Guns, Germs and Steel, Papua New Guinea Essay

C.

   Papua New Guinea is not geographically lucky. Jarred Diamond believes that if an area has geographic luck, they will be able to succeed into a developing country. The Fertile Crescent was the best place 13,000 years ago to live. They had a great climate for growing crops, they had enough domesticated animals, they had a huge head start apart from the rest of the world. Papua New Guinea however isn't so lucky. They do not have good enough animals for crops, meat,or take their fur and wool. America, like the Fertile Crescent, is very lucky. We are able to produce best selling crops like wheat, rice and barley. Papua New Guinea so far only produces sago and bananas. Sago and bananas, take a very long time to grow, they don't last long and they don't have a lot of protein. This was a step back for the people in Papua New Guinea.

    Jarred Diamond believes that the people from Papua New Guinea are very smart people so he doesn't completely understand why they are not progressing into the 21st century. He realizes later in the video that people are still hunting and gathering like everyone was 13,000 years ago. A man from Papua New Guinea asked Jarred Diamond why the whites has so much cargo and they have so little. This is when he took more interest to find out why they were not moving along with the rest of the world. In the Fertile Crescent, when things got dry and humid, they could move their villages east or west because the latitude was equivalent. Papua New Guinea, could never do this because they are an isolated island.

    If the Papua New Guinean's weren't spending so much time hunting and gathering looking for food, they could have advanced in technology like the rest of the world. When more people came on to the land, more people could produce food and more homes, more efficiently. Because their country is undeveloped, they did not have much to offer other countries so they didn't get anything in return. Papua New Guinea did not use plows for farming because they did not have the right animals to pull them, all of their farm work was done by hand. There are only 14 species that are domesticated for farming; pigs, goats, sheep, horses, camels, watter buffalo, donkeys, other camels, llamas, reindeer, yaks, cows and mithans. Papua New Guinea only has goats and sheep. They used the sheep for wool, and the goats for milk. They used both animals for farming. There are 6,064,515 people living in Papua New Guinea, they are geographically unlucky, but if they had as much advantages as the rest of the world, they could have been much further along by now.