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Human Development

Jared Diamond's above-entitled book seeks to offer a comprehensive explanation for why human development proceeded at different rates in different continents, especially after the end of the Ice Age in about 11,000 B.C. He finds the answer in a series of environmental factors, some geographical and others climatical, ecological and biological, with which parts of Eurasia was in particular blessed more than other continents. Those factors led to certain continental areas moving earlier to farming and herding and the production of food surpluses which led to the creation of other rudiments of civilization and which enabled some societies to achieve dominance over others. His thesis is most convincing in explaining how Eurasia obtained a headstart on other continents, much less persuasive, because of its unidimensional approach, which stresses physical as opposed to cultural and other non-physical factors as determinants of history, and falls short of an adequate explanation of major phenomena covered by his sweeping generalizations.

The author documents that societies at lower stages of economic and political organization have fairly consistently been engulfed --i.e. conquered, destroyed or amalgamated by societies at higher stages of development, hunting and gathering v. farming and herding, egalitarian communal v. hierarchical states, and lower levels of technology, stone age tools and weapons v. their metallurgical counterparts. The disparity in power between such societies has become very apparent since the expansion of Europe overseas into the Americas and elsewhere since the beginning of the sixteenth century, symbolized by the superior weapons, guns and metal swords, metal armor and horses of the Spanish conquistadores, 168 of whom defeated an Inca horde of 80,000 in 1532 in Peru, and the lethal effect of the bacilli they brought with them which killed off 95 percent of the pre-Columbian indians. These were only, however, pro...

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Human Development. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:48, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681691.html