Guns, Germs, and Steel 2

Today we continued to watch Guns, Germs, and Steel. The part we watched was about Jared Diamond researching about the question the New Guinea people asked, how we have so much and they have so little. He started to look at the have's and have not's. He had to look way back, at a time where everyone lived the same. He had to look at where people were hunter gathers. Hunter gathers are people that hunt animals and gather food like wheat and berries and barley until everything was gone and then they left. Those people lived in huts. The problem with that way was that there is never enough time to hunt enough food for everyone so they usually rely on gathering. In the Middle East there was a lot more things to gather than in New Guinea. In the Middle East they gathered barley and wheat until a drought came on. By the time the drought ended the people discovered farming. They learned that you didn't have to move every time you ran out of things to gather or hunt. They learned that you could control the environment. They made the first granary. A granary is a place to store grain for a long period of time. The people of New Guinea are some of the first farmers ever. The problem with New Guinea is that there is not much protein in their crops. They even sometimes eat giant spiders to gain protein. Jared says it is just geographic luck to get healthy crops. New Guinea has crops like the sago tree. To get food out of the sago tree takes a lot of people and a lot of work. It takes 3-4 days to make dough and bake it. They also have some kind of root that they have to plant one at a time and again does not contain a lot of protein. 

Guns, Germs, and Steel 1

Today in school we watched the beginning of a movie called Guns, Germs, and Steel. The movie is based on the book by Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond is a biologist in training and he loves to study birds. He is the main character in the movie. The movie takes place in the rainforest of Papua, New Guinea. The first few minutes that we watched were about people that live in less developed countries doesn't always make them less smart. People have been living in New Guinea for over forty thousand years, which is around the time of the Stone Age. Those people learned how to live in the wilderness with very little, that method has been passed on for years. Now people from New Guinea have been asking how we have so much and they have so little. That doesn't make us any smarter than them because they have so little. If you placed a typical American into the wilderness, they would barely be able to last for a day or two but if you placed a person from New Guinea in the wilderness they would be able to live a whole lifetime. Sure they don't know how to use a car or a computer but that doesn't make it any different from learning how to survive in the wilderness.