Guns, Germs and Steel
At first, humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies. This means that they lived by hunting animals and picking up foods from plants. The journey towards modern inventions began about 9,000 years ago when humans first learned to grow crops. In order to start farming these crops, humans first had to domesticate the crops, meaning that they had to change them so that they were better for farming. They did this by using selective breeding. This means that they planted the seeds from the best plants, to make sure that better plants appeared the next year. Diamond talks about why this happened to some plants and not others. For example, most trees are not useful for farming because they take a very long time to grow. The most useful plants were plants that took only a year to grow.