Guns, Germs and Steel (Civilizations Rise and Fall, #1)

by Jared Diamond

Confucian China was technologically more advanced than western Eurasia until about A.D. 1400.

This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results.

Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.

psychologists try to understand the minds of murderers and rapists, why social historians try to understand genocide, and why physicians try to understand the causes of human disease.

island climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation.

Aboriginal Australians who never reached the stage of farming yams and seed plants nonetheless anticipated several elements of farming. They managed the landscape by burning it, to encourage the growth of edible seed plants that sprout after fires. In gathering wild yams, they cut off most of the edible tuber but replaced the stems and tops of the tubers in the ground so that the tubers would regrow. Their digging to extract the tuber loosened and aerated the soil and fostered regrowth. All that they would have had to do to meet the definition of farmers was to carry the stems and remaining attached tubers home and similarly replace them in soil at their camp.