Guns, Germs, and Steel

Episode 1: Out of Eden
Link
Episode 2: Conquest
Episode 3: Tropics

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, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” 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?

More info from PBS

See also:
Jared Diamond: How Societies Fail and Sometimes Succeed [Presentation]