Guns, Germs, and Steel

Hi Blog!

Today we continued watching the video Guns, Germs, and Steel. It said that all great civilizations have three things in common. They all have advanced technology, large populations, and a well organized work force. A large population allows more people with different skills to do more than just gather food and hunt to survive. People have been been hunters and gatherers since 13,000 years ago. This is called pre-history. This was before people wrote stuff down and recored what they were doing. They used to move where the food was and would leave the area if there was no food around. The only place where people still are hunter/gatherers is deep in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea and in the Amazon. One important food source for New Guineans is the sago tree. They chop down the tree and scrape the pulp out of it and turn it into a dough like substance. One tree gives them about 70lbs of food and it takes days to process it. But it is low in nutrition and doesn't last for a long time.

We also learned about the earliest permanent settlement on Earth. This place is called Draa. It is an archeological site where they found ancient dwellings. They think maybe 40-50 people lived there. But how did they survive? They made a granary where they were able to store food year round so they didn't have to constantly go out and find food. This allowed more time for people to do other things, which led to progression of the settlement.r4