Diamond is a professor of physiology, which may explain why he's not afraid to try this, and the basic question of Guns, Germs, and Steel is, "Why did a bunch of white guys from Europe end up ruling the world?"

Diamond's answer is simple, interesting, and compelling: it happened because they had a head start on everyone else. His basic argument goes like this:

• In order to build complex civilizations, you have to give up the hunter/gatherer lifestyle and take up crop farming. The main reason for this is that only crop farming provides enough excess food to support a nonworking army, bureaucracy, scientific class, etc., and it confers several other advantages as well, including the ability to simply outgrow your competitors.
  
  
• Cultures with lots of epidemic diseases have a big advantage when they meet up with other cultures: since the other guys aren't immune to the diseases, they are usually decimated pretty quickly. It turns out that most epidemic diseases come from large domesticated mammals, so cultures with lots of domestic animals are usually better able to beat up on competing cultures.
  
  
• The fertile crescent area of the Middle East had better crops and more domestic animals, and had them earlier, than any other place in the world, and that's why Eurasians went on to rule the world.

The most interesting part of the book consists of a few chapters in the middle where Diamond explains why certain civilizations took up farming when they did and why others didn't. The basic points are these:

• Wild cereals like wheat and barley didn't start appearing until around 20,000 BC, right after the end of the last ice age. These wild crops are the necessary precursors to domesticated crops.
  
  
• In addition, technologies such as baskets, sickles, mortar and pestle, etc. are required to make good use of crop farming. These weren't available until about 12,000 BC or so.
  
  
• Farming isn't necessarily more efficient than hunting. In fact, the first farmers were usually less efficient than hunter/gatherers, and most civilizations didn't give up the hunter/gatherer lifestyle until they were forced to because they had hunted the local population of large mammals to extinction. In addition, most of the crops we take for granted today have been bred for size for millennia; they didn't look nearly so promising as a food source 10,000 years ago.
  
  
• Farming isn't as easy as it sounds. For example, it turns out that wheat plants normally explode when they ripen and spill on the ground, a fine strategy for a wild crop trying to reproduce but less useful for human farmers. You have to find the rare mutations that don't do this in order to begin farming, and it took a while for this to happen.
  
  
• A balanced diet requires more than one crop. In order to build a civilization dependent on crop farming, you have to tame at least two and probably more like three or four separate crops.

All of these things conspired to prevent crop farming from taking hold until around 8000 BC or so, and even then it was only likely to happen in an area that already had lots of wild crops to choose from and in which most of the large wild mammals were extinct, thus forcing a change in lifestyle.

It turns out that only the fertile crescent area of the Middle East met these conditions 10,000 years ago. It's true that at first glance it seems as if all the continents would be equally good as sources of domesticable crops and large mammals, but Diamond makes a very convincing argument--the core argument of the whole book--that 10,000 years ago only the Eurasian continent had all the right ingredients to make crop farming sustainable. The Americas were settled only about 10,000 years ago to begin with, and had only a few domesticable crops and only one domesticable large mammal (the llama). Australia was hopeless (no crops and no animals) and Africa was only a little better off: it had a few decent crops but no domestic animals. The Eurasians also had the advantage that their continent stretches mostly east/west, which means that crops domesticated in one region can be transplanted to another. Continents like Africa and the Americas, which are aligned north/south, can't exchange newly discovered crops because crops that grow well in, say, Missouri, won't grow at all in Mazatlan.

The bottom line is that by around 1000 AD or so, the Eurasians had had 9,000 years to use their food surpluses to build up great civilizations and the same amount of time to build up immunity to their own epidemic diseases. The rest of the world had only begun domesticating crops a couple of thousand years earlier, and were so far behind that it was really no contest when they met the Eurasians. The result was that when the European Age of Discovery began it was like a teenager taking on a baby, and within a few hundred years the Europeans had thoroughly wiped out or absorbed every other culture on the planet thanks to superior technology and a wide array of epidemic diseases. (The population of North American Indians in 1520, for example, was about 20 million. A mere five years later it was reduced to 1 million without a shot being fired.)

This is interesting as far as it goes, but it stops short of answering another interesting question: even granted that Eurasia had a big advantage over other continents, why did Western Europeans win out over their fellow Eurasian civilizations in the Middle East, India, and China? After all, if a Martian had visited the Earth in AD 1000, he would almost certainly have picked Western Europe as the longest of longshots to prevail over the others.

I spent half the book wondering when Diamond was going to get to this, but he never really did. In the very last chapter he simply suggests that this is a fit subject for further study and then offers a few tentative hypotheses. The fertile crescent, for example, lost its early lead because it became arid and dry and unable to support large populations (it really was fertile 10,000 years ago). China is more difficult to explain, but Diamond suggests that Europe was ultimately better able to compete because it was composed of lots of warring states rather than a single monolithic state. Since there were more competing ideas in Europe, a mistake in one area did not necessarily hold back the entire region.

In the end, however, Diamond seems to hold the commonsense idea that to some degree the answer is simply chance. China could have won out, but didn't (at least, not yet), probably due to some small quirk of fate that we will never know about. On the scale that he writes about in Guns, Germs, and Steel, a few hundred years is just a drop in the ocean, and it was probably no more than luck that Europe enjoyed a major flowering at just the time in history when worldwide dominion first became technologically possible.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is well written and absorbing, and its only real flaw is the final hundred pages, which basically recapitulates everything he has already said. My advice: if you like this kind of broad historical theorizing, buy the book but skip the section titled "Around the World in Five Chapters." Overall, Guns, Germs, and Steel is thought-provoking stuff that's well worth reading.

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