Jared Diamond was born on September 10, 1937. He wrote several books, such as The Third Chimpanzee and The World Until Yesterday. He was born to two Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Boston. After graduating from Cambridge, he became a professor of physiology at UCLA. However, he has since written some of his best work on topics very different from those he studied. In his fifties, he expanded his career into ornithology and ecology and developed a passion for environmental history, after which he became a professor of geography at UCLA, a position he still holds. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book about the development of modern civilization, focusing primarily on why some regions of the world gave rise to societies that were much stronger than any other regions of the same period. The book begins by explaining humanity's initial migration from Africa to Eurasia. The author uses fossil evidence and cave drawings to trace this migration, which headed first into the Middle East and then into southeastern Europe and central Asia, before expanding to the edges of the Eurasian landmass and into the Americas across the Bering Strait. It is argued that most would reasonably assume that Africa would give rise to the largest human societies, after all, it had a ten million year head start before migration out of the continent even began. The author believes, however, that this is easily attributable to the fact that most of that period of time has been spent by evolution. He explains that fossil evidence from former humans shows that our brain began as a mere fraction of its modern size and evolved over millions of years. In essence, that ten million year head start served more to level the playing field, as it had no real effect on the development of human society. The author then states that the reason why Africa has not yet been at the forefront of our development is the lack of resources. The continent, despite being rich in goods, keeps them hidden in areas that are almost impossible to reach. The deserts of the north have blocked access to the rich Mediterranean for millennia, while in the south the mountains have made it difficult to overcome the barrier. Tropical rainforest and savannah were; thus, the only place modern humans could easily live, an area about the size of Europe. Yet this suggests that such diversity, as seen in Europe, should still exist in Africa, and on this the Author is uncertain but states that perhaps the lack of external influence has prevented this development. In Central and Eastern Asia, agriculture took root. Thanks to the development of a sedentary lifestyle, farmers could now have more children. The author states that hunter-gatherers would have been limited to one child approximately every four years, as the parent would have had to keep them until they were old enough to stay with the group, thus preventing the possibility of a second child, as simply put. , there would be no one to carry them. With a sedentary lifestyle, this time is estimated to be halved, allowing for a population boom and the development of food preservation. With food conservation, farmers would be able to provide for the entire village, meaning that some residents could start doing specialized jobs, such as blacksmith, shoemaker, etc. This trend was also observed in Europe, where a hierarchy of leaders and politicians began to form rapidly after the development of stocksfood in order to tax the residents and provide for the village and eventual kingdom. Europe was migrated much later than Asia. Cave drawings in France show human activity dating back thousands of years, but still not far enough to surpass Asia. Despite this, the ability to obtain easily accessible resources was enormous in Europe. Most of the continent is a fertile plain and there are very few mountain ranges and no deserts. To the south is the Mediterranean, where fishing would allow the growth of populations and the birth of maritime culture. Due to the land connection with Asia and the sea connection with North Africa, it can be argued that cultures were able to explode in the region thanks to trade, which would initially have been based on agricultural goods and livestock, but eventually it would shift to resources like iron and steel. Furthermore, horses were abundant in the region. Modern Ukraine, the place believed to be man's entry point into Europe, was teeming with horses and cows. Because of this, man would have been given access to a devastating war machine, giving them the ability to easily conquer lesser enemies, as seen in Pizarro's conquest of the Inca, where the Spanish were able to capture the Inca king Atahualpa and defeat his army of approximately eighty thousand men, all without a single casualty. Europe, much like Asia, was then able to become an area where agriculture could thrive, with easy access to livestock energy and natural fertilizers. Just as in Asia, specialists were born here, including priests and blacksmiths, who would later fuel the European war machine in the Middle Ages. During this period humanity began the art of weaving fabrics. As sedentary lifestyles began to take hold in Europe and Asia, some hunter-gatherer tribes slowly managed to move north into Siberia, where clothing proved vital. From there these groups could cross to the Americas, and so they did. About forty thousand years ago they managed to cross the Bering Strait. There are two theories; they managed to develop boats to allow them to cross the 50-mile strait, or they managed to cross it during the winter, when the land bridge would have been about thousands of miles wide. Many agree on the latter as the more likely event, as the invention of boats would have meant that areas such as Polynesia and Australia would have been migrated much earlier. Over the next ten thousand years these natives, the Clovis people, experienced a population boom, unchallenged anywhere else in the world. During this time, they managed to spread from the Canadian Arctic, throughout the contiguous United States, and into the Argentine Pampas, as evident by the wide range of arrowheads found in the Americas. It is widely believed that this population explosion occurred at the expense of America's giant mammals. These mammals evolved in the complete absence of human interaction and therefore had no perception of human threat. These giants like the American lion were then killed without much of a fight. Geologists even identified that around the same time the Clovis moved south, these mammals rapidly disappeared. Furthermore, this population growth was also observed in the post-Columbian landing, where it is estimated that approximately two hundred million natives were killed by disease. Essentially, at the time, the Old World and the New World had the same population, yet the New World managed to manage this growth in a much shorter period of time, something that amazes archaeologists who study the Clovis people. However it remains there.