HLTB21H3 Lecture Notes - Thomas Robert Malthus, Becoming Human, Jared Diamond
Document Summary
Chapter two: plagues, the price of being sedentary. A change in environment in the past (from trees to the ground place), freed them from some disease but allowed for the acquisition of new ones: i. e. from ground bugs biting them. Climate change and technolocal advancements (tool making) new infections: domesticating animals. Zoonoses animal infections transmitted to humans. When populations emigrated africa the vectors (mosquitoes, flies that transmit disease) stayed in africa: even today there are diseases that remain in africa. Tool making and tool use made hunting possible further increasing size of population. Hunter-gatherers were forced to roam over large distances and lived in small populations did not come into exposure with parasites that much: relatively healthy. The road to plagues: more humans, more disease. Thomas malthus a population that is unchecked increases in geometric fashion: there are factors that will eventually bring population growth to a halt, if population goes unchecked lead to starvation, disease and war.
