Why were some societies advancing faster than others?

One topic that interested me in Guns, Germs, and Steel was how some societies advanced faster and further than other societies today. For example, in New Guinea, where the native peoples living there had crops that were hard to harvest and were low in nutrition, and their animals could no longer help them in farming either because they couldn’t plow. They then relied on only hunter gathering, which means it used all of their manpower, and there were no people to invent and innovate, so their civilization could not grow and advance as much as maybe the others around them. Jared Diamond believed that the cause of the contrast between New Guinea and maybe Europe was because of where geography left you early on in human civilization. For example, a region called the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East was where civilization thrives because geography left them with the best crops and animals, fertile land, meat, leather, etc. These advantages also provided surpluses, which allowed them to make more tools and become more productive. But eventually, they overused the land of the Fertile Crescent, so now, the the Middle East is doing poorly. 
The Europeans used geographic advantages to their advantage and advanced faster and conquered many, it mainly boiled down to geographical luck. But I think that we can never really answer this question because it could also be many other factors, but this factor might just fit the best, so I feel like this is a simple question, with a complicated answer that can’t be fully answered right now.