Study+Guide+Guns,+Germs+&+Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel Study Guide = Key Terms & Key Places=


 * 1) Food surpluses – agricultural produce or quantity of food grown by a nation, or people, that is in excess of what they need to live on and survive.


 * 1) Destiny – a predetermined course of events that is often held to be fixed and unchangeable.


 * 1) Hunting and gathering – any human culture or society that depends on a combination of hunting, fishing, or gathering wild plant foods for their survival. Sometimes called foraging.


 * 1) Fertile Crescent – a geographical area of fertile land in the Middle East stretching in a broad semicircle from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.


 * 1) New Guinea – the world’s second largest island located in the tropics in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Most of the eastern part of the island is today the country of Papua New Guinea.


 * 1) Plant domestication – to cultivate and adapt wild plants to live in a human environment in a way that benefits humans.


 * 1) Animal domestication – to train and breed wild animals and their offspring to live in a human environment in a way that benefits humans.


 * 1) Granary - a storage facility for grain.


 * 1) Sago - a starchy granular substance used in cooking that is harvested from certain palm tress growing in tropical Asia.


 * 1) Smelting – the process of using heat to remove pure metal from the ore in which it is contained. Some examples include tin, copper, and iron.


 * 1) Alloy - a mixture of two or more metals in various concentrations to make a new metal. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin.


 * 1) Taro – a leafy root vegetable with an edible starchy stem found in the tropics of Southeast Asia and Africa.

__ Overview: __

The movie //Guns, Germs and Steel// is about why the world is so unequal today. Jared Diamond, the author of the book on which the movie is based, argues that certain parts of the world were geographically positioned to develop successful and advanced civilizations, while other regions were destined to centuries of underdevelopment and material poverty. The main reason why some places successfully developed while others never advanced beyond nomadic hunting and gathering cultures lies in the geography.

In the first part of the video, Diamond contrasts New Guinea (a historical have-not) with Mesopotamia (a historical have). Today, Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, is not considered a highly developed society while New Guinea is still an underdeveloped region. A key point to the video is that Mesopotamia eventually loses its advantages due to climate change, but their advances and advantages eventually pass onto Europe and then to the Europeans who came to North America. Early in the video, the story is about the contrast between Mesopotamia and New Guinea.

Diamond is arguing, “geography is destiny. By this he means, those areas that happened to be blessed with the most beneficial food and animals to domesticate were able to develop and prosper because they could easily produce food surpluses. Those with the “wrong” plants and animals remained locked into cultures that devoted the bulk of their hours of labor to secure enough food to survive. Some, like the people of New Guinea were basically hunters and gathers. Others, like the Incas could produce food crops but did not have the right animals to enhance food production. In the Middle East, and then in Europe, they had the crops and animals necessary to produce huge food surpluses.

Once societies were able to produce huge food surpluses they could develop specialists in other areas such metalworking, ship building, weapons, and communications. Over the course of centuries, the advantages that the geographically blessed had were extremely sophisticated compared to regions without the “right” geography. Ultimately, when those encountered societies encountered each other, as the Spanish meeting the Incas, those with the centuries of geographically built in advantages were easily able to overwhelm and conquer the geographically less fortunate. According to Diamond, these built in geographic advantages that led to the “haves’ conquering the “have-nots,” are at the root of inequality in the world even today.

The Spanish encounter the Incas in 1520

 * Large farm animals like the sheep were key to development**

__ Hunting & Gathering: __
 * At one time, all humans were hunter-gatherers
 * People lived in small group
 * Shelters made where they found food
 * A very unproductive way to get food
 * Takes time to track animals
 * Gathering especially crops like sago is time consuming and in the case of sago, low in protein.

=Domesticating plants/crops=
 * A change in the environment led to farming and raising animals in the Middle East
 * Grain (wheat and barley) in the Middle East can be stored easily
 * Food crops of New Guinea like sago, taro, and bananas cannot be stored and preserved for a long period of time
 * Other areas had beneficial crops: China: rice, Americas: corn, squash, and beans, Africa: yams, sorghum and millet.

=Domesticating animals=
 * All animals were at one time were wild, meaning, not domesticated
 * The domestication of the “right” animals is the big key to success for civilizations
 * Only 14 of 268 large plant eating mammals have been domesticated – not for a lack of trying
 * Of the 14, nearly all were found in the Middle East or very close by
 * The big four farm animals were all native to the Middle East – the cow, the goat, the pig and the sheep.
 * Animals provided “beef on the hoof” – a rich source of protein
 * Animal waste provided fertilizer for crops
 * Animals could provide ready skins for clothing
 * Animals could provide muscle power in agriculture
 * Animals worked in combination with agriculture – it was mutually beneficial
 * Those places that had access to the four large farm animals, such as the Middle East and then Europe could produce huge food surpluses – quantities of food in excess of what a civilization needed to survive.
 * People in the Americas (like the Inca) and New Guinea did not have the farm animals and did not produce huge food surpluses.

=Food Surpluses & Development of Specialists=
 * Having a dependable supply of crops and animals produced food surpluses.
 * This allowed civilizations to feed large numbers of people.
 * Since all people did not have to be involved in raising food, some people were able to develop other specialties that were useful.
 * One specialty was advanced use of fire and heat to turn limestone into plaster.
 * Eventually fire and heat led to smelting and creating metals and alloys from ore. This includes substances such as tin, copper, and iron.
 * After centuries of experimentation, civilizations created high quality metal work such as the swords that the Spanish created.
 * The development of writing systems allowed information to be easily passed on to future generations.
 * The horse was useful not only in farming but also in battle and war – the Spanish had perfected the use of the horse as a weapon by the time they encountered the Inca.




 * Diamond in New Guinea**


 * Firing an arquebus – an early gun **