The 's People, By Jared Diamond 's Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human

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In Chapter 15, “Yali’s People,” of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, the author explains that although Native Australians showed a head start with some early technology, they were soon conquered by Europe. Diamond goes on to explain why and how Australia and New Guinea became to be seen as “backward” states. Diamond explains that although there was a rise in population due to the development of agriculture, they were unable to progress as much as Europeans due to biological and geographical factors. Biographical factors in New Guinea included lack of protein from crops, few animals to do labor, and no epidemic diseases to keep away invaders. In Australia, the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle caused a…show more content…
He notes, “China has been Chinese, almost from the beginning of its recorded history.” Diamond talks about the way to map East Asia linguistically. Diamond states, “First, we can reverse the historically known linguistic expansions of the recent millennia. Second, we can reason that modern areas with just a single language or related language group occupying a large, continuous area testifies to a recent geographic expansion of that group, such that not enough historical time has elapsed for it to differentiate into many languages. Finally, we can reason conversely, that modern areas with a high diversity of languages within a given language family lie closer to the early center of distribution of that language family.” In creating this linguistic map, Diamond concludes that North China was originally occupied by speakers of Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages, various parts of South China, where occupied by speakers of the Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai languages, and that Sino-Tibetan speakers have replaced most speakers of those other families throughout South China. Diamond explains, “…China’s north–south distances were smaller…and China is transected neither by desert…nor by a narrow isthmus. Instead, China 's broad east-west expense in
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