Anthony's Blog One Western Civilization

Difference between us and people back in the years of hunting was that they used to hunt for food, but now, we grow food. Domestication is the controlling of things such as the growth of food. A few places in which farming blew up is 1) the Middle East which grew Barley and Wheat, 2) China which grew Rice, 3) the Americas which grew Squash, Corn, and Beans, and 4) Africa which grew Sorghum, Millet, and Yams. People have been growing food for ten thousand years. Papua New Guineans sometimes eat spiders to gain their proteins. Geographic luck is when a place gets lucky to have nutritious and protein filled crops growing while other places don't get so lucky. Animal Domestication became a huge thing in the Middle East and used the animals' poop for fertilizing their crops. Goats and sheep were the first domesticated animals. Others included horses, oxen, and pigs.

In July 1972 I was studying bird evolution on the tropical island of New Guinea. I started talking to a remarkable local politician named Yali as we walked together.  Yali asked me, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Yali’s question was only about New Guineans and European whites. 25  Still, it points to a larger set of contrasts in our modern world: Peoples of Eurasian origin dominate the modern world. They have the most wealth and power. Other peoples have defeated European colo- nialism. Yet, they still remain far behind in wealth and power. Still 30  other peoples, such as aboriginals in Australia, have been dominated by European colonialists. Others have even been destroyed. Our question is this: Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are? Why didn’t things turn out some other way? For instance, 35  why weren’t Native Americans, Afric...

"History has gone very differently for peoples from different parts of the world. The last ice age ended 13,000 years ago. Since then, some 5  parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools. Other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies. Still others had societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities still influence the modern world. They enabled the more advanced societies to conquer or exterminate the other ones. These differences are the basic facts of world history. But the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial. Why did these differences develop? This puzzling question was posed to me 25 years ago in a personal way In July 1972 I was studying bird evolution on the tropical island of New Guinea. I started talking to a remarkable local politician named Yali as we walked together. Yali asked me, 'Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guine...

Several key questions that I think may be important from the video are: - How have the New Guineans shaped the world? - How did our worlds ever become so different? Notes on the video: - All this began in Papa New Guinea in which people have been living within for forty-thousand years! - Cargo was a term used by the New Guineans that refers to the material goods first brought to New Guinea. - Western colonials believed that people had power, only because of their race. - In order to understand the New Guineans, Diamond had to turn back the clock on human history and development to go back to prehistory to understand how they live. - Thirteen-thousand years ago, the Ice Age ended, allowing the world to become warmer and wetter. - The area in which humans thrived the most after the Ice Age, was the Middle East, in which people lived in small groups and went area hopping whenever their wasn't a stable environment for food or the area in general (such as a dangerous area with...