[chx]

Guns, Germs and Steel is... not a particularly scientific work. Read some of the refutations linked https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views... here. For example:

> in a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.

> Mass resettlement into compact and unsanitary reduccion towns, disruption and destruction of traditional foodways, abusive forced labor in mines and hacienda plantations, and other factors all enabled diseases to assault an already weakened populace. [Germ] Resistance had little to do with.

> On a similar note, the most deadly diseases did not originate from domesticated mammals

This last one is repeated in another post:

> when I dived into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) on his hand-picked All Star team could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. Diamond ignored the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.

[mustacheemperor]

Thank you. Having temporarily fallen for Diamond's all too "logical" fantasy reasoning in the past, I always recoil a bit seeing it cited in intellectual discussion.