
Why did Europeans conquer the Americas, not vice versa? Pulitzer Prize-winning "Guns, Germs, and Steel" reveals how geography - not genetics - shaped human destiny. Adapted into a National Geographic documentary and translated into 25 languages, Diamond's revolutionary thesis challenges everything we thought about civilization's rise.
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Why did Europeans conquer the Americas and not vice versa? This question haunted Jared Diamond after a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali asked him: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" The answer lies not in any inherent differences between peoples, but in the uneven distribution of geographic advantages. Imagine if history were a global lottery, with continents drawing tickets for domesticable plants, animals, and favorable terrain. Eurasia won the jackpot, while other continents received far fewer winning tickets. This geographic lottery set societies on dramatically different developmental trajectories long before recorded history began. When Pizarro's 168 men captured the Inca emperor Atahuallpa and slaughtered thousands of his followers in 1532, they weren't demonstrating European superiority-they were showcasing the accumulated advantages of geography that had been compounding for over 10,000 years. The Spanish possessed steel weapons, horses, and guns against stone and wooden weapons; writing against oral tradition; and most devastatingly, immunity to diseases that had already decimated much of the Inca population.