Beyond the Broad-Brush

The history of humans on Earth is mind-boggling. For more than ninety percent of human’s brief history, humans have wandered in small bands, scraping out an existence in a world fraught with danger from animals, the weather, and disease. Only recently did humans decide to settle in villages and grow their food rather than hunt and gather it. And then humans learned to live in larger societies, eventually forming governments, class structures, economies, and empires, and some of these societies came to dominate others, and some got richer than others. When probing into it, one will discover deeper and deeper questions about why Europeans are now in America, why China didn't conquer Europe with its more advanced culture, and so on. Jared Diamond took on the task of having a reasonable discussion about the intriguing question of why Europeans spread all over the world during the past few centuries to a greater degree than ever before in human history? In Diamond’s book Gun...