think or thwim

A 2005 National Geographic documentary. I can’t improve on PBS’ summary:

Based on Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity’s journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century.

Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality.

• Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?
• Why didn’t the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead?
• Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East?
• Why did farming never emerge in Australia?
• And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty?