"Guns, Germs, and Steel" - An Introduction

This book is about history.  And it is also fact, not fiction.  I guess that that makes it a bit of a deviation for me, seeing as I rather prefer to read science fiction.

Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my study of "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond.  Now I am only part of the way through, and I need to break this whole thing up into any number of parts, so I will begin with the questions, not the answers, that Mr. Diamond poses.

History has proceeded very differently for all human cultures since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.  Jared Diamond explains that these disparities exist solely because of differences in the environments of these cultures.

"Guns, Germs and Steel" takes us back to the very dawn of human evolution, from human's divergence from apes to the present day.  His focus though is on the past 13 millenniums since the last ice age, the time in which humans began to form civilization.

Diamond brings his excellent observations on the development of food production, the spread of ideas such as writing and agriculture, the evolution of germs and diseases, and the ability of some societies to support inventors or politicians to bear on this question.

We shall see how the issue fares.