A careful re-reading of the chapter you have identified
would help you to answer this question and also give you the background knowledge that
the necessarily brief response I can supply you with would lack. However, just to give
you a summary of the main points of this chapter, which will hopefully encourage you to
revisit it and read it in its entirety.
The chapter
identifies four key factors that were essential in the different rates of development
between Native American societies and Eurasian societies, which of course gave Eurasian
societies the "edge" when the two civilisations finally collided. Diamond offers the
following helpful summary:
Thus, we have identified three sets of ultimate
factors that tipped the advantage to European invaders of the Americas: Eurasia's long
head start on human settlement; its more effective food production, resulting from
greater availability of domesticable wild plants and especially of animals; and its less
formidable geographic and ecological barriers to intracontinental diffusion. A fourth,
more speculative ultimate factor is suggested by some puzzling non-inventions in the
Americas: the non-inventions of writing an wheels in complex Andean societies... and
wheels' confinement to toys and their eventual disappearance in
Mesoamerica.
All of these
factors meant that crucially the balance of power was tipped towards Eurasian societies.
To gain a full understanding of each of these four ultimate factors, you will need to
refer once again to the book to gain an understanding of how this factors led to
dominance.
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