![]() ![]() ![]() It doesn't answer all the questions in the subject domain and the author makes it very clear he is fully aware of some of the difficulties still in need to be reconciled with his main points. It is written in wide brushes and certainly leaves much to speculation. evolved but rather a high-level attempt to answer the key point on "Why was it that certain parts of the World evolved with one pace and others - with another?". The book makes it very clear from the first pages that it not a historical summary of human civilizations or a detailed research on how each civ. I think they did a great job at trying to jam in as much as possible from the book but it is hard not to miss some important points. Just a quick note to everyone who commented on the historical discontinuity of the documentary - please, keep in mind Jared Diamond's book is much more all-encompassing than the documentary. ![]() 400 to 1700 while Rome’s declined, thus explaining why the former outpost of the Western world became its new center and vice versa? To wit: How did the Ptolemies create an even more dynamic civilization than that of the earlier dynastic pharaohs, when they inherited from them a supposedly exhausted and increasingly salinized landscape? Or why did the palatial culture of Mycenae prove to be a dead-end society, and yet the radically different Greek city-state centuries later blossomed in the exact same environment? More immediately, are we to suppose that there are underappreciated micro-climates that separate Tijuana from San Diego, strangely different soils on the two immediate sides of the Korean DMZ, and something about those ever-changing lagoons of Venice that made it irrelevant in late Roman times, a world power in 1500, and once again a backwater by 1850? Did the environment of Britain improve from A.D. Diamond's environmental determinism can not explain why the ancient Greek city-states, possessing pretty much the same climate, geography, and species of plants and animals as did the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, nonetheless created what those older, more sophisticated civilizations did not: representative government, citizenship, philosophy, a rational approach to reality, political freedom, the beginnings of science, humanism-in short, most of the cultural components of Western civilization that have made it so dominant and that the rest of the world is desperately attempting to emulate. Tropics.ĭiamond's major weakness, apart from the unproven assumptions of materialism, is its ignorance of ancient culture and the origins of the West. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a thrilling ride through the elemental forces which have shaped our world – and which continue to shape our future.Įpisodes included: 1. They also include contributions from Diamond himself and a wealth of international historians, archeologists and scientists. The three one-hour programs were filmed across four continents on High Definition digital video, and combined ambitious dramatic reconstruction with moving documentary footage and computer animation. Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet? Why didn’t the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead? Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East? Why did farming never emerge in Australia? And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty?Īs he peeled back the layers of history to uncover fundamental, environmental factors shaping the destiny of humanity, Diamond found both his theories and his own endurance tested. Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality. Based on Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity’s journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century. ![]()
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