All the interesting stuff like technology, writing, and empires requires a productive economy that is producing enough food to feed technological experts, bureaucrats, kings, and scribes. It's overwhelmingly due to the difference in the wild plant and animal species suitable to domestication that the continents made available. I say the answer is location, location, location. Why over the past 10,000 years has the development of different societies proceeded at such different rates?
National Geographic News spoke with Diamond, a professor of geography, environmental health science, and physiology at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Now the book has been turned into a three-part National Geographic Special, which airs on PBS on three consecutive Mondays, July 11, July 18, and July 25, at 10 p.m.
The physical locations where different cultures have taken root, he claims, have directly affected the ability of those societies to develop key institutions, like agriculture and animal domestication, or to acquire important traits, like immunity to disease. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, scientist Jared Diamond argues that the answer is geography. Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Why has one culture-namely that of Western Europe-dominated the development of the modern world?
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