Guns, germs, and steel the fates of human societies

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: Yali's Question: The regionally differing courses of history -- Ch. 1. Up to the Starting Line: What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.? -- Ch. 2. A Natural Experiment of History: How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands -- Ch. 3. Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain -- Ch. 4. Farmer Power: The roots of guns, germs, and steel -- Ch. 5. History's Haves and Have-Nots: Geographic differences in the onset of food production -- Ch. 6. To Farm or Not to Farm: Causes of the spread of food production -- Ch. 7. How to Make an Almond: The unconscious development of ancient crops -- Ch. 8. Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants? -- Ch. 9. Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated? --

Ch. 10. Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes: Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents? -- Ch. 11. Lethal Gift of Livestock: The evolution of germs -- Ch. 12. Blueprints and Borrowed Letters: The evolution of writing -- Ch. 13. Necessity's Mother: The evolution of technology -- Ch. 14. From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy: The evolution of government and religion -- Ch. 15. Yali's People: The histories of Australia and New Guinea -- Ch. 16. How China became Chinese: The history of East Asia -- Ch. 17. Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of the Austronesian expansion -- Ch. 18. Hemispheres Colliding: The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared -- Ch. 19. How Africa became Black: The history of Africa -- Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science.

Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns.

Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be. It is a work rich in dramatic revelations that will fascinate readers even as it challenges conventional wisdom.