Was Jared Diamond On Track: LO 1

After reading the Learning Objective 1, I can say that Jared Diamond’s theory of “geographic luck” is completely true. In the text, it says that civilization ultimately began with the transition from the hunting and gathering way of life to the settled farming life. The book says that the earliest people began to settle in the area of the Fertile Crescent, which is where Diamond says civilized life originated from.

Diamond said in Guns, Germs & Steel that to be geographically lucky you needed to have an organized workforce, a large population, and advanced technology. Well, in the text, The Fertile Crescent is where all of these began. 

By the words of the text, those that lived in the Fertile Crescent had an organized workforce because instead of being like their ancestors, a people of hunting and gathering, they began to herd large amounts of animals, some that could be used for food, and some that could be used for labor or supplies. Also, instead of going out and looking for plants and berries they could eat, they planted and harvested them so that they would have an over abundant amount. And because they began to plant and harvest crops, they also began building permanent homes for families.

Now since they figured out a more organized workforce system, it actually gave the women of the villages more free time, which they used to get pregnant and have more children. This, over time, created a larger population, which from Diamond’s point of view, is a necessity of being geographically lucky.

Finally, the newly civilized people had advanced technology. By this, I don’t mean iPhones and tablets; I mean advanced weaponry and new ideas to get crops harvested faster, like using an animal to plow the soil. The civilized people had advanced weaponry because they went from the Paleolithic Age all the way to the Bronze Age, which eventually led to the Iron Age as the civilized way began to spread out East and West.

Now, there ultimately was one more way that you could be “geographically lucky,” and that was if you were relatively on the same line of latitude as the Fertile Crescent. This was because the way of life from here was spreading East to Southern and the Tropics of Asia and West to Northern Africa and Europe and then later, the Americas. Now that the new way of life was out, the rest of the world became civil.

All of these facts from the text book do prove that Jared Diamond’s theory of “geographic luck” was true and correct.