Editing Guns, Germs, and Steel (section)

=== Geography ===
Diamond argues that geography shaped [[Migration (human)|human migration]], not simply by making travel difficult (particularly by latitude), but by how climates affect where domesticable animals can easily travel and where crops can ideally grow easily due to the sun. The dominant [[Out of Africa theory]] holds that modern humans developed east of the [[Great Rift Valley]] of the African continent at one time or another. The [[Sahara]] kept people from migrating north to the [[Fertile Crescent]], until later when the [[Nile River]] valley became accommodating. Diamond continues to describe the story of human development up to the modern era, through the rapid development of technology, and its dire consequences on hunter-gathering cultures around the world.

Diamond touches on why the dominant powers of the last 500 years have been West European rather than East Asian, especially Chinese. The Asian areas in which big civilizations arose had geographical features conducive to the formation of large, stable, isolated empires which faced no external pressure to change which led to stagnation. Europe's many [[natural barrier]]s allowed the development of competing nation states. Such competition forced the European nations to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation.