Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Today we talked about the important things in the movie that we watched last class, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The movie was about a man named Jared Diamond and his research done in New Guinea. Jared Diamond was a professor at UCLA and was a cultural anthropologist. He originally traveled to New Guinea to enjoy his hobby of bird watching, but when he got there he observed the culture of the residents there. Diamond realized that these people were living as if the last 2000 years haven't happened. They were living with barely any clothes on, they had to gather their own food, and they had to make their own homes. In order to get food, they used the sago tree. This tree had a substance inside that, when mixed with water, it became a sugar for the people to eat it. Even though this tree filled the people up, the labor to make the food was intensified. It also lacked proteins and could not be stored. Diamond's theory of why some civilizations were able to thrive, survive, and develop cities revolved around geographic luck.