Environmental determinism rose to its prominent stage in modern geography beginning in the late 19th century when it was revived by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel and became the central theory in the discipline. Ratzel’s theory came about following Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 and was heavily influenced by evolutionary biology and the impact a person’s environment has on their cultural evolution. Environmental determinism then became popular in the US in the early 20th century when Ratzel’s student Ellen Churchill Semple, a professor at Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts, introduced the theory there. Semple’s were also influenced by evolutionary biology.