The first part, “From Eden to Cajamarca,” sketches developments on all the continents before 11,000 BCE, approximate date for the earliest shifts to food production, which Diamond reports in part two, under the themes of “Farmer Power. The complex and integrated argument unfolds in four parts, framed by questions: why have different continents and regions developed so differently as to lead to results like those the parables describe. In Diamond’s final analysis, the illiterate Pizarro triumphs as the cultural heir of bands of hunters who had been first induced to settle by the natural abundance of heavy-seeded grasses and pliable animals that was uniquely to be found in parts of western Asia and gradually came to be exploited in the last 13,000 years with the combination of ingenuity and ferocity that characterize human behavior at every place and time. So what ultimate causes gave steel and germs to Europeans? Was theirs a superior race? No, argues Diamond, merely heir to ancestors who happened into environments that facilitated certain kinds of development over others: the gradual shift from hunting-gathering to food production by domesticating plants and animals, so population grows in sedentary communities that get diseases from their animals, but also develop specialized forms of work, ever more complex socio-political organization, and concomitant forms of communication. Above all they had diseases that had already weakened the Incas and, far more than steel, were to wreak genocide in the new world.

The Spanish had steel armor and weapons, horses, ocean going ships, also written reports and propaganda, with wily, steely minds. What, asks Diamond, made such a powerful ruler so vulnerable? Why, for that matter, weren’t the Incas laying siege to Madrid? Seeking answers, Diamond starts with proximate causes. The second parable tells how in 1532 Pizarro at the head of 168 men captured the Inca emperor Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in spite of his 80,000 troops. Here the environment forced them to give up farm culture and figure out how to survive by gathering and hunting off the land, which they did in a peaceable, egalitarian fashion until 1835, when an exploring party of their New Zealand cousins, the Maori, who in the meantime had intensified farm production and assimilated complex technology, arrived “armed with guns, clubs, and axes” and began killing and eating or enslaving them. After Polynesian farmers colonized fertile New Zealand around 1000 BCE, one fraction, the Moriori, sailed 500 miles further southeast, arriving at the chillier, less hospitable Chatham Islands.

Two parables make the point behind this book. “… an ambitious, highly important book.”-New York Time Book Review (June 15, 1997, p.13), James Shreeve.

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