Today we will go over Chapter 8; we are reading one chapter a week.
I encourage this to be slow blogging - the very opposite of "breaking". I will leave this on my hot list for a week, so comment any time during the week.
When we get near the end of GGS, I'll start a poll for the next book; I am strongly leaning towards the book Ideas: A history of thought from fire to Freud.
Ground rules: I expect vigorous discussion. But I expect civil discussion. A sign I saw in a restaurant said
Be nice or leave
If you want to have a flame war, go elsewhere, please.
In this chapter, Diamond examines the questions: Why did agriculture not arise iin a lot of areas of the world that look like they could support it? and Why did it arise at such different times in different places?
Of the 200,000 or so species of plant, a few thousand are eaten by humans; of these few thousand, several hundred have been domesticated; of these few hundred, a mere dozen account for over 80% of the modern world's tonnage of crops. What are these 12?
Wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybeans, potatoes, manioc, sweet potato, sugar cane, sugar beet, and bananas. All have been domesticated a long time, and, in modern times, not a single major food source has been domesticated - these dozen are special. So, part of the variation in agriculture is easy to explain - where the precursors of these plants don't exist, domesticating them would not be possible.
But there is still a lot of variation left to explain. There are many regions where these plants were available, but were not domesticated. Why not?
Diamond boils this down to a paradigmatic example:
Did the flora and environment of the fertile crescent have advantages over those of New Guinea and the eastern United States?
It will surprise no one that the answer is "Yes", but the details are what take up the bulk of this chapter. I clearly can't cover it all, but here are some highlights:
- Climate
- Abundant native plants, both in terms of spread and density
- A high proportion of hermaphroditic species
- Climate variation
- A variety of altitudes
- Domesticated large animals
- Relatively meager aquatic resources