The Importance Of Technology In Papua New Guinea

The arrangements of the continents have a strong effect on the earth's climate. Where a continent is on the earth can determine regional climates, such as if a location is arid, cold etc. When plates move, they can also convert locations from one climate to another.

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.

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.

Diamond believes that the main reason why people were able to create such a great civilization in Middle East is because they had over produced food so people were able to specialize in labor and produce military, leaders, architects, art and such. But why New Guineans were not able to do the same?

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

How they domesticated wild animals and plants for milk, food, clothing, and more, and the benefits of domestication over the hunter-gathering culture. More food meant more calories for humans meaning more work. More work meant higher crop yields which meant more population density which meant more people could work, and the cycle continued over and over again. The reason food production was so successful in Europe was because the continent lies east to west creating a similar climate for food to grow. Europe also has more open fields compared to Africa, the Americas, and Australia, where there were deserts, jungles, and drastically different climates. The conversion from the hunter-gatherer society to the domestication of wild animals and farming society was gradually and took many years and there are still hunter-gatherer societies today.

The “Factors Underlying the Broadcast Pattern of History” chart shows the spreading and domesticating of plants and animals and the pros and cons of it on civilization. I agree with the author that when you have domesticated animals in the civilization food storage and surpluses; large dense, sedentary, stratified societies with political

In chapter 3, it discussed the different territorial states of Egypt, Southwest Asia, East Asia, and the South Pacific. During the early developments of these territorial states, climate played a big role in each states. Farmers were largely affected by the climate changes, and long period of droughts occurred throughout the lands. Due to the radical changes of climates, “powerful warming and drying trend”, it was hard for many territorial states to continue to grow enough crops to feed their people or raise animals (textbook pg 93). Thus, causing them to move and try to find a better place to live where there is more water, and this migration caused many developments to occur. An important development that I would say is the most important that led to the growth of the these early territorial states is the development of the

In both Australia and New Guinea, the chief geographical factor in retarding the development of the region was the isolation from other societies. This isolation created a lack of new technologies being spread to this region while Europe was more easily able to innovate and trade with other areas. Another factor that Diamond cites is that “Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flattest, most infertile, climatically most unpredictable… continent.”

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

The first example is how the geography of Mesopotamia greatly affected their development as a civilization. If we look deep into Mesopotamia, we know that it was based between two rivers. Eventually over time, the two Rivers would flood over their banks. This doesn’t seem like a good thing but after all, it brought some sunlight to them. The flooding eventually gave in nutrient rich silt which covered most of the land around it. What made this so significant was that it made the land more fertile than the regions surrounding Mesopotamia. The fertility enabled the citizens of Mesopotamia to produce an excess of food and materials. You might wonder what materials the Mesopotamians where able to get out of this. They were able to produce mud for building with bricks, clay for writing, and lastly reeds for building houses. This gave them an advantage over other civilizations. If we think of it, the city states could not develop any further if there weren’t any dedicated workers that

Geography and the environment play a monumental role in the establishment and success of a nearly every civilization. For example, rivers bring water and allow for agricultural development, while mountains or deserts provide for protection and create a barrier. Many things, such as the aforementioned deserts and mountains, can offer both positive and negative influences on the society in question. The climate and amount of rainfall is directly related to the success or failure of crop growing, and thus related to the amount of time spent on simply surviving. Civilizations that are able to spend less time on subsistence farming are able to redirect that energy towards the establishment of arts, culture, religion, and science. Where a

Yali’s question asks why Eurasian societies have, throughout the course of history, acquired greater wealth than the vast majority of Native American, African, and Aboriginal Australian societies. It encompasses the question of why these Eurasian societies were the ones to develop the necessary skills and technologies to conquer most or all of the groups living on the respective other continents, as opposed to the other way around. It compares the different rates of development between contrasting continents, and asks why some continents – particularly Europe and Asia – developed faster than others (15).

Geography influences culture in many ways. A civilizations geography determines what kind of god(s) they believe in as well as influences from other cultures. These features provide a stepping stone for cultures that are solely based on geography.

The beneficial continental circumstances enjoyed by Eurasians first appears in vegetation. The Fertile Crescent was endowed with diverse, abundant, and highly productive cereals and pulses such as wheat, barley, and pea that yielded both starch and protein. These food staples were domesticated very quickly and with little effort by Eurasians, whose newfound farms gave rise to specialization and division of labor. Conversely, in the Americas, the sole cereal crop of corn took many more thousands of years of domesticated refinement to prove useful to humans. Mr. Diamond also places great emphasis on the geographic East-West orientation of Eurasia. A plant growing at a given latitude can grow at that latitude the world over. Thus, Eurasia's East-West orientation was highly conducive to the rapid spread (by trade) of productive domesticated grains across the continent. Conversely, the Americas, Africa, and Australia were impaired by their North-South orientation, which dictated that domesticated plants from people of one latitude were of little use to their neighbors to the North and South. Compounding the effect, the trade of agricultural technology in Eurasia ultimately led to trade in other things, such as technological advances, including writing and language