Book - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Paperback, 1997, 500 pages. 32 pages of black-and-white plates. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. Very good used condition. Minor cosmetic wear to cover, edges, and corners. Spine and pages are all intact. No marks, tears, or dog-ears. "Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this classic book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing that environmental factors were actually responsible for the broadest patterns. The story begins 13,000 years ago when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals gave some peoples a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents...." If you like Diamond I also have a listing for another of his books: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed