For instance, after some discussion, Diamond confidently asserts that there was no human being in America before about 12000 BC this is the "short chronology" of the settlement of the Americas and Diamond uses it as an argument to support the overkill hypothesis, by which most big animals in America were hunted to death in a short time by human hunters, of which animals had not evolved to be wary. Some points developed in Diamond's book are still open to lively debate while they do not invalidate the whole book's thesis, they are worth mentioning. For instance, there now is cattle in America, and I can eat oranges in winter (I live in Canada.). In that sense, the guns, germs and steel culminate in the great showdown of the Columbian Exchange afterwards, worldwide transportation of people, goods, ideas, and (of course) germs tends to nullify the geographical-induced effects that Diamond expands upon.
That's a knee jerk reflex Diamond's book links in no way geography to notions of human races, and its themes do not really apply to industrialized societies.
The book, though, attracted criticism because it seems to relate indirectly to notions of geographical determinism that were used in German Geopolitik and incorporated in the Nazi ideology. The book is well written and well explained Jared Diamond actually takes real pain to explain that his theories are not implacable and must not be taken as a 100% reliable blueprint for predicting success or failure of any civilization (even if we could actually define what "failure" means for a civilization).
How accurate, well-supported, and well-regarded is this book? There are other factors, but it's at least a well-written book, and superficially plausible. Wheat is a better grain than corn, in terms of nutrition supplied per unit effort. Eurasia extends more east-west, and America more north-south, as does Africa. It's easier for a civilization to expand in a roughly east-west direction than a north-south direction, since climate is more similar east-to-west (an example would be the lack of horses in South Africa until imported by sea, since they couldn't go by land through the tse-tse fly zone). Diamond places great importance on diseases in human development, and likens the results of making contact with a more diseased civilization to being digested. This had advantage for animal-powered farming and transportation, as well as infecting the Eurasians with numerous diseases the Americans had no resistance to. In Eurasia, there were several large domesticated animals, including the cow and horse. It has several explanations for the development of Eurasian civilization rather than American civilization. Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book that purports to explain, in a very broad way, the development of civilization.
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