Animals and Grains

Today we watched more of the video we watched last week about the scientist in New Guinea. One reason New Guinea did not advance like other countries because they did not have the food resources to plant like other countries. One plant that developed farming in other countries was wheat and barley. This showed through digging through an old village which was probably the first permanent civilization discovered called Draa. People started to settle down and tried to survive through another somewhat Ice Age when they started farming wheat and barley. They even made the first granary which was where they kept the crops away from moisture and insects. Most villages were found close to water with fields full of wheat next to them. The people farming this wheat didn't realize it at the time but they were the start of plant domestication. After the Middle East, China started developing rice and the Americas started to farm corn, squash, and beans and finally Africa with plants called sorghum, millet, and yams. This doesn't mean New Guinea wasn't farming, it just means they weren't farming good grains that were storable. The whole thing came down to ultimately geographic luck as Jerod Diamond described it. Inequalities in the world could have been caused because we developed much faster than other countries by food. The humans started the evolution of animal domestication because animals provided meat, gave milk, helped plow, and gave fur for clothes. The ideal animals to domesticate were over 100 pounds and reproduced in 1-2 years. Most were social animals so if you control the alpha you can control the whole herd. 14 species over 100 pounds have been fully domesticated by humans. We will probably finish the video tomorrow.