Guns, Germs and Steel - Netflix
Based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity's journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Type: Documentary
Languages: English
Status: Ended
Runtime: 60 minutes
Premier: 2005-07-11
Guns, Germs and Steel - Guns, Germs, and Steel - Netflix
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (also titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.
Guns, Germs and Steel - Synopsis - Netflix
The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term “cargo” for inventions and manufactured goods, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (p. 14) Diamond realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: “People of Eurasian origin ... dominate ... the world in wealth and power.” Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, “have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists.” (p. 15) The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technologic and immunologic advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last Ice Age.
Guns, Germs and Steel - References - Netflix
- http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article266422.ece
- https://web.archive.org/web/20021207222137/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s707591.htm
- https://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001894820
- https://mises.org/system/tdf/22_1_5.pdf?file=1&type=document
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13186-columbus-blamed-for-spread-of-syphilis-.html
- http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel.html
- http://www.jstor.org/stable/216157
- https://www.netflixtvshows.com/shows/guns-germs-and-steel/