Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond Jared Diamond was a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles. He was a biologist by training, and a specialist in human physiology. But his real passion has always been the study of birds. He began watching the birds when he was about seven years old in the United States. He arrived in New Guinea at the age of 26 and he felt that it was love at first sight. Diamond started to make regular trips to New Guinea and ever since, he decides to be the leading expert on the bird life of the island. But in the course of his field work he becomes just as curious about the people in Guinea. Jared Diamond's quest to uncover the roots of inequality began in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea.
In 1974, a local man named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question. “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Diamond realized that Yali's question had penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history, the root of global inequality. Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent and far more resourceful.
Diamond sets out to explore the division of the world into haves and have not’s. It was a massive challenge the few scholars would have dared to take. He was a scientist, not a historian. How could he possibly solve the great puzzles of human history? Quote the narrator of the movie Gun, Germs and Steel. To understand where inequality came from, Diamond needed to identify a time before inequality, when people across the world were living more or less the same way. He had to turn back the clock thousands of years, back before the first civilization. About 13, 000 years ago, the ravage of the last Ice Age were over. The world was becoming warmer and wetter. One area where humans were thriving was the Middle East.
In 1974, a local man named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question. “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Diamond realized that Yali's question had penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history, the root of global inequality. Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent and far more resourceful.
Diamond sets out to explore the division of the world into haves and have not’s. It was a massive challenge the few scholars would have dared to take. He was a scientist, not a historian. How could he possibly solve the great puzzles of human history? Quote the narrator of the movie Gun, Germs and Steel. To understand where inequality came from, Diamond needed to identify a time before inequality, when people across the world were living more or less the same way. He had to turn back the clock thousands of years, back before the first civilization. About 13, 000 years ago, the ravage of the last Ice Age were over. The world was becoming warmer and wetter. One area where humans were thriving was the Middle East.