In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond offers a theoretical framework to understand why Eurasian cultures developed agriculture, metal tools, writing and state government compared to other continents that remained hunter-gatherers without these features of complex societies. His answer primarily revolves around food. Diamond suggests that those populations that were dense and sedentary were able to produce food surpluses that were a prerequisite to these features of complex societies as well as the ability to ward off epidemic and infectious disease. This analysis will discuss DiamondÆs framework that links geography and history to explain why some nations were able to achieve complexity while others were not.
In postulating a framework for why Eurasian cultures became more complex and developed than other primitive cultures, Diamond maintains geography played an enormous role in favoring some continents over others. Aboriginal Australian cultures and those in Africa had to contend with deserts that did not sustain life or food production but also with a north-south axis that limited development. Eurasia, in contrast, has a gigantic and permeable east-west axis across which weather remained constant and allowed for the rapid spread of food technology and animal domestication. According to Diamond (184) ôlatitude-features of climateö helped spread food technology, animal domestication, and disease resistance in Eurasia in ways that were not permitted in the north-south geography of Australia or Africa. As the rise in population and food production spread across Eurasia, so did technology, writing, state politics, domestication and other features of complex societies that were more easily diffused than in north-south continents.
DiamondÆs theory helps explain why Spain would conquer the Incas as opposed to the other way around. The Spanish had better technologies and domestication of an...