There is an omnipresent theme throughout the story. In the perpetual cycle of life, Europeans always manage to overshadow other civilizations. Why did Europeans dominate other races? In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond desperately tries to answer Yali's question: "Why did you whites develop so much cargo and bring it to New Guinea, but we blacks had little cargo of our own" (Diamond, p.14) ? In the epilogue, Diamond summarizes his answer to Yali's question by essentially attributing the environment for the success of the Europeans and discrediting any kind of racial superiority (Diamond, p.405). Although other factors contributed to the rise of European civilization, the environment was the primary factor. Some specific factors that fall within the environment that influenced European civilization are geography, food production, diffusion, and population. Europe's geography contributed to its dominance over other civilizations. The Chinese seemed to have it all. They had increased food production, the largest human population in the world, developed writing and most importantly were a unified country (Diamond, p.411). The European coast was very rugged with five large peninsulas that developed independent languages, ethnic groups and governments. China has a much smoother coastline with less sparse territory than Europe (Diamond, p.414). The “geographical Balkanization of Europe” and interstate discord developed hundreds of competing and ambitious states (Diamond, p.416). States were kept on their toes to try to achieve what another state had previously achieved because they knew that “if one state did not pursue some particular innovation, another would, forcing neighboring states to do the same or else be conquered or left behind economically” ( Diamante, p.416). The unification of China based on geography led to their demise. Their government isolated them from the outside world and rejected all imports, including technologies, leaving them dramatically underdeveloped in a world of technologies (Diamond, p.416). Food production also influenced Europe's dominance over other civilizations. As stated in Chapter 18, “the previous absence of food production in the [Americas] was due entirely to local scarcity of domesticatable wild animals and plants, and to geographic and ecological barriers that prevented crops and the few species of domesticated animals elsewhere of the Americas coming (Diamond, p.356). Animal domestication varied between continents due to differences in continental areas and late Pleistocene extinctions.