Fiction

The thing I have most retained from it is that humans have domesticated every single animal that it is possible to domesticate. Humans in Africa didn't domesticate the zebra because they were too stupid to do so, but because the zebra simply isn't domesticatible.

The other thing I got from the book is that humans are incredibly smart. We really are. We exploited whatever environment we wound up in to its fullest. No one group is necessarily smarter than any other. Although Diamond does say in another book that he thinks that Europeans won out only because they survived disease vectors, and he thinks certain other groups may be actually smarter.

I have long had an issue with those who vilify Christopher Columbus for bringing European diseases to the New World. While Columbus certainly had his flaws, had it not been for him, it would have been someone else. The separate evolution of Europeans and other peoples guaranteed that once they re-connected, there was going to be hell to pay. Europeans spent centuries in circumstances that bred disease and then immunity to those diseases. Humans in the other hemisphere didn't live in those kinds of conditions, so they didn't have those diseases nor those immunities. It was a set-up for the disaster that we know followed.

Had the European contact with the Western Hemisphere been delayed until a modern understanding of disease, there still would have been the inadvertent disease genocide that did take place. The separation of the populations meant that a genuine difference of disease contact and immunity was inevitable.

In a way the current global culture that allows disease vectors to spread across the planet in weeks is a good thing. Exposure to a novel disease will mean that those with an immunity will live. Those without will die. It sounds harsh, but that's how it goes.