Notes on Guns Germs and Steel

Notes...

• All great civilizations have one thing in common,
• To discover inequality you must go to a time where there was no inequality
• Ancient Middle East, humans survived after ice age
• Hunter Gatherers, making shelters wherever they could hunt animals and gather food
• New Guinea is one of the only places where there are still hunters and gatherers
• Wild Sago, main source of plant gathered
• Women did gathering
• Barley and Wheat were found in the Middle East
• Grains had a lot of protein
• Ice age conditions returned
• Dra, a digsite in the Middle East
• Archeologists discovered a small village, created around the time when the end of the drought
• They stored grains, small hut that is closed off and protects the grain from water, bugs, etc.
• Mostly Wheat and Barley
• Because this was the first community people probably had jobs
• First farmers in the world
• They interupted the cycle of plant growing, favoring the better characteristics of plants
• Domestication - most useful to humans
• Hunter Gatherers could not produce as much food as farmers did
• Ancient China
• Rice
• Ancient U.S
• squash, corn, and beans
• New Guinea
• Highlands were most densly populated with the most extensive farmers
• Have been farming for a long time
• No one believed any one lived there
• Now farm localized bananas
• Sometimes eat giant spiders to supplement protein in their diet since they had very little
• Inequalities were born from the crops we eat
• Wheat
• Wealth of Modern America could never survive from plants like Taro
• People survived by producing better crops
• New source of food : domesticated animals