“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?”. Yali's question serves the basis for a worldwide survey of the many factors influencing history and that determined the fates of world's power balance.

Through this amazingly thorough journey throughout history, we learn that most of what happened happened by chance, by subjecting different peoples in different continents to different conditions, conditions which were ultimately responsible for a particular set of peoples having reached the stage of dominating guns, steel and having greater immunity to certain (and very deadly germs).

This is probably one of the best books to make you rethink history under a much more naturalistic perspective, taking the thunder out of those that naively think that the real reasons for the present day status quo lie somewhere on human personality or will [to power?].

From geography to weather to food production to plant and animal domestication to greater demography to wider spread of technology and diseases, all that contributing to make some peoples more apt to conquer others, resulting in the human world we witness today.

If you really want to know how we got from point A (being hunter-gatherers) to point B (present day world structure), this is one of the best books that will present an easy to follow, sufficiently rich in examples, and concise enough to save you from being overburdened with information (for any conversation trying to tie up all of human history necessarily covers too many topics, peoples and their histories, and thus covering too much raw information, which can be way too difficult to absorb and digest). If, by chance, you happen to be one of those who vow for the supremacy of any particular group of people, you probably should avoid this volume — for claiming superiority when you happen to be at the end of a long string of random events does not make you particularly special. In any case, whatever your starting position, you will be much more illuminated on world's history by the time you end up reading this book.