Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning theory gets the documentary treatment: why did Europeans end up conquering the Americas, Africa, and Australia, rather than the other way around? The series follows Diamond himself across three continents as he traces the answer back to geography and agriculture rather than intelligence or culture. In Papua New Guinea he revisits the conversation with a local politician, Yali, that first posed the question driving the whole project. Reenactments and location footage cover the domestication of wheat and livestock in the Fertile Crescent, the Spanish conquest of the Inca under Pizarro at Cajamarca, and the spread of smallpox through populations with no immunity. The argument builds in three stages, one per episode, moving from the origins of farming to the guns and horses of conquest to the germs that did more killing than any army. Diamond's claim is blunt and stated plainly on camera: the accident of which continent had the best plants and animals to domesticate, not the people on it, decided who would end up ruling whom.