I've been meaning to read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for some time and have finally got around to doing so. The book reads as fast as Collapse or faster but it doesn't hold my interest like Collapse did.

Diamond's approach and explanations are very easy to understand and follow. He goes point by point and follows a basic time-line.

I really didn't know and still don't know too much about the evolution of Humans and where we originated and migrated to first but Diamond does a great job of briefly explaining our evolutionary history. It's amazing that we reached Peru around 11,000 years ago and that that culture built pyramids or that the Aztecs produced a written language and an accurate calendar even though their Euroasian counterparts had such a huge head start. We as Humans had been in the fertile crescent for about 1,000,000 years. That's a little misleading considering that Homo Sapiens who were developing modern behavior didn't come to be until around 50,000 years ago but still... Euroasians had a huge head start on most of the rest of the globe.

The amount of large animals available for domestication and industrial use was a big topic in Collapse. It is in this book, too. Also, the amount of crops and ease of information sharing among a larger group of people helped to create and support specialized careers such as positions in government, inventors, scholars, clergymen...etc is discussed.

The germ part is what really gets me. I didn't know how powerful diseases were or how pivotal their role in shaping our world history was. Killing over 90% of some populations of Native Americans, diseases decimated entire tribes. Euroasian diseases reached far into the interior of the Americas before Europeans ever did - leaving it looking empty. I believe the theory is that the North American continent had something along the lines of 20 million natives before the diseases hit and then a mere 1-2 million after.

This has been one of the great books I've read in my life.