Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years

Jared Diamond

Vintage, £8.99, pp 480

ISBN 0099302780

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“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?”

Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology who also writes about ecology and evolutionary biology, has written this book in response to the above question. The 400 pages wade through 13 000 years of history to explain why the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro destroyed the Atahuallpa's …