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that the question with which I had wrestled in that Chapter 14 was in essence the question Yali had asked me in 1972, merely transferred to a different part of the world. And so at last, with the help of many friends, I shall attempt to satisfy Yali's curiosity – and my own.

THIS BOOK'S CHAPTERS are divided into four parts. Part 1, entitled "From Eden to Cajamarca," consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1 provides a whirlwind tour
    of
    human evolution and history, extending from our divergence from apes, around 7 million years ago, until the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. We shall trace the spread of ancestral humans, from our origins in Africa to the other continents, in order to understand the state of the world Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel just before the events often lumped into the term "rise of civilization" began. It turns out that human development on some continents got a head start in time over developments on others.
    Chapter 2 prepares us for exploring effects of continental environments on history over the past 13,000 years, by briefly examining effects of island environments on history over smaller time scales and areas. When ancestral Polynesians spread into the Pacific around 3,200 years ago, they encountered islands differing greatly in their environments. Within a few millennia that single ancestral Polynesian society had spawned on those diverse islands a range of diverse daughter societies, from huntergatherer tribes to proto-empires. That radiation can serve as a model for the Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel longer, larger-scale, and less understood radiation of societies on different continents since the end of the last Ice Age, to become variously hunter-gatherer tribes and empires.

The third chapter introduces us to collisions between peoples from different continents, by retelling through contemporary eyewitness accounts the most dramatic such encounter in history: the capture of the last independent Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, in the presence of his whole army, by Francisco Pizarro and his tiny band of conquistadores, at the Peruvian city of Cajamarca. We can identify the chain of proximate factors that enabled Pizarro to capture Atahuallpa, and that operated in European conquests of other Native American societies as well.

Those factors included Spanish germs, horses, literacy, political organization, and Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel technology (especially ships and weapons).

That analysis of proximate causes is the easy part of this book; the hard part is to identify the ultimate causes leading to them and to the actual outcome, rather than to the opposite possible outcome of Atahuallpa's coming to Madrid and capturing King Charles I of Spain.

Part 2, entitled "The Rise and Spread of Food Production" and consisting of Chapters 4-10, is devoted to what I believe to be the most important constellation of ultimate causes. Chapter 4 sketches how food production – that is, the growing of food by agriculture or herding, instead of the hunting and gathering of wild foods – ultimately led to the immediate factors permitting Pizarro's triumph. But the rise of food production varied around the globe. As we shall see in Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel
    Chapter 5, peoples in some parts of
    the
    world developed food production by themselves; some other peoples acquired it in prehistoric times from those independent centers; and still others neither developed nor acquired food production prehistorically but remained hunter-gatherers until modern times. Chapter 6 explores the numerous factors driving the shift from the huntergatherer lifestyle toward food production, in some areas but not in others.
    Chapters 7, 8, and 9 then show how crops and livestock came in prehistoric times to be domesticated from ancestral wild plants and animals, by incipient farmers and herders who could have had no vision of the outcome. Geographic differences in the local suites