This chapter starts from the beginning, explaining the evolution of the first human ancestors, seven million years ago. Our closest living relatives are the gorilla, chimpanzee, and the bonobo. We all originated in Africa, the first to leave being the Homo erectus. Neanderthals have always been depicted as brainless, wild, careless creatures, but evidence shows they actually cared for their sick and buried their dead. "The Great Leap Forward" is what Diamond calls the earliest signs of standardized tools, jewelry, bone tools, and more. This great leap was 50,000 years ago. Also at this time is the spread of hominids to New Guinea and Australia. Large animal species that were not evolved to defend themselves against such predators were wiped out. Eurasia came next. In the Americas the Clovis people start the 1st colony. Some archaeologists claim there were pre-Clovis people but Diamond believes if this were true we would have found significant evidence by now. Obvious explanations fail to explain why Eurasia became the most advanced and Africa didn't even though it had a head-start.

According to Diamond, the ancestors of human beings broke off as a separate lineage from other animals about 7 million years ago in Africa. Human ancestors began walking upright around 4 million years ago, and they moved to Eurasia around 1 or 2 million years ago. Sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, not long after human fossils began to resemble modern homo sapiens, our race created an explosion of new technological and artistic innovations that far surpassed anything previously created. Archaeologists call this period the Great Leap Forward.Shortly after the Great Leap Forward, between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago, the human race expanded its territory. Although human ancestors had remained in Africa and Eurasia for millions of years, people now moved outward to Australia, the South Pacific, and the coldest northern regions of Eurasia. The precise dates of human arrival in the Americas are harder to determine, but the colonization happened at least 12,000 or 13,000 years ago. Diamond thinks it is remarkable that human beings moved into all habitable areas of the globe in a few tens of thousands of years without the benefit of modern technology.Diamond begins his consideration of the fates of human societies around 11,000 B.C., or 13,000 years ago, because during this period all the habitable continents were populated with hunter-gatherers, and no society had advanced technologically to become farmers or city dwellers. Diamond asks whether a modern archaeologist, transported back 13,000 years, could determine which continents people would have the best chances for developing advanced technologies. Considering each continent in turn, he lists the qualities one might consider to be advantages.

The first chapter is a brief history of the human race from our appearance on the planet Earth as an offshoot of a species of apes in Africa to the cusp of our most glorious era, starting about 13,000 years ago after the end of the last ice age.'

The apes of ancient Africa split into 3 different groups 7 million years ago. These groups were the ancestors of modern gorillas, modern chimpanzees and modern humans. About 4.5 million years ago, our ancestors began standing in an upright posture, and 2 million years ago, human brain size relative to body increased close to the proportions of humans today. Human beings first moved out of Africa (probably) about a million years ago. We spread to all corners of the earth except the Australian and American continents. The reason for this is that Australia was separated from the Eurasian landmass by sea and primitive humans had no boats. The reason for not reaching the American continent was that it was separated from the Eurasian continent by the Bering strait, which was inaccessible because primitive humans had yet to discover warm clothing to help them cope with the cold climate.

Around 500,000 years ago, our close ancestor homo erectus appeared. He would learn to make tools of stone and also discover fire. Around 50,000 years ago, our human ancestors really got started. This was the time of the Cro-Magnon Man. Cro-Magnon man was physically and behavorially similar to modern humans. Cro-Magnon Man made relatively complex stone tools with multiple pieces and specialised functions. Human beings around this time learned to make clothes, art, culture, boats, developed language. Our ancestors began to colonize the previously unreachable Australian continent as well as the American continent. In our ancestors' expansion efforts, their near human cousins were displaced and eventually were eliminated. These near human cousins were Neanderthals and also some indigenous Chinese and Indonesian species. It is interesting to read that some anthropologists have found physical similarities between modern Chinese and these ancient Chinese humans. This disputes the account that Cro-Magnon Man evolved and displaced all other near human species, as it did to the Neanderthals from Europe. Instead the evidence suggests that at least some of the cousins of Cro-Magnon Man co-evolved or interbred with him to bring about modern humans. The issue is disputed and evidence not wholly conclusive.

An interesting observation the writer made is that at around this period of 50,000 years ago, that he calls the Great Leap Forward, large mammals or megafauna began to become extinct at an astonishingly fast rate. Modern Australia doesn't have native large mammals with sizes on the scale of elephants, giraffes or even bears. However, fossil evidence indicates that pre-historic Australia did have giant kangaroos, rhino-like marsupials, a marsupial leopard and some huge reptiles.

The author ends the chapter by considering the states of human development in each continent at slightly after the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. Each continent seemed to have certain favourable conditions for why it would become the site of rapid human development. Even though we know in the end Eurasia won this race, we still need to explore why and now we have the groundwork.

The second thought that came to mind as I read chapter 1 is also related to Megafauna. The Great Leap Forward marked the first time humans really were responsible for mass extinctions. This is truly amazing! Our ancestors were eliminating entire species before they even had guns. I didn't know any species went extinct because of us before the Mauritian Dodo. This, of course, is nothing to be proud of. I think too many of us still believe the world so large, our needs so small that we can't really have a significant effect on the Earth. The best example of this would be our relative inaction towards global warming. If with clubs and axes we could wipe out the Megafauna from Earth, how much more damagae could be done by altering the global temperature? Yet we continue to live our lives as if nothing was happening. I shudder at the thought.