Yali’s question is an age old inquiry. Yali is inquisitive as to why caucasian people developed so many goods/ cargo and brought them to New Guinea but black people had so little goods themselves. On the surface, the question appears simple, but is complex to answer. Essentially, he is asking: Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents, or, why do their lifestyles contrast so greatly? Why did Europeans end up with more goods than New Guineans despite intellectual …show more content…
Humans developed at such different rates on different continents and their lifestyles differ so vastly due to a number of reasons. Inequalities dating back to 1500 A.D. influence life today. A generally thought explanation to this question would be that biological differences, how and where people were raised, and what humans were taught and how they were taught them contributed to dissimilarity. However, there is no genetic answer, and the idea that climate contributes to dissimilarity can be disproven. This leaves the proposition that what humans were taught and how they were taught them contributes to cultural variation. This is a supported and debated hypothesis because, in relation (not right word) to Yali’s question, New Guineans are taught different things than Westerners. This is due to the fact that the different cultures need different life skills to survive. There seems to be no obvious advantage or disadvantage in between cultures. However, Europeans had the advantage of guns, germs, and steel. New Guineans had only developed stone and wood tools, had no guns, and immune systems that had never been exposed to foreign germs that the Europeans