AllMovie

Part 1 of Prof. Jared Diamond's three-part study of why some societies are more advanced than others goes back to the end of the last ice age, when societies' fates turned on nutritious plants and animals that could be domesticated. Some places (most notably the Middle East ) had them, and others (such as Papua New Guinea) didn't. "Ultimately," says Diamond, "it came down to geographic luck." Based on Diamond's 1997 book "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies."