Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:57, 17 October 2002

Synopsis of Jared Diamonds book Guns, Germs and Steel, which won a pulitzer prize for 1998.

People clearly came from Africa, at one time or another, and the reason large civilizations never began until humans could reach north to Egypt, was due to climate, and animals. In order to develop technology, you need to have free time, in order to have free time, all your survival issues must be well in order. The city is necessary for developing technology.

Cities

• Diamond explains that cities allow people to have free time to devise different tools and methods for better survival. In order to be able to stay put instead of roaming, people needed food, hence agriculture. And making the change from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies depended entirely on the presence of domesticable animals.

-- Domesticability

• If an animal is not domesticable, it cannot be used for work in agriculture. There are six criteria for domesticability. The animal must not be too dangerous. It must allow man to replace one of the group as head animal, many animals are too independent to be domesticated. The animal must be able to survive in captivity, and so on.

• Of all the domesticable species in the world, only one comes from outside the temperate region of Eurasia, which extends nearly uninterrupted from eastern Europe to Asia. Only the Llama of South America is indigenous to lands outside of the temperate region of Eurasia. There are no domesticable animals native to Africa.

Geography

• Lastly, Diamond explains how geography shapes human migration, not simply by making travel difficult, but by how climates affect where domesticable animals,

can easily travel, and where crops can ideally grow. Thus civilization developed in the fertile crescent quite naturally because the conditions were right for it.