Guns, Germs, and Steel Flashcards

Flashcards based on the book 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond.

How does food production lead to denser human populations directly?

Availability of more consumable calories leads to a larger population.

What are the four distinct ways livestock contributes to food production?

Meat, milk, fertilizer, and pulling plows.

How does a sedentary lifestyle, enforced by food production, contribute to denser populations?

A sedentary lifestyle permits a shortened birth interval.

What is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists?

Stored food surplus.

How does stockpiled food lead to complex political units?

Political elites can control food, assert taxation, and engage full-time in political activities.

Besides kings and bureaucrats, who else can a stored food surplus support?

Professional soldiers, priests, artisans, and scribes.

What animal played the role of jeeps and Sherman tanks in ancient warfare on the Eurasian continent?

Eurasia's horses.

What types of germs evolved in human societies with domestic animals that were important in wars of conquest?

Infectious diseases like smallpox, measles, and flu.

What are California, Argentine pampas, southwestern/southeastern Australia, and the Cape region of South Africa examples of?

Areas where indigenous peoples were hunter-gatherers when European colonists arrived, despite ecological suitability for food production.

What areas rank as somewhat dry or ecologically degraded but are the earliest sites of food production?

Iraq and Iran, Mexico, the Andes, parts of China, and Africa's Sahel zone

What is the most unequivocal evidence of food production in an area?

Identifying plant and animal remains at archaeological sites.

How do archaeologists date food production?

Radiocarbon dating of carbon-containing materials at the site.

What are the five areas for which there is detailed and compelling evidence of independent origins of food production?

Southwest Asia, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes of South America, and the eastern United States.

How can cases where the same plant or animal was domesticated independently at several different sites be detected?

By analyzing morphological, genetic, or chromosomal differences between specimens in different areas.

Besides the five major regions, what other regions are candidate areas for the independent evolution of food production?

Africa’s Sahel zone, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea

What are some areas where local domestication followed the arrival of founder crops from Southwest Asia?

Western and central Europe, the Indus Valley region, and Egypt.

What are the five main contributing factors in the shift from hunting-gathering to food production?

Decline in availability of wild foods, increased availability of domesticable wild plants, development of technologies for processing wild foods, rise in population density, and competition between hunter-gatherers and food producers.

What were the two fates that hunter-gatherers met in most areas suitable for food production?

They were displaced by neighboring food producers or adopted food production themselves.

Which continents span a greater distance north-south than east-west?

The Americas and Africa.

What affected the rate of spread of crops and livestock, and possibly also of writing, wheels, and other inventions?

Orientation of continents' axes.

What were the main spreads of food production from its original centers?

Southwest Asia to Europe, Egypt, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley; Sahel and West Africa to East and South Africa; China to Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan; Mesoamerica to North America.

Give an example of the incomplete spread of suites of crops and livestock

Neither of the Andes' domestic mammals (llama/alpaca and guinea pig) reached Mesoamerica in pre-Columbian times.

In what way does climate alter germination growth, and disease resistance.

Plants are adapted to seasonal changes of day length, temperature, and rainfall.

What are the four geographical areas with the independent origin of food production?

Eurasia, China, Africa, and the Americas