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Hello, the 19th century historian Thomas Carlisle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished.

In the 20th century that understanding of history is being increasingly called into question.

Professor Jared Diamond is an ecologist and physiologist from the University of California Los Angeles Medical School.

He's been acclaimed as being one of the very few scientists who may radically change the way we think about history.

As the century closes down then, his science, the future for the past.

Professor Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which won last year's prestigious Rowan Poulong Prize for Science and the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, is a re-evaluation of the last 13,000 years of the history of mankind, particularly in the light of geography and ecology.

He claims that history is not only influenced by great men, great deeds, or by genes, but also, and mostly by geography and ecology.

But what are the implications of looking at world history as being determined by geography and ecology?

Is history being turned into a scientific discipline in the 20th century?

Joining Jared Diamond is Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, and a historian of international reputus specializes in modern German history.

In his latest book, In Defensive History, he states, history is important because it illuminates the human condition by recreating the thoughts, actions, and the lives of other human beings separated from us by time.

So there appears to be some differences here, but let's start with you, Jared Diamond.

You begin by saying that the global history of the past 13,000 years followed the different causes for different people because of differences among people's environment.

You stress environment, and you're very keen to say it's not because of biological differences among people themselves.

Why do you want to say that so strongly up top?

It's not that I want to say it, it's that the facts say it, but let's be clear also about what I was trying to explain in the book.

Most history is concerned with relatively small spatial scales and short time periods, periods of a few decades or a century or two.

I was instead concerned with patterns of very long-term history.

Why did history unfold differently over the last 13,000 years on the different continents?

And in particular, why did every single Aboriginal Australian tribe, without exception, remain stone-tool using hunter-gatherers?

While over that same period of 13,000 years, most duration societies adopted metal tools and writing and formed into states or empires, and many Native American and many sub-Saharan African societies were also doing so, except at our slower rate.

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