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Collapse jared5/8/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() To broadly simplify, Diamond's book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. ![]() For most readers (and there were millions), Guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question - "Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?" - and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase "east-west axis of orientation" the most talked-about kind of orientation there was - freshman, sexual, or otherwise. Jared Diamond’s Collapse traces the fates of societies to their treatment of the environment ![]()
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