Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel

This movie was very interesting and informative about how civilizations developed and thrived. The narrator of the movie, Jared Diamond, has been studying evolution of humans for 30 years and based his studies in New Guinea. While there, he was asked the questions he has been trying to answer for years. A young man named Yali asked him, "Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little". He noticed that the white men had so much more material goods and new advancements than his people did. After years of research, Diamond came up with the conclusion that much of the evolution of certain tribes or races had to do with geographic luck.

Much of the evolution of people has to do with the domestication of plants. Once groups of people stopped hunting and gathering but rather stayed in one place by a water source, they could obtain all the strongest strains of wheat and barley for growing. This is when humans started to control nature and the beginning of everything. They developed buildings that housed the grains and could keep them for years which could feed more people. The grains had more nutrients which could also help keep the tribe larger and capable of more work.

Along with the domestication of plants came the possibility of domestication of animals. They could then control where the animals went, what they ate, and when they bred. They used certain animals for their milk, and others for their fur and hides to clothe themselves for warmth. The most important aspect of animal domestication was being able to use them as beasts of burden or work animals. These animals were bred for the reason of pulling plows for agriculture. With animals helping, people could develop much more land for growing crops and could help feed a larger population of people. The largest influence domestication of plants and animals had on civilizations was that not everyone had to obtain their own food. Since some people farmed for everyone, others could develop into specialists in certain areas.

Some of the earliest specialists were able to create plaster for homes and were able to use fire to create tools out of metal. These two jobs help propel civilizations to places they had never been to before. When the houses of these people were dug up, they were found to have plaster on the walls which tells us two things. The first is