Guns, Germs and SteelJared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning national best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, summarizes his book by saying the following: "History has taken different courses for peoples different because of differences between people's environments, not because of biological differences between people themselves." Guns, Germs and Steel is historical literature that documents Jared Diamond's view of how the world as we know it developed. But is your thesis that environmental factors contribute so much to the development of society and culture valid? Traditions and Encounters: A Brief Global History is the textbook used for this course and presents several accounts of how society and culture developed that differ from Diamond's claims. However, neither the Diamond nor the Traditions are wrong. Each offers different, but true, accounts of the same historical events. Each text chose to analyze the story differently. Not without flaws, Jared Diamond makes many claims in his work and provides numerous examples and evidence to support his theories. In this essay I will summarize Jared Diamond's accounts of world history and the evolution of culture, comparing and contrasting them with what I have learned using the textbook for this course. Jared Diamond begins Guns with a prologue that sets the stage for the rest of the book. the book. Approached in New Guinea by his friend and local politician Yali, he is asked a question: "Why did you whites develop so much cargo and bring it to New Guinea, but we blacks had little cargo of our own?" Yali's question made Diamond nervous. This question led to his book's thesis that the environment is more persuasive about the development of civilization than people might once have thought. In the first chapter of Guns, Diamond establishes two main arguments that will become crucial to his thesis later in the book. First, it delves into the mass extermination and further extinction of large mammals that occurred in New Guinea and Australia, important for food and domestication, and second it argues that all of the world's early civilized peoples each had ability to develop further. among themselves, but were hindered or helped by their environment. Diamond continues to provide evidence to support his argument that environmental factors play a significant role in the development of society by citing the Maori and Moriori Incident of 1935. In 1935, the Maori killed and enslaved the Moriori peoples.