests, and failing any one rules it out. Only 14 big plant-eating mammal species were domesticated before the twentieth century: the Major Five (cow, sheep, goat, pig and horse) and nine others of regional importance, such as camels, llamas, donkeys and reindeer. Taming a wild animal, like an elephant, is not the same thing. Domestication means breeding it in captivity until it changes.
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Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.
Jared Diamond
The distribution of those 14 is lopsided. Thirteen of their wild ancestors lived in Eurasia. South America had one, the guanaco, and North America, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa had none. Eurasia started with 72 candidate species and domesticated 13. Africa had 51 and domesticated none. Part of the reason is size and extinction, since the Americas and Australia lost most of their big mammals. But the rate of success also differed.
It was not a cultural problem. Non-Eurasians adopted Eurasian animals quickly: Plains Indians became expert horsemen, the Navajo built a society around sheep, and people everywhere keep pets. All the big domestications happened between about 8000 and 2500 B.C., and modern efforts with eland, elk, moose and zebra have achieved very little.
The animals themselves were the problem. Carnivores cost too much to feed. Gorillas and elephants grow too slowly. Cheetahs and vicuñas will not breed in captivity. Grizzly bears, African buffalo, hippos and zebras are too dangerous, and zebras injure more American zookeepers each year than tigers. Gazelles panic and batter themselves against fences. The best candidates lived in herds with a clear ranking and shared territories, so humans could take over as leader, as with horses. Many are called, Diamond concludes, but few are chosen.
Chapter 10
Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes
Look at a world map and the continents’ shapes differ in an important way. The Americas stretch 9,000 miles north to south but only 3,000 miles east to west, narrowing to 40 miles at Panama. Africa is also longer north to south. Eurasia’s main axis runs east to west. Diamond argues this simple fact had enormous consequences.
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Axis orientations affected the rate of spread of crops and livestock, and possibly also of writing, wheels, and other inventions.
Jared Diamond
Places at the same latitude share day lengths and seasons, and often similar climates and diseases. Plants are tuned to those signals. So crops can move east or west easily but struggle to move north or south. Fertile Crescent crops spread to Greece and the Indus Valley by 6500 B.C., to Egypt soon after 6000 B.C., to central Europe by 5400 B.C. and to Britain around 3500 B.C. By the time of Christ, they were grown from Ireland to Japan. Genetic evidence shows most were domesticated only once, because they spread so fast that nobody needed to tame them again.
In the Americas, spread was painfully slow. Corn and beans took thousands of years to move from Mexico into the eastern United States. Andean llamas, guinea pigs and potatoes never reached the highlands of Mexico, so the Olmecs, Maya and Aztecs had no pack animals and no edible domestic mammals except dogs. Many American crops were domesticated two or more times in different places. In Africa, Fertile Crescent crops could not cross the tropics to South Africa’s Mediterranean Cape, and livestock stalled for 2,000 years at the edge of the Serengeti.
Deserts and mountains mattered too, but the axis effect extended beyond food. The wheel spread across Eurasia within centuries of its invention, while Mexico’s wheels never reached the Andes. The alphabet spread from the Fertile Crescent to Carthage and India, while Mesoamerican writing never reached the Andes. Diamond ends by turning around the song “America the Beautiful”: the Americas had constricted skies, not amber waves of grain from sea to shining sea.
Chapter 11
Lethal Gift of Livestock
A farmer is not stronger than a hunter-gatherer in a naked fight. Farmer power comes from greater numbers and from what farmers carry, including nastier germs. Until World War II, more victims of war died of microbes than of wounds. In the Americas, far more Native Americans were killed by Spanish germs than by Spanish swords. Why was the exchange so one-sided?
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The winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.
Jared Diamond
Diamond looks at disease from the microbe’s side. Many symptoms are the germ’s way of spreading: coughs and sneezes for flu, diarrhea for cholera, skin sores for smallpox, biting frenzy for rabies. Our defenses include fever, antibodies and, over generations, genes like the sickle-cell gene that protects against malaria. Crowd diseases such as measles spread fast, then leave survivors immune, so they burn out in small populations. Measles dies out in groups under about half a million people. These diseases need large, dense populations, which only farming and cities provided, along with sewage, rodents and trade routes that linked Europe, Asia and North Africa into one breeding ground.
Most of these killers came from domestic animals. Measles and tuberculosis came from cattle, flu from pigs and ducks, smallpox from a livestock pox virus. People who lived and slept beside their herds gave microbes endless chances to jump. Some jumps fail, some linger, and a few become permanent human diseases. Germs keep evolving: the myxoma virus released on Australian rabbits in 1950 first killed 99.8 percent of them and later only about 25 percent.
The Americas had few domestic animals, and llamas were not kept indoors, milked or herded in huge numbers, so no crowd diseases evolved there. When Europeans arrived, smallpox killed nearly half the Aztecs in 1520, and Mexico’s population fell from about 20 million to 1.6 million by 1618. Overall, the Native American population may have dropped by 95 percent. Germs did not always favor Europeans, though. Malaria and yellow fever held them out of tropical Africa and New Guinea for centuries.
Chapter 12
Blueprints and Borrowed Letters
Writing is a tool of conquest. It carried orders to fleets, sailing directions from past voyages and stories of riches that drew new adventurers. Yet until recently most of the world had no writing. Diamond asks why only some peoples developed it and how many times it was invented from scratch.
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The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.
Jared Diamond
Inventing writing was extremely hard. The first scribes had to break speech into units and invent signs for them with no model to follow. Only two independent inventions are certain: the Sumerians before 3000 B.C. and Mexican Indians before 600 B.C., with China and Egypt as possible cases. Sumerian cuneiform grew out of clay tokens used for accounting. Its key breakthrough was the rebus principle, using a picture for a word that sounds alike, as with arrow and life, both pronounced ti. Maya writing independently arrived at the same principles.
Everyone else borrowed, either by copying a detailed blueprint or by taking only the idea. Most alphabets are blueprint copies: Cyrillic, Gothic and Roman alphabets adapted for new languages. The alphabet itself arose only once, among Semitic speakers in the second millennium B.C., and the Greeks later added vowels. The most striking case of idea diffusion is Sequoyah, a Cherokee who could not read English. Around 1820, knowing only that white people made useful marks on paper, he built an 85-sign syllabary, and the Cherokee quickly became almost fully literate.
Early writing was ambiguous, complicated and limited to a few scribes, mostly for tax and palace records. Writing only appeared in stratified farming societies that could feed full-time bureaucrats. Yet some such societies, like the Inca Empire, Tonga and Hawaii, never got it. Diamond’s explanation is geography: they lay too far from the few inventing centers, or were cut off by deserts, oceans and rain forests.
Chapter 13
Necessity’s Mother
In 1908 archaeologists on Crete found the Phaistos disk, a clay disk from about 1700 B.C. stamped with 241 signs. It is the world’s earliest printed document, yet printing did not appear again for thousands of years. If inventions are that random, can technology’s history be explained at all? And why were Eurasians, not Native Americans or Africans, the ones who developed guns, oceangoing ships and steel?
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Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.
Jared Diamond
Diamond first challenges the idea that necessity drives invention. Most major inventions came from tinkerers, and uses were found only later. Edison listed ten uses for his phonograph, including recording the last words of the dying, and only after twenty years accepted that music was its main purpose. Early motor vehicles were toys for the rich until World War I created demand for trucks. He also rejects the heroic view of lone geniuses. Watt improved an older steam engine, Edison improved existing light bulbs, and the Wright brothers built on earlier gliders.
Societies also differ in how they receive inventions. A new technology must offer a real economic advantage, social prestige, compatibility with vested interests and visible benefits. The QWERTY keyboard survives despite better designs. Historians list many possible reasons why some societies are more open to innovation, but none is tied to geography, and openness varies over time. China and medieval Islam led the world before Europe did. Even neighboring New Guinea tribes differ: the Chimbu embraced coffee and bought a sawmill, while the Daribi ignored the first helicopter that landed among them.
Most technology spreads by borrowing, and isolation can even cause loss, as when Japan abandoned guns and Tasmanians dropped bone tools. Technology is autocatalytic: it builds on itself and speeds up. Gutenberg’s press combined paper, movable type, metallurgy, presses, inks and a simple alphabet, while the Phaistos disk maker had few of these. Eurasia combined the earliest food production, an east to west axis and the largest population, so its early lead snowballed. Diamond insists the cause was geography, not intellect.
Chapter 14
From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
In 1979 a missionary friend of Diamond’s visited the Fayu, a New Guinea group living as scattered families. At a rare gathering, one man recognized his father’s killer and attacked him with an ax. The Fayu had no way of settling disputes, and their numbers had fallen from about 2,000 to 400 because they kept killing each other. At the end of the Ice Age much of the world lived like this. By A.D. 1500 less than 20 percent of the land was ruled by states. Today all of it is.
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The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree
Jared Diamond
Diamond sorts societies into four types. Bands of a few dozen relatives have no formal leaders. Tribes of a few hundred have clans and informal big-men, who live and work like everyone else; a famous Solomon Islands carver still dug his own sweet potatoes. A few hundred is about the limit at which everyone can know everyone. Chiefdoms of thousands brought something new: people had to live alongside strangers without killing them. Chiefs held a monopoly on force, inherited their office and collected tribute that they partly redistributed.
This raises a basic dilemma. Central government provides valuable services, but it can also transfer wealth from commoners to elites. The difference is one of degree. Elites keep support by disarming the people, sharing some tribute, keeping order and building an ideology or religion that justifies their rule and makes strangers willing to die for one another. States, starting around 3700 B.C. in Mesopotamia, took all of this further with cities, bureaucracies, laws and armies.
What drove this progression? Diamond rejects both Rousseau’s social contract and the theory that states formed to run irrigation, since large irrigation came after states arose. The best predictor is population size. Large populations need centralized authority to handle conflict among strangers, make decisions and redistribute goods. Small societies merge only under threat or by conquest, as with the Cherokee confederation, the United States under pressure after Shays’s Rebellion, and the Zulu state built by Dingiswayo. Food production and competition ultimately produced the germs, writing, technology and government that decided history.
Chapter 15
Yali’s People
On a trip to Australia, Diamond nearly died of heat hiking to Aboriginal rock paintings. He recalls Burke and Wills, the explorers who starved in the desert in the 1860s after Burke shot at the Aborigines who had been feeding them. Australia is the driest, flattest, most infertile and most unpredictable continent. In modern times its native people were the only continent-wide population with no farming, herding, metal, bows, villages or writing, even though 40,000 years ago they had some of the world’s earliest boats and ground stone tools.
“
The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians.
Jared Diamond
New Guinea was once joined to Australia, yet its people became farmers who lived in villages and raised pigs. Highland New Guineans dug drainage ditches 9,000 years ago and domesticated sugarcane, bananas and taro, making the island one of the world’s independent centers of plant domestication. But they never developed metal, writing or states. Their crops were low in protein, their animals gave no milk or plowing power, their population never passed a million, and rugged terrain split them into about 1,000 languages. Their neighbors had little new to offer.
Australia never developed food production at all. Its big animals were gone, its soils were poor, and the irregular El Niño cycle made farming risky. Of the world’s heaviest-grained wild grasses, it had only two small ones. Aboriginal nomadism was a sensible response, and people managed land with fire. Tasmania, cut off for 10,000 years with only 4,000 people, lost technologies. New Guinea farming never crossed the Torres Strait because the islands between became steadily poorer, like a game of telephone.
Europeans colonized New Guinea but did not replace its people, because malaria killed settlers and European crops did poorly. Australia was different. Its temperate lands suited Eurasian crops and sheep, and European germs and violence reduced the Aboriginal population from about 300,000 to 60,000. The idea that white colonists built a modern society where Aborigines could not ignores that the colonists imported everything from Eurasia. The people who actually built a society from Australian resources were the Aborigines.
Chapter 16
How China Became Chinese
Most large nations are recent creations and linguistic melting pots. China is the exception. It has been politically unified since 221 B.C., has used one writing system since literacy began, and over 800 million of its people speak Mandarin. That is surprising given the genetic and environmental differences between north and south, and given that New Guinea has a thousand languages in a tenth of China’s area.
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Hence the history of China offers the key to the history of all of East Asia.
Jared Diamond
A closer look at China’s language map reveals over 130 smaller languages in four families. Their scattered, patchy distribution is the remnant of once larger areas broken up by expanding Sino-Tibetan speakers. Diamond concludes that China was once as diverse as anywhere else, and that North China was Sino-Tibetan while the south held Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai speakers. Tropical Southeast Asia lost all its original languages to invaders from South China, and only a few relict hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Semang Negritos and the Andaman Islanders, hint at who lived there before.
China was one of the world’s earliest centers of food production, by around 7500 B.C., with millet in the north and rice in the south, plus pigs, chickens, water buffalo and silkworms. Wheat, barley and horses later arrived from West Asia. Food production led to bronze, the world’s earliest cast iron, and inventions like paper, the compass and gunpowder. Its long east to west rivers and gentle terrain made unification easier than in Europe, and most culture flowed from north to south.
Korea and Japan took rice, bronze and writing from China but kept their own languages because the sea protected them. China’s cultural prestige still shows in Japan’s Chinese-derived script. China’s early head start in domestication, nearly 10,000 years ago, still shapes East Asia today.
Chapter 17
Speedboat to Polynesia
Diamond once shopped in a store in Jayapura, Indonesian New Guinea, with three friends: Achmad, a Javanese official, Wiwor, a New Guinea highlander, and Sauakari, a lowlander. The store belonged to a Chinese merchant, Ping Wah. The scene was funny, but behind it lay real tensions and three waves of prehistory. Wiwor’s ancestors reached New Guinea over 40,000 years ago. Achmad’s ancestors arrived in Java from the South China coast about 4,000 years ago. Sauakari’s ancestors came with the same wave about 3,600 years ago. Ping Wah’s stayed in China.
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One prong of it became the Polynesians, who populated the most remote islands of the Pacific and were the greatest seafarers among Neolithic peoples.
Jared Diamond
That wave was the Austronesian expansion, one of the largest population movements of the last 6,000 years, spreading languages from Madagascar to Easter Island. Language evidence points to Taiwan as the homeland: three of the four Austronesian subfamilies are found only there, while the fourth covers nearly everything else. Archaeology agrees. Pottery, polished tools, pigs and crops appear on Taiwan by the fourth millennium B.C., then in the Philippines around 3000 B.C., Indonesia by 2000 B.C. and the New Guinea region by 1600 B.C. The double-outrigger canoe, very hard to capsize, may have made it possible.
Austronesians replaced the thin populations of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines and Indonesia. They failed in New Guinea. There, dense farming populations already grew taro and bananas, had polished stone tools, resisted malaria and were skilled sailors. Austronesian Lapita potters settled mainly on small islets off larger islands and traded, and their languages spread along the coasts, while the interior stayed Papuan.
From the Solomons the Lapita people sailed on into the empty Pacific, reaching Fiji, Samoa and Tonga around 1200 B.C., then Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand. The Chathams, settled around A.D. 1400, were the last. Diamond draws the lesson again: related peoples in different environments diverged, with some returning to foraging and others building kingdoms and monuments like Borobudur.
Chapter 18
Hemispheres Colliding
Why did Europeans conquer the Americas, and not the reverse? Diamond starts with food production. Eurasia had 13 big domestic mammals that supplied meat, milk, wool, transport, war horses and plowing. The Americas had only the llama, confined to the Andes. Had the Ice Age extinctions not happened, he suggests, Cortés might have faced Aztec cavalry, and Spaniards might have died of American germs. American farming also relied on protein-poor corn, hand planting, hand tilling and no manure.
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When Cortés and his bedraggled adventurers landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, they might have been driven into the sea by thousands of Aztec cavalry mounted on domesticated native American horses.
Jared Diamond
The proximate gaps followed. Native Americans had almost no crowd diseases. They used stone, wood and bone instead of steel. They had no animal, water or wind power, used wheels only in Mexican toys, and sailed rafts. They had two empires, the Aztec and Inca, against many organized Eurasian states, and writing only among a small Mesoamerican elite.
Diamond traces four deeper causes. Humans arrived in the Americas much later, though that mattered less than one might think. Wild plants and animals were poorer, so teosinte took thousands of years to become corn while wheat needed only centuries. North to south axes, the narrow Isthmus of Panama and deserts blocked diffusion, so llamas and wheels, both present by 3000 B.C., never met. And the Americas were fragmented into poorly connected regions, where inventions could be lost as on islands.
The Norse attempt on the Americas failed because Norway was poor, Greenland was too cold and the timing was too early. Spain succeeded in 1492 because it was rich, landed at farmable latitudes and had mature ocean ships. The results were catastrophic: West Indian populations were wiped out, the Aztec and Inca empires fell, and germs destroyed societies ahead of any European soldier. Native peoples survive mainly in lands Europeans did not want or in the populous Andes and Central America.
Chapter 19
How Africa Became Black
In Namibia, Diamond saw a street named after Goering, the father of the Nazi leader and the first governor of German South-West Africa, whose colony later waged a war of extermination against the Herero. Africa’s past shapes its present. By A.D. 1000 the continent held five major human groups, blacks, whites, Pygmies, Khoisan and Asians, and one quarter of the world’s languages. Madagascar’s people speak an Austronesian language close to one from Borneo, 4,000 miles away, which Diamond calls the most astonishing fact of human geography.
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In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume.
Jared Diamond
Languages reveal lost history. Pygmies speak their farming neighbors’ languages, and click languages survive in Tanzania far from today’s Khoisan homeland, showing both groups once ranged more widely. Some 500 closely related Bantu languages cover subequatorial Africa, yet their closest relatives sit in Cameroon and Nigeria. That means the Bantu spread out from there. Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, are just one branch of a family whose other branches are all African.
The Bantu had advantages. Africa’s crops came from the Sahel, Ethiopia and West Africa, all north of the equator, and none from the south. Bantu farmers with yams and cattle, and later iron, sorghum and millet, swept south within a few centuries, engulfing Pygmies and Khoisan. They stopped at the Fish River because their summer-rain crops could not grow in the Cape’s winter rains. So when the Dutch arrived in 1652 with Near Eastern crops, they met only sparse Khoisan herders, and later needed 175 years to subdue the Xhosa.
Why did Europe colonize Africa rather than the reverse? None of Africa’s big mammals could be domesticated. Africa had fewer domesticable plants, less area and fewer people than Eurasia. Its north to south axis slowed the spread of crops, livestock, pottery and writing, and tsetse flies killed introduced animals. Diamond concludes that the different histories of Africa and Europe come down to differences in real estate.
Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science
Diamond gives his final answer to Yali. Had Aboriginal Australians and Eurasians swapped continents in the Ice Age, the Aborigines’ descendants would now rule the world. Four sets of factors made the difference: the wild plants and animals available to domesticate, how easily things spread within a continent, how easily they spread between continents, and continental size and population. This is not crude determinism. Human inventiveness is universal, but some environments offer more raw material.
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The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us.
Jared Diamond
Why, within Eurasia, did Europe win rather than the Fertile Crescent or China? For most of the last 10,000 years Europe was the backward region. The Fertile Crescent lost its lead because its fragile, dry environment was deforested, eroded and salted, so its societies destroyed their own resource base. China’s problem was unity. When a court faction ended the great treasure fleets after 1433, one decision halted them across the whole country. Fragmented Europe gave Columbus several chances to find a sponsor, and ideas rejected in one state were taken up in another. Geography explains the difference: China has a smooth coast and linked river valleys, while Europe is split by peninsulas, islands and mountains.
Circumstances change, but the past weighs heavily. The transistor jumped from America to Japan, not to Zaire or Paraguay, because Japan already had literacy, machinery and a strong state. Culture and individuals also act as wild cards. The QWERTY keyboard became fixed by accident, and a truck braking a second later in 1930 might have killed Hitler. But such accidents cannot explain why Eurasia had literate, iron-using states while Australia did not.
Finally, Diamond argues that history can be a science, like astronomy, geology or evolutionary biology. These fields cannot run lab experiments and deal with unique, complex systems, so they rely on comparison and natural experiments. Prediction works best at large scales and over long periods. Because we understand people far better than dinosaurs, he believes human history can be studied just as scientifically, and with real benefit to the future.
Chapter 20
Who Are the Japanese?
Diamond added this chapter to fill a gap in earlier editions. The Japanese look genetically much like other East Asians, especially Koreans, which suggests a recent arrival. Yet their language has no clear relatives, which suggests a long separate history. The question is emotional in Japan. Until 1946 schools taught that the emperors descended from the sun goddess, and the great kofun tombs remain closed to excavation. Diamond believes an honest answer matters for relations between Japan and Korea.
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Who are the Japanese, when and whence did they come to Japan, and how did they evolve their unique speech?
Jared Diamond
Japan is more isolated than Britain, very wet and extremely productive, with nut-rich forests and seas full of fish. When the Ice Age ended, rising seas cut the land bridges and created long, rich coastlines. At the same time Japanese people made the world’s oldest known pottery, about 12,700 years ago, a finding that shocked archaeologists. Pottery let people boil acorns and shellfish, wean babies earlier and feed toothless elders. The Jomon hunter-gatherers settled in villages, stored nuts in pits, harpooned tuna and grew to about a quarter of a million people. Their way of life changed little for 10,000 years.
Farming did not take over for a long time because early Korean farmers were poorer than Jomon foragers. That changed around 400 B.C. when the Yayoi culture appeared in Kyushu with irrigated rice paddies, iron tools and Korean-style pottery. Population exploded, war and social classes appeared, and by A.D. 300 to 700 rulers were building enormous keyhole tombs.
Diamond concludes that Korean immigrants, whether millions or only a few thousand who multiplied quickly, contributed most of modern Japanese ancestry. Jomon skulls resemble the Ainu, Yayoi skulls resemble modern Japanese and Koreans. The language puzzle resolves because the Jomon spoke many languages, with Ainu only in the north, and the Yayoi language need not resemble modern Korean.
Chapter 21
2003 Afterword: Guns, Germs, and Steel Today
Seven years after finishing the book, Diamond finds his conclusion unchanged: societies developed differently because of continental environments, not biology. New findings enrich the story. Genetic evidence confirms that Korean farmers spread into Japan from around 400 B.C. Mexican crops reached the eastern United States through the Southwest rather than by the direct dry route. And Eurasia’s big domestic mammals were domesticated repeatedly in different places.
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Innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation: a too-unified society is at a disadvantage, and so is a too-fragmented society.
Jared Diamond
He revisits why Europe, not China, led in modern science. Following the sociologist Graeme Lang, he argues that rain-fed farming in Europe let towns and universities grow independently, while China’s irrigated river valleys and easy terrain favored early, powerful central states. From this he draws his Optimal Fragmentation Principle: innovation moves fastest in a society that is neither too unified nor too fragmented. India, even more divided than Europe, was less innovative.
The idea resonated with business readers, including McKinsey executives. German beer is made by about a thousand tiny local breweries protected from competition, and is far less productive than the U.S. industry. Japanese food processing is similarly fragmented and costly. Industries that compete hard at home and abroad match or beat American productivity. Silicon Valley and Microsoft, he says, succeed by combining competing groups with free flow of ideas.
Finally he considers why some nations are rich and others poor. Good institutions matter, as the Koreas and Germanys show, but they are not random. New economic studies find that countries with long histories of states and agriculture are richer and grow faster, even after allowing for institutions. The hand of history at 8000 B.C. still lies on us, and understanding that chain of causes could help poorer countries advance.
Jared Diamond is an American scientist and author whose work spans physiology, evolutionary biology and geography. In the book he describes a background that prepared him for its wide scope: a father who was a physician and geneticist, a mother who was a teacher and linguist, training in languages and history, and a Ph.D. in physiology. He was born in Boston in 1937 and later became a professor of geography at UCLA.
Much of his research has been on the evolution and biogeography of birds. By the time he wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel he had spent 33 years doing fieldwork in South America, southern Africa, Indonesia, Australia and above all New Guinea, where he worked with speakers of nearly 100 of the island’s languages and lived among peoples ranging from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Those friendships, including his conversation with Yali, shaped the book’s central question.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was published in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It built on ideas from his earlier book, The Third Chimpanzee. He went on to write Collapse, about why some societies fail, as well as The World Until Yesterday and Upheaval, and he has received a MacArthur Fellowship among other honors.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond’s attempt to explain why history unfolded so differently on different continents over the last 13,000 years. It starts with a question from a New Guinean politician named Yali about why Europeans had so much more “cargo.” Diamond argues that the answer lies in environments, not in biological differences between peoples. Regions with many domesticable plants and animals developed food production first, which led to dense populations, epidemic germs, writing, technology and centralized states. Eurasia’s east to west axis then helped these advantages spread.
What are the key takeaways from Guns, Germs, and Steel?
The main takeaways are that food production was the root of power, since it created surpluses, large populations and specialists; that only a few regions had wild species suited to domestication, with 13 of the 14 big domestic mammals native to Eurasia; that crowd diseases evolved from livestock and devastated peoples without them; that continents with east to west axes spread crops and ideas faster than those with north to south axes; and that larger, better connected populations produce and share more inventions. Guns, germs and steel were the immediate tools of conquest, but geography was the deeper cause.
What does the title Guns, Germs, and Steel mean?
The title names the immediate factors that let Europeans conquer other peoples. At Cajamarca in 1532, 168 Spaniards with steel weapons, armor, guns and horses captured the Inca emperor, whose empire had already been weakened by smallpox. Diamond calls these proximate causes. The book’s real subject is the ultimate causes behind them: why Eurasians, rather than Native Americans, Africans or Aboriginal Australians, ended up with guns, germs and steel in the first place.
What is the Anna Karenina principle in the book?
Diamond adapts Tolstoy’s opening line to animal domestication: domesticable animals are all alike, and every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way. A species must pass many tests at once. It needs an efficient diet, fast growth, willingness to breed in captivity, a manageable temper, no tendency to panic and a herd structure with a clear ranking. Zebras are too aggressive, gazelles panic, cheetahs will not breed in captivity. Failing any one test is enough, which is why so few big mammals were ever domesticated.
Why does Diamond say continental axes mattered?
Places at the same latitude share day lengths, seasons and often climates, so crops and animals adapted to one can thrive in the other. Eurasia runs mostly east to west, so Fertile Crescent crops spread from Ireland to Japan. The Americas and Africa run mostly north to south, across very different climates, so crops and animals spread slowly or not at all. Llamas never reached Mexico, and Mediterranean crops could not cross tropical Africa to the Cape. The same barriers slowed wheels and writing.
Is Guns, Germs, and Steel worth reading?
For readers interested in big picture history, yes. The book pulls together archaeology, genetics, linguistics, epidemiology and botany into one argument about why the world looks the way it does, and it is full of vivid examples, from the capture of Atahuallpa to the Moriori and Maori. It is long and sometimes repetitive, and some scholars argue it gives too much weight to geography. Even so, it changes how many readers think about history, and its central ideas are easy to remember and discuss.
Who should read Guns, Germs, and Steel?
The book suits anyone curious about world history, human origins or why some societies became rich and powerful. Students of history, anthropology, geography and economics will find its framework useful. Readers interested in how diseases, crops and technology shape societies will enjoy its detail. It is also valuable for people who want a clear, evidence-based answer to racist explanations of history, since that is one of Diamond’s stated reasons for writing it. The later chapters and afterword also speak to business readers interested in innovation.
How long does it take to read Guns, Germs, and Steel?
It is a long book, about 19 chapters plus a prologue, an epilogue, a chapter on Japanese origins and a 2003 afterword. Most readers need around 15 to 18 hours to read it in full, so a few weeks at a steady pace. Because each chapter tackles one question, such as the origins of writing or why zebras were never domesticated, it works well read in chunks. A summary gives the core argument in well under an hour.
Does Guns, Germs, and Steel argue that some peoples are smarter than others?
No, the book argues the opposite. Diamond rejects racial explanations as both loathsome and wrong, and he spends much of the book showing that peoples everywhere know their environments well and adopt better crops, animals and tools when they can. New Guineans took up the sweet potato, Plains Indians mastered the horse and the Cherokee embraced a new writing system. Differences in outcome came from differences in the starting materials and geography each people inherited.
Why did Europe, rather than China, come to dominate?
Diamond argues that China’s geography, with a smooth coastline and linked river valleys, favored early and lasting unity, which let a single decision shut down innovations across the whole country, as when the treasure fleets were ended after 1433. Europe’s peninsulas, islands and mountains kept it divided into competing states, so ideas rejected in one place could thrive in another. Columbus, for example, was turned down several times before Spain backed him. In the 2003 afterword he calls this the Optimal Fragmentation Principle.
What is the role of germs in the book?
Diamond argues that germs killed far more Native Americans than guns or swords did, with the population of the Americas falling by as much as 95 percent after 1492. Diseases like smallpox, measles and flu evolved from diseases of domestic herd animals and need large, dense populations to survive. Eurasians had lived with livestock and crowded cities for thousands of years and had built up resistance. The Americas had few domestic animals, so few crowd diseases evolved there to send back to Europe.
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