I found out that tomorrow on the History Channel, they're showing the documentary entitled, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" at 9:00pm - 12:00pm on channel 45. I highly recommend this documentary to anyone who enjoyed games like Civilization, or they have an interest in history. Out of all the documentaries I've watched this year, Guns, Germs, and Steel is definitely one of my favourite ones for 2005.
Here's an abstract of the documentary from PBS:
"Based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity's journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality.
- Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?
- Why didn't the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead?
- Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East?
- Why did farming never emerge in Australia?
- And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty?"
The theory that the researcher presents gives a very fascinating hypothesis as to why certain things are like this in the world. Why is Africa poor? How did the European powers take over so much of the world? It nicely ties together events from the beginning of mankind, to events that affect us now.
The documentary combines entertainment and education. It has lots of re-creations of events in history, and the researcher visits a lot of exotic places.
If you can't watch the show,
PBS has a summary of the three hour series.