PBS SERIES TRACKS CULTURES' MARCH AROUND THE WORLD.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

A SIMPLE question changed the course of Jared Diamond's career. The UCLA professor of physiology and environmental health sciences - who is also an avid bird lover - was in Papua New Guinea 30 years ago when a native acquaintance challenged him: ``Why do you white men have so much cargo (possessions) and we New Guineans have so little?''

Diamond recast the question slightly: Why do some cultures march faster than others through the course of human history? The answers became the basis of his provocative 1999 best seller, ``Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,'' now transformed by producer-director Tim Lambert into a user-friendly three-part series on PBS.

Tonight, Diamond focuses on geography - how those in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa were the beneficiaries of climates conducive to farming and domesticating animals. By contrast, his friends in New Guinea were saddled with less-nutritious foods to farm and only goats to domesticate.

Diamond also suggests that it was easier for cultures to traverse Europe and Eurasia - rather than, say, up and down North and South America - because the climate was amenably consistent. By creating time-saving methods of providing food, Europeans were allowed the luxury to contemplate solutions to other needs, such as, say, the ability to make war.

Episode two next week demonstrates how Europeans were able to conquer North and South America rather handily with a mix of more sophisticated weaponry and an unexpected ally - diseases to which they had become more or less immune, but that proved deadly to those in the New World. (As diseases spread in the more mobile Europe, some built up a resistance to them; in the Americas, where the exigencies of geography meant that societies were more secluded, disease was less prevalent and, therefore, more deadly.)

Episode three points out that Europeans had a much tougher go of trying to colonize the tropical portions of Africa, succumbing to malaria and the harsher climates. It also offers the series' most melodramatic moment - when Diamond becomes emotional at a Zambian clinic for children suffering from AIDS and malaria. ``Here in Africa, there are human faces on the issues,'' he explains, ignoring Spain's human toll on, say, the Incans and Mayans.

The final episode also seems to attempt to use the phrase ``guns, germs and steel'' in virtually every sentence, probably in an effort to disguise the fact that it has drifted a bit from Diamond's original premise.

Diamond is a genial enough companion, but efforts to cast him as an Indiana Jones-style globe-trotter fall a little short. He's bad at shooting arrows from his bow, he yelps giddily after blasting an old-fashioned rifle, and sits in an awkwardly unimposing position that makes less convincing his explanation of the sword he's wielding and its lethal nature.

``I can never work on anything as interesting as 'Guns, Germs and Steel,' '' Diamond says, ``because it deals with the biggest questions of human history.'' Actually, his latest book, ``Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,'' which studies the environmental causes of extinct civilizations, seems even more fascinating and relevant and would make a fine companion piece to this series.

David Kronke, [phone]

david.kronke(at)dailynews.com

GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Three stars

What: Human history proves geography is destiny, says UCLA professor Jared Diamond; based on his best-selling book.

Where: KCET.

When: 10 p.m. Mondays through July 25, beginning tonight.

In a nutshell: A simple question - why? - inspires a new way of looking at the world.