Guns, Germs and Steel- Episode 1

Flora Lau 
11/25/19

Guns, Germs and Steel

1. According to Jared Diamond, what are the three major elements that separate the world’s  “haves” from the “have nots”?

1.) Guns

2.) Germs

3.) Steel

2. Jared Diamond refers to the people of New Guinea as “among the world’s most culturally diverse and adaptable people in the world”, yet they have much less than modern Americans.Diamond has developed a theory about what has caused these huge discrepancies among different countries, and he says it boils down to geographic luck. Give several examples from the film to support Diamond’s theory.

People living in the Middle East and all of their resources compared to the relatively small amount of resources provided by the jungle areas of New Guinea, and how having more food resources and the ability to store them led people to become more rural and less reliant on being hunter-gatherers.

 3. For thousands of years, people have been cultivating crops. Describe the process used to domesticate crops and create plants that yielded bigger, tastier harvests.

By domesticating crops, people interfere with what actually happens in nature by planting and harvesting at specific times, choosing only the biggest and easiest to harvest seeds from the crops, and selecting individual plants for use in breeding the next year’s crops to increase the harvest.

4. According to Diamond, livestock also plays a significant role in a civilization’s ability to 

 become rich and powerful. How did the domestication of animals help people? Give several examples.

Breeding animals for use as meat and for their milk as well as providing other resources such as skins for clothing, using the animals as beasts of burden/plowing, and using the animals for transportation or warfare.  Also, animals were important to farming because they could eat the stubble from the fields and provide the fields with fertilizer at the same time.

5. List the animals that can be domesticated and where they can be found.

Llama-South America, Asia, North Africa, and Europe had the others: goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, camels, water buffalo, reindeer, yaks, nithans, and cattle.

6. Looking at the list of animals and locations from question 5, discuss how Diamond’s theory about geographic luck applies here.

Domesticated animals led to greater productivity, and the majority of these domesticable animals were native to the temperate climates of the world where the most powerful civilizations developed.

7. How did the movement of the early civilizations of the Fertile Crescent (Middle East) further support Diamond’s idea that geography played a key role in the success of a civilization?

The Fertile Crescent had a dry climate and a fragile environment. The people of the time did not have keeping methods. Instead, they over harvesting the land and environment. As time went on, the land could no longer support them. The fact that the Fertile Crescent shared the same latitude with Europe and Asia allowed them to move their crops and animals to these areas and continue to thrive. Had they not lived adjacent to land masses that could support their crops and animals, they may have died out.

8. Do you agree with Jared Diamond when he says of a civilization's ability to gain power, 

 wealth, and strength, “…what’s far more important is the hand that people have been dealt, the raw materials they’ve had at their disposal.” Why or why not?

Diamond is accurate to a certain degree. Natural resources and raw materials certainly impact a civilization's ability to achieve all of these things. However, it is also important for a civilization to acquire the knowledge necessary to utilize what they have to work with and to create things of an interest to a civilization outside of their own.