Jared Diamond

For this blog, it will be a little bit longer covering all the information from today and yesterday.  We started to learn about Jared Diamond, the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" a multi-award winning book.  The overview of the book is Jared's theory of how some economies survived and thrived when others stayed as they were for 2000 years.  Jared went to a place called Papua New Guinea.  At Papua New Guinea, the people have been so dependent on making food and housing, they haven't been able to thrive and discover other talents.  They are either hunters or gathers.  The men go out while the women stay back and cut down trees.  Not just any ordinary trees, these are called "Sego Tree".  This is a tree where you can get the material inside the tree which is all fat and calories. Nothing nutritious about it, just fat but easy to preserve for a long time.  It takes 3 to 4 days for the women to chop down the tree then gather all the food from it.  It very time consuming and get little from it.  Because the women are working with feeding people with the material from the sego tree and the men are all hunting, there is no time to invent anything else.  There's no one who makes clothing, no one who makes metal, shoes, watches, nothing.  They live with what they have and that's not very much.  Now leaving this topic and going on to civilizations and why they went extinct.  Like one of the oldest villages still standing.  The archaeologists have estimated that it is around 11,000 years old.  The oldest known village still stands.  Living within this little village was about 50 to 100 people.  The thing that interested the archaeologists the most was this thing called granary.  A granary is a hole dug to preserve the food from bugs and sunlight.  It’s almost like a refrigerator.  It's the oldest refrigerator known to man.  After that we started to talk about Animal Domestication.  There are over 148 animals you can domesticate but only 14 are needed.  Goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkey, Bactria camels, carabien camels, water buffalo, llamas, reindeer, yaks, and Bali cattle.