Peter:
> The Future Eaters came out yonks before Guns, Germs and Steel and
> Diamond relies heavily on Flannery in many places. So he's hardly
> a student...
That's true - 'Guns' has Flannery in the bibliography.
But remember Diamond has been addressing this thesis since the early nineteen seventies - he dates Yali's question (about why Papuans had so little 'cargo') to 1972. Curiously, it was in 1972 that biohistorian Alfred Crosby published 'The Columban Exchange: Biological and Cultural Differences (later expanded in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900) that contains *all* of Diamond's key theses.
The 'student of Diamond' appellation comes from Flannery himself.
John
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