In Guns, Germs, and Steel, how does Diamond challenge our assumptions about the transition from hunting-gathering to farming?

There
wasn't really a direct, clean-cut transition from hunter-gathering societies to sedentary
agricultural societies. Instead, agricultural societies formed over a lengthy period of time.
This gradual change, according toin , was directly related to a
significant decrease in prey population 10,000 years ago during a period of mass extinction; an
increase in human population and subsequent need to find more means of food production; and the
invention of agricultural technologies that certain tribes and groups experimented with. Around
8500 BCE, some groups of people were experimenting with agriculture, but it would some time
before groups were fully agricultural. Thus, the change was gradual, and there was overlap of
the two types of societies as groups experimented with agriculture while still
maintaining...