If you want a not-shit version of this book, try "Energy and Civilization", by Vaclav Smil. It looks at some of the same points, but from a more practical energy-based approach.
Tl;dr: if you don't have (draft) animals to domesticate, your civilization is doomed to develop extremely slowly or stagnate.
That's a point also made in Guns Germs and Steel though, that book isn't all crap. Its mostly just the long/wide thing that's bullshit, and ignoring cultural differences.