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.