guns, germs, and steel

clint and i started watching the first part of the pbs series guns, germs, and steel together tonight on accident. i need to read the book, but it was really exciting watching it in pictures with clint... a shared, multi-sensory experience of compelling theories about what contributed to major shifts in humanity. here's a run-down of the part we saw tonight:

A scientist named Gerald Diamond started asking himself some important questions, when, on a bird mission in Papa New Guinea, the people there asked him why white people always have more cargo. He ended up asking himself where inequalities in human beings began. He saw that in New Guinea, where people still lived (in the 1960's) pretty primitively without advanced technology, there was much less inequality. He had the idea that while hunters and nomadic people were kind of on their own to get food and shared within their tribes, it was when people began to be able to store crops that inequalities began.

People began to really experience success in farming in the Fertile Crescent. Some crops lead to more surpluses than others. Places that grew bananas and taro root couldn't store those products for long periods of time, so inequalities were lessened in those places. Everyone had to eat now or never kind of thing when it came to their crops. Crops like wheat and barley, however, could be stored, and thus could feed more people.

Another contribution to fixed food sources were domesticated animals. Out of all of the wild animals in the world, only 14 have been domesticated since the dawn of man (at least that are still around). 13 of those animals were to be found Europe, Asia, and North Africa. One was found in South America--the llama. In the Fertile Crescent, they had many of those animals: goats, cows, sheep, and pigs (at least). Because they had all that, people started accumulating wealth and started building nicer dwellings. Some people had homes with devised "air conditioning" systems. And people there started decorating their homes with plaster from the inside, investing in their homes.

People started having villages with so many people (because they could feed them), that some people didn't have to farm, and the community was able to support specialists. This freed people to develop new skills and new technologies, like making plaster from limestone. It was people's understanding of how to work with fire that was a first step toward forming steel, a technology that would change the world (namely through weapons, it appears, but I've got to stay tuned to find out).

In places like New Guinea, they never developed advanced technology. In the 1960's, people were still using stone tools. The way of life in New Guinea was perfectly viable. But they didn't have advanced technology meaning that it took too much time to feed themselves. Then Westerners arrived to colonize the country.

How did the Fertile Crescent lose its head start? A fundamental weakness of the region was that its climate was too dry, and the ecology was too fragile to support intense farming. People were destroying the environment. The environment became a place where there were too few trees, no grass, and less water because people overexploited it.

So, the communities were forced to move and went to places for farming that were spread on the same line of latitude. The benefit of this latitude was that there was the same day length and a similar climate and vegetation so that they could grow similar plants and have similar animals. So they took wheat and barley, sheep, cows, and pigs, east to India and west to North Africa and Europe, transforming the human societies at their destinations.

When they reached Egypt, there was an explosion of civilization. There was now enough food to feed the pharoahs, the scribes, generals, and the armies it took to build the pyramids. And in the European civilizations, they could feed the artists, inventors, and scientists.

In the 16th century, crops and animals were taken to the New World, where not a single cow or ear of corn existed before. Now Americans consume wheat and corn which originally came from the Fertile Crescent.

One question is: did cows and corn really create all of this change? What about culture, religion, people's role in shaping their own destiny? Diamond argues that there have always been smart, successful, dynamic people everywhere. He maintains, though, that social differences are the result of inequality and are not the cause.

In New Guinea, the people acquired pigs, but they didn't develop in the same ways because they didn't have the same raw materials. Towns in New Guinea are now becoming bigger and more developed. But they still ask: why do you white men have so much trouble and we have so little?

Diamond maintains that the blueprint for division lies in the land itself. Certain land has geographic advantages. The invention of helicopters would have helped isolated groups like the New Guineans. But the haves and the have-nots were determined by chance of birth in a region and the resulting resources one had access to.

In the next episode of Guns, Germs, and Steel, we will see why a few hundred Europeans dominated the New World. They hint that it has to do with the fact that the Europeans shocked the Native Americans because they arrived on horses, which the Americans had never seen before. They also arrived with armor and swords (steel).

I'm curious to see what relationship, if any, exists between the fact that so many people were able to live in the Fertile Crescent for a period of time and the fact that three of the major enduring religions also came from that region (there also must have been a lot of literacy there to come up with all the words to articulate the complex moralities of those religions). I'm also very curious about the ways in which the merging philosophical systems there, from that of the Greeks to the Egyptians, resulted in the religions that have endured... I don't know that this series will answer that, but it remains an interesting question.