You’re kind of missing something. The interesting result is that they didn’t find evidence for Diamond’s theory, which isn’t so surprising to me. The world is a very complicated place and mono causality is, almost surely, never the case.
I thought they did, it just wasn't very pronounced. There was impact, but not to the degree the Diamond book theorized.
"didn't" makes it sound a lot more definitive than the paper said.
The paper found that Europe's layout is in fact not significantly better or even different from many other places on earth where early humans developed. They even found that in many cases civilization flourished in direct opposition to those qualities, like in southeast asia where mountainous terrain was compensated with rice terraces.
They also confirmed that the things Diamond said about having interconnected similar areas etc being important to cultural spread were generally right, just that they aren't actually correlated very closely with europe/asia in particular. Diamond was right about them (they're very agreeable statements, and not unique to him) but they don't support his thesis.
Though I still don't quite understand what is the original question here. I have not read Diamond's book, so I don't know what he is exactly trying to explain. The phys.org source talks about "Eurasian political and military dominance".
First, the focus on Asia (in addition to Europe) is strange. The renaissance, the industrial revolution, the demographic transition, secularism, constitutional democracy, institutionalized science etc all started in Europe and not in Asia. So apparently Diamond tries to explain the current political dominance of (some parts of) Asia. But then he would need to also take into account the US, not just Europe and Asia. So I don't really understand what we are trying to explain here.
One important point that hardly anybody dares to mention is that people of East Asian and European descent have significantly higher IQs than people from other geographic areas. Personal IQ is highly correlated with measures of life success, like income, highest education degree etc. Moreover, national IQ is substantially correlated with per capita GDP. We also know from twin studies that adults have similar IQ to their biological parents, not their adoptive parents. This suggests IQ causes both personal and national success, and isn't just correlated with it.
So arguably the task should not be to explain some sort of "Eurasian" dominance, since this dominance can likely be explained sufficiently with IQ as a proximate cause. The open question is rather why people of East Asian and European descent have a higher average IQ. Or why modernity began in Western Europe, not Asia, despite East Asians today having higher IQs than Europeans (excluding people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, which have higher IQs than both gentile Europeans and East Asians).
I don't blame you if you'd rather not look at the research too closely, it kind of feels like an infohazard. But it's a good source to bookmark and to perhaps come back later.
But reality is what it is. It doesn't care whether someone labels a hypothesis as racist or not. The only way to grapple with reality is to find out what it is.
God, what a disappointing euphemism. Just stick with redpill, would you?