Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and has received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Phi Beta Kappa Award, the Burr Award of the National Geographic Society, and the National Medal of Science. He has published over 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines.
*Throughout this book, dates for about the last 15,000 years will be quoted as so-called calibrated radiocarbon dates, rather than as conventional, uncalibrated radiocarbon dates. The difference between the two types of dates will be explained in Chapter 5. Calibrated dates are the ones believed to correspond more closely to actual calendar dates. Readers accustomed to uncalibrated dates will need to bear this distinction in mind whenever they find me quoting apparently erroneous dates that are older than the ones with which they are familiar. For example, the date of the Clovis archaeological horizon in North America is usually quoted as around 9000 B.C. (11,000 years ago), but I quote it instead as around 11,000 B.C. (13,000 years ago), because the date usually quoted is uncalibrated.