ENV S 3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Central Asia, Microorganism, Fetus
Document Summary
Farmer power lies in the much denser populations that food production support. Farmers tend to breath out nastier germs, to own better weapon and armor, to own more-powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest. The major killers of humanity are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals. World war ii-the winner was not the army with the best general but rather had the nastiest germs to inflict onto their enemies. For a microbe, spread depends on how many new victims/original patient. The risk of dying by the death of the host is an unintended by-product. Crowd diseases (i. e. measles ): to sustain themselves, they need a human population that is numerous and densely packed; Agriculture sustains much higher human population densities than h-g lifestyle>always on the move so they leave behind their own piles of feces with accumulated microbes and worm larvae.
