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of wild plants and animals available for domestication go a long way Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel toward explaining why only a few areas became independent centers of food production, and why it arose earlier in some of those areas than in others. From those few centers of origin, food production spread much more rapidly to some areas than to others. A major factor contributing to those differing rates of spread turns out to have been the orientation of the continents' axes: predominantly west-east for Eurasia, predominantly north-south for the Americas and Africa (Chapter 10).

Thus, Chapter 3 sketched the immediate factors behind Europe's conquest of Native Americans, and Chapter 4 the development of those factors from the ultimate cause of food production. In Part 3 ("From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel," Chapters 11-14), the connections from ultimate to proximate Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel causes are traced in detail, beginning with the evolution of germs characteristic of dense human populations (Chapter 11). Far more Native Americans and other nonEurasian peoples were killed by Eurasian germs than by Eurasian guns or steel weapons. Conversely, few or no distinctive lethal germs awaited would-be European conquerors in the New World. Why was the germ exchange so unequal? Here, the results of recent molecular biological studies are illuminating in linking germs to the rise of food production, in Eurasia much more than in the Americas.

Another chain of causation led from food production to writing, possibly the most important single invention of the last few thousand years (Chapter 12). Writing has evolved de novo only a few times in human Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel history, in areas that had been the earliest sites of the rise of food production in their respective regions. All other societies that have become literate did so by the diffusion of writing systems or of the idea of writing from one of those few primary centers.

Hence, for the student of world history, the phenomenon of writing is particularly useful for exploring another important constellation of causes: geography's effect on the ease with which ideas and inventions spread.

What holds for writing also holds for technology (Chapter 13). A crucial question is whether technological innovation is so dependent on rare inventor-geniuses, and on many idiosyncratic cultural factors, as to defy an understanding of world patterns. In fact, we shall see that, paradoxically, this large number of cultural factors makes it Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel easier, not harder, to understand world patterns of technology. By enabling farmers to generate food surpluses, food production permitted farming societies to support fulltime craft specialists who did not grow their own food and who developed technologies.

Besides sustaining scribes and inventors, food production also enabled farmers to support politicians (Chapter 14). Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band's own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands.

With the rise of dense, sedentary, foodproducing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings, and bureaucrats. Such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains but also to maintaining standing armies, sending Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars of conquest.

Part 4 ("Around the World in Five
    Chapters," Chapters 15-19) applies
    the
    lessons of Parts 2 and 3 to each of the continents and some important islands.
    Chapter 15 examines the history of Australia itself, and of the large island of New Guinea, formerly joined to Australia in a single continent. The case of Australia, home to the recent human societies with the simplest technologies, and the sole continent where food production did not develop indigenously, poses a critical test of theories about