Jared Diamond and Papua New Guinea P.2

Today Mr. Schick had us watch more of the video that we watched last week. Some things that I learned were that wheat and barley can be stored for years which makes it easier for a civilization/a group of people to stay in one place. But, these plants like wheat and barley don't grow in Papua new Guinea which would help explain why they haven't advanced their people in the 40,000 years of the island. The New Guineans only have things like sago and bananas which are found somewhat easily but take a lot of energy and time to process to eat and these foods don't have a lot of nutritional value and are really just a filler. Sometimes, New Guineans would eat giant spiders. There are other plants that are similar to barley and wheat like rice. There are other places around the world that domesticated plants like the Americas and China. Plant domestication was followed up with animal domestication. Animal domestication is pretty much the same thing as plant domestication but with animals instead of plants. This can supply more than food. It can also supply things like fur or to help plow plants. The animal-pulled plow was the strongest machine before the Industrial Revolution. It can dig deeper, longer, and farther than if you were to do it by hand. Mainly horses or cows would pull the plow because they were so strong and could plow a field longer and faster than any human could plow a field. New Guineans could never do this because they don't have the right animals. Sure, they have some pigs brought from when countries in Asia came over but that's about it. They don't have any big, strong animals like cows or horses.

This is the end of my blog for today.