Friday January 4, 2013

In today's class, we continued to learn about Jared Diamond. We learned about his studies in Papua, New Guinea by watching a documentary that was written about him and his work. We found out in the documentary that Jared Diamond had originally came to New Guinea to study the exotic bird species that lived there, but he had also found out that the people who lived there were just as interesting as the birds. Throughout the years, he has learned to speak their language, and he has learned many skills and their culture from them. In Diamonds career, he had one person named Yali ask him a question that would completely change his studies. Yali had asked Diamond why white men have so much cargo, and we New Guineans did not? In other words, Yali has asked why some groups of people had more resources than others. This led Diamond to ask himself; "what had led other groups to succeed over the other?" To answer this question, he would have to go back in time so far, where history became pre-history.