Why white people dominate (part 2)

If you haven’t read it yet, here’s part 1.

Why then are some New Guinean societies still using stone tools? If people are just as intelligent and imaginative wherever you go, why have some societies developed printing and parliaments, while others have not? Diamond show that the deciding factors are all geographical. The argument goes like this.

The big development that separates stone-age societies from all others is food production. Once you can produce food, it’s won’t be long until you’re developing steam trains, too. If you can farm your own food, you can support a much bigger population. You don’t have to travel around gathering food where it grows, so you can settle in one spot. Once you have a village and enough food to feed it, you can start building permanent infrastructure.

In a hunter-gatherer society, everyone has to hunt and gather; there’s no way you could have a potter or priest in your tribe, so no one has time to develop new technologies. But if your farms produce a surplus of food, not everyone in the village will need to be involved in the farming. This means that some villagers could become craftspeople, administrators or traders, and with these people working full-time in their areas, technological development can take off.

And once your society can produce food, is settled in one place, has permanent buildings and full-time professionals, development will take off. Your population will explode. Hundreds of new products and services, like jewelry or accounting, which were unthinkable in the nomadic tribe, will be available to everyone. Your leader can become a chief, and then a king, as your tribe’s area of influence increases. Once you can feed yourselves, the line of development runs straight from the clay cooking pot to the George Foreman grill.

So if food production is the big advantage, why did some societies develop farming, while others didn’t?

Part 3 soon.

Photo by Tambako via Flickr