Wednesday, 19 November 2008

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, how does Diamond challenge our assumptions about the transition from hunter gathering to farming?


Diamonds main point is that, while we tend to think of hunting/gathering and farming as an
either/or proposition, in fact the change from one economy to the other happened very slowly.
Another false premiss Diamond discusses is the notion that farming is always better than
hunting/gathering; he shows that in many situations, particularly at the beginning of
agriculture, farming was far more labor intensive, and yielded less food, than
hunting/gathering. He argues that farming was less a choice than a set of practices that
evolved over...

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