Guns Germs and Steel

I like non-fiction books, I guess it's because I have a thirst for knowledge, but also a dire need to join a pub quiz team - so the more general knowledge I've got, the better player I'll be... At least that or finally win at the family "Trivial Pursuit" game. So with that I always pick up random books at the book shop, I might have heard of them, maybe seen them reviewed, and sometimes it's just a matter of picking up something that just "looks interesting"...

And as such with this book. Anything that proposes to be a "short history for the last 13,000 years" interests me!

Bascially explaining why society has evolved the way it has due to (as the title says) guns, germs and steel, it goes back to the way the world has been colonised, and the effect of colonising societies on others (such as the spanish effect on the native americans).

The base theory offered is as follows (from wikipedia) "In our earliest societies humans lived as hunter-gatherers. The first step towards civilization is the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture with the domestication and farming of wild crops and animals. Agricultural production leads to food surpluses and this in turn supports sedentary societies, rapid population growth, and specialization of labor. Large societies tend to develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which leads in turn to the organization of empires. Although agriculture arose in several parts of the world, Eurasia gained an early advantage due to the availability of suitable plant and animal species for domestication. In particular, Mesopotamia had by far the best collection of plants and animals suitable for domestication, and Europe adopted Mesopotamia's animals, plants, and agricultural techniques."

blahblah...

Going through the different options for the different societies in regards to the domestication of animals, crops, and why eurasia seemed to dominate all cultures, I still felt that this book missed out on several key points.

I guess the whole book felt like it was trying to justify the inevitability of Europe taking over all cultures. I was disappointed at the lack of focus on the great things that nomadic cultures produce (such as Aboriginal culture) and really got the feel from the book that cultures were "less evolved" which of course had a negative connotation.

Overall an interesting read, however I would like to think that society evolved with more of a focus on culture and initiative rather than putting it all down to the ease of animal domestication and the ability to grow crops...