Anthropology-
Please answer four of the following problems. You may use any sources that you like, including your text book. Please take note: This exam is an opportunity to demonstrate how much you have learned about each topic, not a chance to answer each question as quickly and superficially as possible. You should provide relevant examples to illustrate concepts or areas of knowledge, key dates, persons, discoveries, and key evidence or data that support a concept or conclusion. You have one week to complete this assignment. Please use a word-processor, if possible. You can return your exam to me by email. Each of your answers should be a minimum of one page, double-spaced, 12-point font.
(1) Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, suggests that Europe was the unwitting beneficiary of thousands of years of cultural development and biological processes that ultimately allowed Europeans to spread their cultures around the World with unprecedented success. What does he mean by this, and how did it come about?
(2) Jared Diamond argues that another factor that helped Europeans conquer peoples around the world was their technology. Explain what he means and give examples.
(3) Jared Diamond points out that centralized governments have the ability to encourage or retard economic, technological and social development through their role as "kleptocracies" (ability to take wealth or valuable goods in the form of taxes and use these for the purposes of government). What does Diamond mean by this? Give examples.
(4) In class we talked about Diamond's idea of "Farmer Power." How did the rise of farming fundamentally change human societies? Give specific examples.
(6) In class we talked about Nuclear Areas and how these influenced the spread of farming around the world. Please discuss.
(7) The end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene) altered the world in many ways. Please describe these changes and how humans adapted to them. Give specific examples.
29. Contrary to popular thinking, Diamond points out that centralized governments can also encourage economic and technological development through the use of superior military force. As noted in class, this follows from (a) technological innovations related to warfare itself, (b) powerful military forces can suppress the frequency of destructive wars, as illustrated by the history of the Roman Empire and other ancient and modern states, (c) tribal and forager societies often suffer from more debilitating forms of warfare than state-level societies, owing to their inability to control chronic warfare (d) all of the above, (e) none of the above.
30. Diamond concludes that the extraordinary spread of European settlement, conquest and cultural influence over last few centuries results from: (a) The inherent superiority of European culture, (b) the inferiority of many nonEuropean peoples when it comes to innovation and intelligence, (c) the convergence of geographical, biological, historical and ecological circumstances, unfolding over thousands of years, that ultimately favored European cultural expansion.