Life Before We Had Safeway

Today in class we watched a movie on Jared Diamond’s adventure around the world to see if different human races are agriculturally smarter than others. Diamond is a professor at UCLA and bird watcher. He was able to witness how we live and found food thirteen thousand years ago by traveling to New Guinea and living in a hunter gather’s life.  Hunter Gathers spend their whole day gather food and go hunting. Since everyone in the family or tribe is gathering food there is no one to build a home. Since places run out of food easily they have to pick up and leave to a new place every day. These people are kind of like bears they both gather food and have to leave to a new home. About eleven million years ago people finally realized they did not need to keep moving. If they grew their food and stored it they could stay right where they were.  Sago is one of the many gathering foods in New Guinea. One tree is 70 pounds of Sago and it is low on protein. It can also not be stored for many years like Barley and wheat like in the Middle East. This is just geographic luck. People in New Guinea have bad geographic luck because they have to eat spiders for their protein. Also, making Sago is very time consuming. In the Middle East they there is more geographic luck. They have barley and wheat which has protein, can be stored for a longer amount of time and is less time consuming. Not longer after the Middle East found barley and wheat China’s main farming produce was rice. When the ice age occurred it caused a huge drought for 1000 years killing many trees and food supplies. During the drought the Middle Eastern people started growing their own food and would stay as close to water as possible. Stone Age people where becoming the first farmers and changed land around them. Once they started farming they realized we could control nature which is domesticated crops. Domesticated crops are crops you can control and manipulate so you can keep growing and controlling crops. In Dra archeologist are starting to find remaining’s of what might have been a city during the drought 11.5 million years ago.