|
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesEven so, the Easter Islanders managed to erect 30-ton stone statues—no mean feat for an island with only 7,000 people, who had no power source other than their own muscles. THUS, polynesian island societies differed greatly in their economic specialization, social complexity, political organization, and material products, related to differences in population size and density, related in turn to differences in island area, fragmentation, and isolation and in opportunities for subsistence and for intensifying food production. All those differences among Polynesian societies developed, within a relatively short time and modest fraction of the Earth's surface, as environmentally related variations on a single ancestral society. Those categories of cultural differences within Polynesia are essentially the same categories that emerged everywhere else in the world. Of course, the range of variation over the rest of the globe is much greater than that within Polynesia. While modern continental peoples 66 • GUNS, GERMS,and steel included ones dependent on stone tools, as were Polynesians, South America also spawned societies expert in using precious metals, and Eurasians and Africans went on to utilize iron ...» |
Код для вставки книги в блог HTML
phpBB
текст
|
|