Guns, Germs & Steel - Tropics

For the past three decades, historian Jared Diamond has been studying the historical reasons that might be able to explain human inequality in our own time.

In the first episode of this series, Diamond discovered that although our species originally came from Africa, geography (and the many other variables that go with it) eventually endowed some previously nomadic societies in the Fertile Crescent with the environmental and natural resources that could help them sustain increasingly larger populations.

The second episode demonstrated how a long and violent history of war molded Europe in the direction of increasingly sophisticated weapon technology, which the Europeans subsequently unleashed on the unsuspecting inhabitants of the new world. It also helped that the Europeans brought with them all kinds of bacterial infections to which the natives had not yet had a chance to evolve modes of resistance.

But what happens when you come full circle to Africa, the very place from which our species originated? How did guns, germs and steel fare then? Part of the story is already familiar to you, but then it gets a lot more complicated and a lot more heart-breaking...

Will we learn from the lessons of history and mend our ways now that there is virtually no more undiscovered land to exploit and abuse, or will continue with the trends that will eventually consign us to our own doom?
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