dr congo: cursed by its natural wealth - bbc news https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24396390 """ Jared Diamond: When I first came to New Guinea in the 1960s, people were still using stone tools like this axe in parts of the island, and before European arrival, people were using stone tools everywhere in New Guinea. So why didn’t New Guinea develop metal tools by itself? And eventually I realized that to have metalworking specialists who can figure out how to smelt copper and iron, requires that the rest of the people in the society who were farmers, be able to generate enough food surpluses to feed them. Voiceover: But New Guinea agriculture was not productive enough to generate those food surpluses, and the result was no specialists, no metalworkers, and no metal tools. Archive: B&W footage New Guinean people building/creating/working/on water with plane Voiceover: The way of life in New Guinea was perfectly viable. It had survived intact for thousands of years. But according to Diamond, people didn’t advance technologically because they spent too much time and energy feeding themselves. And then Westerners arrived, and used their technology to colonize the country. Pan across Middle Eastern mountains Voiceover: Yet for all its advantages, the Fertile Crescent is not the powerhouse of the modern world, nor is it the bread basket it once was. How did it lose its head start? Abandoned village Voiceover: Within 1,000 years of their emergence, most of the new villages of the Fertile Crescent were abandoned. Ironically, the region had a fundamental weakness. Despite having some of the most nutritious crops on the planet, its climate was too dry, and its ecology too fragile, to support continuous intensive farming. Arid landscape, Jordanian village site Mohammed Najjar: People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is what when, when, when you, when you face the, the end, I mean you are facing the wall. You will end with landscape like that, mean with, with few trees, with no grass, and with less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of over-exploiting the environment. People and goats walking, Craggy mountains, Sunset Voiceover: Unable to farm their land, entire communities were forced to move on. The advantages they’d accrued from centuries of domestication might have been lost. But again, geography was on their side. Graphic showing earth from space, with highlighted areas and arrows Jared Diamond: The Fertile Crescent is on the middle of a huge land mass, Eurasia. There were plenty of places for farming to spread, and crucially, many of those places were to the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, at roughly the same line of latitude. Computer Generated Image – landscape with arrows Jared Diamond: Why’s that so important? Because any two points of the globe that share the same latitude automatically share the same length of day, and they often share a similar climate and vegetation. Crops or animals domesticated in the Fertile Crescent were able to prosper at other places along the east/west axis of Eurasia. Wheat and barley, sheep and goats, cows and pigs all spread from the Fertile Crescent, east towards India and west towards North Africa and Europe. Wherever they went they transformed human societies. Ancient Egyptian art showing farming Voiceover: Once the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent reached Egypt, they caused an explosion of civilization. """ https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/transcript1.html