Agriculture arose in those areas for a few reasons. Using carbon-dating technology, archaeologists have determined that the first sites of agriculture were Mesopotamia (in the Middle East), followed by Mesoamerica and China. In Part Two, Diamond talks about the dawn of agriculture and explains why it arose in certain parts of the world, but not others. Why did the Europeans colonize the New World, and not the other way around? For example, when Francisco Pizarro led a Spanish expedition to the Inca Empire in the early 16th century, he was able to defeat the Incan Emperor, Atahuallpa, easily. By the 15th century A.D., enormous differences had arisen between civilizations. About 11,000 years ago, certain human beings developed agriculture-a major milestone in human history. Beginning about half a million years ago, the first human beings emerged in Africa, and eventually migrated around the rest of the world in search of game and other sources of food. In Part One of the book, Diamond sketches out the course of recent human history, emphasizing the differences between civilizations. Yali wanted to know, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo … but we black people had little cargo of our own?”-in other words, why have European societies been so militarily, economically, and technologically successful in the last 500 years, while other societies have not approached such a level of achievement? The book is framed as a response to a question that Diamond heard from Yali, a charismatic New Guinean politician.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the differences between societies and societal development arise primarily from geographical causes.
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