The video Guns, Germs, and Steel 2 talks primarily about inequality and why some civilizations do better than others.
This question was asked by Yali to Jared Diamond. This led to Diamond setting out to discover the answer. He realized it was the history of earth that was questioned. Why did some countries, like Egypt, Rome, Greece etc. progress when the rest of the world wasstruggling to make ends meet?
To find this, Diamond needed to go out an era where all civilizations were more or less equal and thus he turned the clock back by 13000 years. This was time when the Ice Age had just ended and the climate was beginning to get warmer. Hunting and gathering were the means to survive. He studied the then Middle East which was dry and arid.
To understand how the hunters lived, Diamond explored how the tribes today live in the rainforests of Papua New Guineans.Inhabitants lived as nomads hunting and moving to new places when their prey – the animals migrated. However, hunting required a lot of skill and was time consuming and not very productive. The tribes needed another productive way to collect food and that was ‘gathering’ done by women. Saga trees were cut and the sap was collected, processed and made into dough and consumed. This too had its disadvantages because it was hard work and the food was low in protein and nutrition. 1 tree just gave 70 pounds of food and took 3 to 4 days to be processed.
When Diamond studied how tribes in Middle East lived, he saw that they depended on healthier and easier to gather food crops which were more nutritious. They gathered cereals like barley and wheat. This would have given them an edge over other civilizations but after 500 years, the global temperatures again reversed and Ice age set in again destroying plant and animal life. This continued for 1000 years and the civilization now had to find new means to survive and progress.
Diamond’s arguments are correct as they talk about geographical advantages that the people in the Middle East had. They had access to healthier crops, which was easy to harvest and required less time. Thus, their time could be used more productively. This leads to effective utilization of resources and development of specialized craft. Surplus crops and sufficient time to think creatively opens avenues for new income such as trade leading to more growth and progress.
