Jared Diamond Gea Essay

Jared Diamond is a biologist whose area of expertise is birds. His studies took him to Papua New Guinea, where he utilized his skills to study all of the bird species inhabiting the island. One day, a PNG inhabitant, Yali, came up and asked Diamond a question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Diamond argues that the answer to Yali’s question wasn’t racial inequality like so many people assume it is. Diamond began his research by going back in time to the earliest civilizations. Upon studying about the ancient civilizations of the world, Diamond found an answer to Yali’s question. Diamond’s argument was that racial inequality had no influence whatsoever on the amount of cargo that Papua New Guinea had compared to Europe or the Americas. Varying factors such as geographic differences (or “geographic luck”) come into play when answering Yali’s question. Depending on the location of each ancient civilization, Depending on the location of each ancient civilization, two other factors came into play; the making of well-developed agriculture systems and crops, and the successful domestication of specific animals also play into the prosperity of civilizations in ancient times. The development of an agricultural system was vital for a civilization. Crops that had great nutritional value and storage time increased the division of labor. Papua New Guinea’s main crops were wild sago, the taro root, and bananas. Wild sago was pulp in the center of trees that was gathered rather than harvested. Sago was hard to harvest, and was difficult to keep stored for long periods of time. On top of that, sago wasn’t high in nutrition either. Papua New Guinea’s people needed foods that were high in protein, and sago’s protein levels were rather low. The taro root and bananas were two crops that were farmed by the people. The taro root and banana didn’t provide much protein to the Papua New Guineans either, just like