Guns Germs and Steel Part 2

How come Greeks, romans, and Mayan people can advance in development but Papua New Guinea could not? Diamond is a scientist not a historian, yet he is trying to solve the puzzles of human history. After ice age parts of world became warmer and wetter, people in the Middle East were thriving.  Rainforest of new guinea is one of the only places where people still hunt for their food right on the spot but they never a productive way to get enough food, it takes too much time and with a bow there is no certainty to whether you will get it.  Traditional societies rely more on gathering, in this part it is done by women. They collect wild sago, from the sago tree.  In it they get the pulp form the center and it is cooked into dough.  This is not enough calories to support the whole community.  One tree only has about 70 pounds of sago, a lot of work for not enough food, and it is low on protein.  Sometimes they have to eat spiders to get some protein.  Ian focused on an archaeological dig.  He uncovered remains of ancient dwelling that were very sophisticated.  He found a small village, one of the first civilized permanent villages.  It was the first time people settled down in a community.  But how did they feed entire village if times are so hard? They found a dry, humidity controlled environment where they would take grains and protect them from moisture, world’s first granary, where they could store food and preserve it.  It was an oval shaped mud wall building primarily for wheat and barley.  Could be stored for years.  People started growing their own food- stayed close to any place of water they could find and place wheat and barley fields around them, bringing them as seeds and putting them next to their village.  People of the Middle East were becoming the first farmers.  Changing the nature of the crops around them.  Domestication is how crops are changed by human modification.  This is not so different from what the farmers were doing in the Middle East.  Archeologist believes people have been farming in Papua New Guinea for 10,000 years, almost as close to the people in the Middle East.  But if they were farmers why weren’t they advancing to what other parts of the world were doing? What was the difference? The people who had access to the most productive crops had the most productive farms, Geographic luck.