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 works on subjects very different from those he studied. In his 50s, 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 Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayGuns, Germs, and Steel is a book about the development of modern civilization, focusing primarily on why certain regions of the world have given rise to much stronger societies. than any other region of the same period. The book begins by explaining humanity's initial migration out of Africa and into Eurasia. The author uses fossil evidence and cave drawings to trace this migration, which first headed to the Middle East, then to southeastern Europe and Central Asia, before extend to the edges of the Eurasian landmass and to the Americas via the Bering Strait. It is argued that most should reasonably assume that Africa would have given rise to the greatest human societies, after all, it was ten million years ahead before migration out of the continent even began. The author believes, however, that this can easily be attributed to the fact that most of this period was devoted to evolution. He explains that fossil evidence from ancient humans shows that our brains were originally only a fraction of their modern size and evolved over millions of years. Essentially, this ten million year head start was more about leveling the playing field, as it had no real effect on the development of human society. The author then states that the reason Africa was not at the forefront of our development is lack of resources. The continent, although rich in goods, hides them in areas that are almost impossible to reach. The northern deserts blocked access to the rich Mediterranean for millennia, while in the south, the mountains made crossing the barrier difficult. The tropical rainforest and savannah were: therefore the only place modern humans could easily live, an area roughly the size of Europe. Yet this suggests that such diversity, as seen in Europe, should still exist in Africa, and on this point the author is uncertain but states that perhaps the lack of outside 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 claims that hunter-gatherers would have been limited to one child every four years or so, as the parent would have to keep them until they were old enough to stay with the group, thus preventing the possibility of a second child, as the author simply puts it. , there would be no one to carry them. With a sedentary lifestyle, it is estimated that this time is reduced by half, allowing a population boom and the development of food storage. By storing food, farmers would be able to support the entire village, meaning some residents could start taking up tradesspecialists, such as a blacksmith, a shoemaker, etc. This trend is also seen in Europe, where a hierarchy of rulers and politicians began to form quickly after the development of food storage in order to tax residents and provide for the needs of the village, and then the kingdom. Europe migrated much later than Asia. Cave drawings in France show human activity going back thousands of years, but not yet far enough to extend beyond Asia. Despite this, the ability to access easily accessible resources was enormous in Europe. Most of the continent is fertile plains and there are very few mountain ranges and no deserts. To the south is the Mediterranean, where fishing would help populations grow and give rise to a maritime culture. Due to a land connection with Asia and a sea connection with North Africa, it can be argued that cultures were able to boom in the region through trade, which would have initially been based on produce agriculture and livestock, but which would have eventually evolved into resources such as iron and steel. In addition, horses were numerous in the region. Today's Ukraine, considered the entry point for man into Europe, was teeming with horses and cows. For this reason, man would have had access to a devastating war machine, giving him the ability to easily conquer lesser enemies, as seen in Pizarro's conquest of the Incas, where the Spanish were able to capture the Inca king Atahualpa and put routed his army of some eighty thousand men, all without a single victim. Europe, like Asia, was therefore able to become an area where agriculture could prosper, with easy access to animal energy and natural fertilizers. Just as in Asia, this gave rise to specialists, priests and blacksmiths, who would later fuel the European war machine in the Middle Ages. It was at this time that humanity was able to learn the art of weaving fabric. As sedentary lifestyles began to develop in Europe and Asia, some hunter-gatherer tribes were able to slowly move north into Siberia, where clothing proved essential. From there, these groups could cross the border into the Americas, and that is what they did. About forty thousand years ago, they successfully crossed the Bering Strait. Two theories exist; they managed to develop boats to allow them to cross the 50 mile strait, or they managed to cross it on foot during the winter when the land bridge would have been several thousand miles wide. Many agree on the latter event as being the more likely, as the invention of boats would have meant that areas like Polynesia and Australia would have migrated much earlier. Over the next ten thousand years, these natives, the Clovis people, managed a population boom, uncontested anywhere else in the world. During this time, they managed to spread from the Canadian Arctic, across the entire contiguous United States, and into the Pampas of Argentina, as evidenced by the wide array 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 had evolved without any human interaction and therefore had no perception of human threat. These gargantuans like the American Lion were therefore killed without much of a fight. Geologists have even pointed out that around the same time the Clovis moved south, these mammals would rapidly disappear. Furthermore, this population growth was also observed during the post-Columbian landings, where approximately two.