A logical question may arise for a person of our time looking deep into the centuries: why did civilizations develop exactly this way, and not otherwise? Why did European sailors discover and colonize the Western Hemisphere, and not the other way around? Why did the aborigines of Australia fall so far behind technologically even compared with their closest neighbors? Why did developed China, which had no serious competitors, suddenly close in on itself? The ornithologist Jared Diamond, who has traveled all over the globe, proposes the theory that the cause of everything is geography.
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Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel