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According to Guns, Germs, and Steel how did big mammals becoming extinct on the continent of Australia impact the history of its people?

Diamond sums up the effects of the large-scale extinctions of Australian megafauna in this way:



Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might otherwise have been candidates for domestication, and let native Australians and New Guineans with not a single native domestic animal (44). 



Diamond assigns considerable importance to the presence of domesticable animals, which he sees as indispensable to the development of agriculture. Settled agriculture is the single factor that contributes to the ability to produce the "guns, germs, and steel" that gave some peoples the power to conquer, colonize, and even destroy other peoples. Because aboriginal Australians had no domesticable animals, they did not develop these things, and their surroundings were unable to sustain the kind of population growth that gives rise to civilization. Something similar happened in the Americas, which also lacked domesticable animals, a fact that placed native Americans at a disadvantage when they made contact with Europeans for the first time. This is crucial to Diamond's thesis that environmental factors--essentially accidents of geography--led to pivotal differences in the development of human societies. 

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