Video

Today in class we watched a video about Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond is a professor at UCLA, a biologist, an expert in physiology, and most importantly, a bird watcher. Jared is traveling to Papua New Guinea to try to answer the question "why do some civilizations advance faster than others?". This adventure sparked when a friend of his named Yali asked Jared when he arrived: "why you white men have so much cargo when we have so little?", in this Yali was using cargo as so much stuff that everyone "has to have".  The people of New Guinea have no tools, no stable food supply, and mass-produced clothes or materials. They rely on making everything themselves with homemade stone tools without any nuts and bolts. They also live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The same way they lived 40,000 years ago when the first people migrated there. They use old vines to cut notches in trees and tie pieces of wood together and build houses, cages, fences, and rafts. They also hollow out logs for boats. Their main food source is animals they kill or tree pulp which isn't really nutritious.