Aude · CC BY-SA 2.5

A physiologist by training, he turned to writing sweeping accounts of human history, winning the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel and, in 1999, the National Medal of Science. His work has reached an enormous popular audience, but it has also drawn sustained criticism from historians and anthropologists, including a 2003 symposium in the journal Antipode, who argue his arguments rest on factual and methodological errors in the specialist fields he draws on.