Yali’s Question

Assignment One – Yali’s Question

Just imagine that you were lucky enough to be born a hunter-gatherer anywhere in Eurasia thousands of years ago. Due to environmental circumstances, you noticed that you and your people were evolving into people that were much more advanced and were to lead a very different lifestyle than you had led before. Slowly you would realize that the abundance of edible plants in your area enabled you and your band to ditch your nomadic lifestyle and adopt a sedentary lifestyle because the plants where you were living were so nutritious and abundant. Why not just stay in one place and domesticate the plant? The availability of large mammals like cows, horses, sheep, goats and pigs made it easier for your people to farm and to carry goods. Your hunter-gatherer days were over. Your people collected many more goods from the neighbouring Fertile Crescent. Specifically your people received barley and emmer, which were two of the most densest and nutritious seeds. Your population grew because of the abundance of food and goods. The farmers of your people concentrated on food production while the rest of your people were left to innovate and invent technology. Some specialized in crafts like textiles while others became beurocrats, scribes, kings and soldiers (Wilford 1997). Writing was brought down from Sumer so that you could track all your advancements, especially in food production. Strangely, when your people made contact with the rest of the world, your people noticed that foreigners had fewer goods than you had and led a very different lifestyle; you also noticed that disease ravaged the foreign people which made it easier for your people to conquer them. Why did you, as a person in Eurasia, lead in dominance and wealth compared to the rest of the world?

Yali, a guide in Papua-New Guinea, once asked Jared Diamond, a professor of geography and physiology (Wikipedia 2008, p.2), “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (Diamond 1997, p. 14). To understand this question one has to delve deep into the depths of history because the answer of this difficult question was cast in die long ago. The question also can be generalized to ask why it is that people of Eurasian origin, as well as those transplanted to North America, dominate the world in wealth and power (Campbell 1999). “Eurasians had the guns, germs, and steel but others did not” (McNeill 2001). Why is this so? In this short essay the answer to this question will try to be determined but because this essay is so short, only the most striking points of the answer will be mentioned. Another point is that history and people are so complex, that there actually isn’t a definite answer to this very difficult question, so one can only try to speculate as to why the wealth and power are so uneven in the different continents of the world.

Jared Diamond said, “Some environments provide more starting materials, and more favourable conditions, for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.” (Diamond 1997, p. 408). This statement is very true for Eurasia. Eurasia was lucky enough to be blessed with abundant nutritious plants suitable for farming. The Fertile Crescent was one of the most fertile areas in the world: “Fertile Crescent... [had] about 32 of the world’s 56 prize wild grasses! Specifically barley and emmer wheat, the two earliest important crops of the Fertile Crescent, rank respectively 3rd and 13th in seed size among those top 56. In contrast, the Mediterranean zone of Chile offered only two of those species, California and South Africa just one each, and South Western Australia none at all. That fact alone goes a long way to explaining the course of human history”. (Diamond 1997). Because of Eurasia’s west-east axis, diffusion of plants and animals was easy (McNeill 2001). The areas had the same day length and seasonal variations so plants and animals could be effective in a wide area range of Eurasia. Not only did Eurasia have suitable plants, they also were lucky to have the easiest animals to domesticate (Campbell 1999). Diamond identifies a mere 14 domesticated large mammal species worldwide. The five most useful (cow, horse, sheep, goat and pig) are all descendants of species common to Eurasia (Wikipedia 2008, p. 3). Thirteen of those 14 animals existed naturally in Eurasia (the llama did not) (McNeill 2001). No wonder Eurasia succeed so greatly, their animals enabled them to do so much, without these animals they wouldn’t have been so successful in agriculture and wouldn’t have got immune to the diseases that the animals spread (Kemy 2001). That brings me to the topic of germs. Because the Eurasians were exposed to diseases such as smallpox, measles, influenza,