Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend the unveiling of a discovery that "will change the face of science forever". The evening's host is his friend and former student, Edmond Kirsch, a forty-year-old tech magnate whose dazzling inventions and audacious predictions have made him a controversial figure around the world. This evening is to be no exception: he claims he...

The author answers the question: Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? He dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns.