Europe Geography And Geography

Jared Diamond discusses the reasons why geographical and environmental factors lead to a more rapid progression of certain civilizations throughout history. The book Guns, Germs and Steel portrays an argument that due to some societies’ access to an area witch contains sufficient amounts of wildlife and climates that are easily inhabitable, these societies developed into more advanced ways of living much easier and also earlier than societies who lacked these geographical attributes. These beneficial geographical attributes promoted the growth of technological improvements in weapons, religion, and farming.

Its geography. Geography controls climate and climate controls what foods people can grow. What foods people can grow impacts a civilization a lot, some can’t even have food for a week. They can be a civilization like the Fertile Crescent with wheat and they harvest it easy to do other things. Or be like Papua New Guinea constantly working for food and can’t do much else than that. The Fertile Crescent is in the Middle East and there they live in a semiarid area which means it's dry but still get seasonal rain. And so their main food source is wheat. Wheat is a great food, it can be stored for several years and it’s high in protein. So when people go to harvest it it won’t take a long time. With the extra time they have, they can have specialists to experiment with things like steel. Over the years they learned to farm so they have more than enough food and even more time. But Papua New Guinea can’t do that. They live in the tropics so they can’t grow the same thing as the Fertile Crescent. One of their main food sources is Sago. Sago is a tree that takes a few days to harvest. First cut it down with stone tools, hollow it out, take the pulp of the inside of the tree and make it into a paste that has hardly any protein. It can’t be stored for a long time and the process of getting the tree cut down uses more calories than the food provides. So the people of Papua New Guinea are constantly working for food and they are a hunter gather civilization so they are on the move following their food.. Wheat and Sago are two completely two different foods. One takes a couple of minutes, the other takes a couple of days. So with Wheat the people of the Fertile Crescent have plenty of time to invent more or new tools. Papua New Guinea can’t invent stuff, plus they are on the move a lot of the time. Their a hunter and gatherer civilization. This leads to inequality in the world. Some

Throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the importance of geography in the ways ancient civilizations grew and spread and how some areas were more advanced than others. He began his research when he was asked a question by a Papua New Guinea residence, Yali. Yali had asked Diamond “[w]hy you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?” At that point Diamond had no answer and he was curious to find out why Eurasia had a head start in civilizing people meanwhile the other continents were behind. As a result, several differences were made between countries that did not have the same resources as those who were advanced. Some of the developing countries were poor and they had to rely on whatever was given to them through nature. When Diamond went to Papua New Guinea, he discovered that the residences of the island had the same routine as those in the ancient civilizations of Eurasia. They would often hunt for animals and used stone weapons instead of metal.

Many geographers have attempted creating a unified theory explaining why cultures advance much more readily than others. Very few have actually reached mainstream society and even fewer seem reasonable. However, Jared Diamond shines where most do not. His book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, proposes an idea that has long been established called environmental determinism. Most view environmental determinism as a racist theory attributing a peoples’ intelligence only to their oppressive climates and geographical barriers. Diamond instead has created a theory that applies environmental determinism to only a peoples’ technology—not the people themselves. This has given researchers valuable tools that allow them to explain why some nations have

On the contrary, they had managed to build great nations without the luxury of going to neighboring countries and comparing technologies and stealing ideas. By the time Europeans made contact, the Native Americans had built “a world unto itself” in the Americas (Resendez 139). They had tremendous trading networks, complex forms of government, accurate calendars, and had even established systems of mathematics. They were also agriculturally superior. Regarding development, these 2 worlds were more alike than they thought. Unfortunately, no observer bothered to really

When European exploration led to the populating of the Americas, it was described as the event with one of the greatest ecological impacts in history. The force behind this impact was the mass movement of people and their behavior's toward their "New World". It only stands to reason that a clash would occur with the natives of these lands. One of the areas with the greatest conflict was the field of technology.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, attempts to explain why history progressed differently for people from various geographical regions. Diamond introduces his book by pointing out that history followed different courses for different people because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves. Through his convincing explanation for how civilizations were created and evolved throughout the course of history, he argues that environmental factors gave some societies advantages over others, allowing them to conquer the disadvantaged societies. While I agree with Diamond’s argument that the orientation of continental axis, availability of potential

The author, Jared Diamond, is asked a question by a local politician,Yali, while studying birds in New Guinea. His question is, "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?". This question leads Diamond to write a book attempting to answer why some humans in certain environments developed faster than others. Food production, writing and government had already started to develop by 11,000 B.C. in many areas around the world such as the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia. Many Native Americans and Africans were still using wood and stone tools while Europeans had steel by A.D. 1500. Many people and historians believe that Europeans are biologically

In the book, Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, the author asks many questions about histories of the world. These question are questions that lie in the main question Jared Diamond is trying to answer. In the Prologue, the author discussed about his personal experience in New Guinea where a local politician asked him the major question "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?” (Diamond 14). When further exploring the meaning of this question it could represent why major civilizations developed and advanced so much faster technologically and economically but other civilizations like New Guineans are behind in these advancements. Which could explain

Diamond states “Technology, in the form of weapons and transport, provides the direct means by which certain peoples have expanded their realms and conquered other peoples.” Most significant inventions in this field (firearms, ships, steel equipment, printing presses, glass, and steam engines, to name a few) were all of Eurasian invention. Diffusion, the author argues, either didn’t exist or didn’t unfold as quickly or efficiently as other areas. Geography, the main factor Diamond argues about history’s development, is included here in the fact that Eurasia is continuous and Europe/Asia is easily accessible to its included North African region through the Suez Canal. The Americas don’t apply in this situation as the connect between the two, the Isthmus of Panama, forty miles wide, “virtually transects the Americas geographically”, and ecologically the Isthmus separates the Darien rainforests of South America and the northern Mexican desert, Diamond explains. The lack of continuity in this case does not allow for a fast, fluid spread of ideas and communication for obvious reasons. Australia, for example, as the most isolated continent, and located so the weather pattern doesn’t allow for proper support of large populations, is why Australia is “the sole continent still without metal artifacts in modern times.” Additionally, Johann Gutenburg’s invention of the

In the beginning of this book Yali asked Jared Diamond a question, “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?”, and in the epilogue Diamond answers. The answer to Yali’s question is that the geography and environment of Europe was an advantage which they used to dominate and conquer people of New Guinea and other remote areas. The difference in animal and plant domestication, rates of diffusion, and migration due to ecological barriers between continents has contributed to Europe as an advanced continent. Europe also came to dictate the Fertile Crescent and China which were the first to develop the earliest food production. The Fertile Crescent underwent

In the novel Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, it is emphasized how the modern world holds an utmost array of differences among societies. Those of Eurasian origin greatly influence the world of power and wealth. However, other people such as Africans, fought off against European colonial dictatorship, lack such influence and wealth. And other people, including the Aboriginal Australians, no longer rule their own land. Rather, they have become decimated and subjugated by European colonists. Food production, technology, and the decisions made by varying continents played a role in the fates of societies. Geographic features, along with other factors, dictated the development of guns, germs, and steel.

“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?” (Diamond, 14). This is the question that Jared Diamond seeks to answer in his manuscript Guns, Germs, and Steel. This question was asked by a man known as Yali during Diamond’s time in New Guinea. This question “concerned only the contrasting lifestyles of New Guineans and of European whites, it can be extended to a larger set of contrasts within the modern world,” (Diamond 15). What we can take from Yali’s question is this: why did sophisticated societies begin where they did and how did they do so? Why was it that Europeans conquered the Americas, and not that Native Americans conquered Europe? Why were

The people in Papa New Guinea still used stone tools in the 1960’s, when people in the United States had already developed telephones and spaceships that sent people to the moon. Why were the people in Papa New Guinea so behind? Inequality is very apparent in our world today, but do you ever wonder why? Or how it started? For everyone to be equal they need to grow and develop at the same pace and in order for that to happen they need the same good crops, and helpful animals so they can have time and create specialists, they need the same immunities to certain diseases, they need specialists to create new technology like steel, and all those things depended on where they were located in the world, geography. So if civilization was not geographically

Diamond deduced that Europeans were only able to conquer the world because they possessed the agents of conquest: steel, germs and guns. Diamond believes that geographical inequality is the sole cause for the discrepancy in development between western nations and the impoverished regions. The development of productive farming enabled certain civilizations to develop specialized skills such as writing, trade and politics. As a result, most of technology that developed from these endeavors spread evenly through Europe and Asia. Isolated regions and islands such as the Inca and Papua New Guinea were left unexposed to these advancements.