In Class 2-4-11

In class today we went over the domesticated animals that the class learned about yesterday while I was absent. After that we continued to watch Guns, Germs, & Steel and where domesticated animals are from. It showed that there were NO domesticated animals that began in Papua New Guinea and thats one of the main reasons that they haven't progressed from desperately looking for food and other places are more advanced. The Fertile Crescent was an area right above the Middle East that was basically a blessed area for agriculture because its so Fertile so thats where it got its name. In this area there was what looked to be a civilization with buildings that used natural air conditioning by having windows and such. These homes weren't just places to rest your head, they were actually a safe place from nature. The people around the Fertile Crescent figured out how to make plaster out of limestone, which was a breakthrough in itself. But New Guineans on the other hand, still have been using stone tools and their building structures haven't changed for centuries. This is because there was never a specialist that handles steel by making tools made of steel or something and no one ever taught the New Guineans about new structures. The Fertile Crescent wasn't the main source of the growing of farming because the area almost ended because the climate was dry and people exploited the environment, causing the communities to move on and settle somewhere else. Since the Fertile Crescent was found in a huge area of land, Eurasia. But Papua New Guinea is an island basically isolated from everyone else so no one would want to come down there because New Guineans had nothing to offer for the knowledge of this stuff. The spreading of better farming happened because of where the Fertile Crescent was located, if it wasn't around anything else it probably wouldn't have thrived in the first place, but if it did then they couldn't get it around to everyone because of where they were located. But since it was found in the middle of the biggest land mass on earth, farming spread after the civilizations had to leave the Fertile Crescent. Diamond says that the people in Papua New Guinea are less fortunate than other places because everyone has a different 'hand dealt to them'. The people in New Guinea aren't stupider then us but they just haven't been given the same technology as other people so they haven't been given the same opportunities as others. Diamond says that the answer to the New Guinean asking why Americans have so much more cargo was geography.